Part 1: Not Thursday
“Mom, I think it would be better if you didn’t come Thursday.”
I had the phone pinched between my shoulder and my ear, because both my hands were inside a bread bag.
It was the Sunday night before Thanksgiving. I was doing what I’ve done on that night for better than forty years. Tearing two loaves of white bread into thumbnail-sized pieces and spreading them on cookie sheets to dry for the dressing.
“Didn’t come where?” I said.
“Here. For dinner.” My daughter Stephanie let out a long breath. “Arlene’s bringing her sister’s family over from Holdrege, and Dale and his bunch are driving out from Lincoln, and she needs the big table. There just isn’t room, Mom. I counted it three times.”
Arlene was Mrs. Lindquist. Her new husband’s mother.
I had met her exactly twice. Once at the wedding in June. And once in the parking lot of the grocery store on Burlington, where she shook my hand like a woman being introduced to a county commissioner.
“She needs the big table,” I said.
“She’s used to a certain kind of Thanksgiving. She did it at her own house for forty-some years, and this is the first one since she sold the place. Curt says it’s been hard on her. I just want it to go right.”
“How many is it?”
“Twelve. With her sister’s and Dale’s.”
“And the table seats twelve.”
“Right.”
I’m going to say this plainly, so nobody loses track of the furniture.
That table was mine.
The oak table, its two leaves, and all twelve chairs around it belonged to me. They’d been on loan in her dining room since June.
I looked down at the bread on the cookie sheets. I’d torn enough for twenty-five people. I always do.
“Who’s cooking?” I asked.
“I am.” She said it fast, the way she used to tell me she’d already done her homework. “I want to do it myself this year. Arlene’s bringing her rolls and the pies. Your turkey’s out in the garage fridge. It’s thawing fine. I looked up the times.”
My turkey.
A twenty-two-pound bird I’d chosen myself and carried into her garage refrigerator the Saturday before. Because the plan, her plan, made back in October, was that I would let myself in Thursday at six in the morning and cook the dinner in her kitchen. The way I’d cooked it in mine since before she was born.
“So I’m not to cook it, and I’m not to eat it,” I said.
“Mom. Don’t make it sound like that.”
“I’m not making it sound like anything. I’m trying to get it straight.”
“We’ll do something Friday, just us. I’ll bring you a plate.”
Then, quieter: “Please don’t be mad. It’s one year.”
I’m going to tell you the truth about that minute. Because I’ve turned it over more than any other minute in this whole story.
I could have argued.
The words were right there in my mouth. That is my table you are counting chairs at, Stephanie. That is my turkey. I am your mother.
But you can’t argue your way back to a table you’ve been asked to leave. The best you can do is get yourself tolerated at it.
I was sixty-six years old. And I was not going to eat my Thanksgiving dinner tolerated.
“That’s fine,” I said.
“Really?”
“That’s fine, honey. You have a good dinner.”
I hung up and stood in my kitchen with a bread bag on each hand, like a pair of mittens.
I should tell you about that table. It’s the reason for everything else.
My husband, Don, and I bought it in March of 1981, at a farm sale south of Juniata.
We’d been married two years. We were eating off a card table his mother had loaned us. I mention that because I’ll come back to card tables.
The auctioneer opened at two hundred dollars and got nothing.
It was a long oak extension table that somebody, sometime in the fifties, had painted kitchen green. Legs and all. It came with eight pressed-back chairs, painted to match. Two of them had split seats.
The bidding dropped all the way to fifty before anybody raised a hand.
Don went to eighty-five. The other fellow shook his head.
We had a hundred and ten dollars in the checking account that morning. I remember because I did the subtraction in my head the whole way home, with the table upside down in the back of his father’s pickup and the chairs lashed on top with baler twine.
He stripped that green paint in the garage all spring, with the door up, after his route.
Don drove a propane truck for the co-op for thirty-one years. He smelled faintly of it every day of his life. I never minded.
Under the green paint was quarter-sawn oak, with a grain like tiger stripes. I stood in the garage door the night he got the top clean, and neither one of us spoke for a long while.
With both leaves in, that table runs just shy of ten feet. It seats twelve if nobody minds an elbow.
For twenty years we had only the eight chairs. Then ten. I hunted the rest at sales and secondhand stores, matching the pattern pressed into the top rail.
I found the twelfth chair at a consignment shop in Minden in 2003. Twelve dollars.
Don said it was the only time he ever saw me cry over furniture.
Every Thanksgiving of Stephanie’s whole life was eaten at that table. The dinner after her first wedding. And the long, quiet Sunday dinners after that marriage came apart, when it was just her and me and Don and a six-year-old boy who wouldn’t eat his peas.
Don died four years ago this past April. His heart. In his sleep. The doctor said it was a mercy, and I suppose it was.
After that, it was a ten-foot table with one woman at it.
I’ll be honest. I quit sitting there. I ate my supper at the kitchen counter with the television on. The table turned into a place to sort the mail.
Then last June, Stephanie married Curt Lindquist.
Curt sells seed for a company out of Grand Island. He is, I’ll say right now, a decent man.
They bought one of the newer houses up on the north end of Hastings. It was the first house Stephanie had ever owned, after nine years in a rented duplex. It had a dining room with a chandelier in it and not one single stick of furniture.
She stood in that empty room the day they got the keys. I could see her trying to work out what a table would cost.
So I said it.
“Take mine. Take it till you find one of your own. It’s a loan.”
I said the word loan. She agrees now that I did.
People have asked me why I ever let it out of the house.
It was doing no good where it was. My daughter had an empty room and a new start. Thanksgiving was going to be at her house anyway, with me at the stove. I thought I was lending it to the same family that had always sat around it.
It never once crossed my mind that I could be counted out of my own chairs.
I didn’t sleep much Sunday night.
I finished the bread, because you don’t waste two loaves. Then I sat at the counter and felt sorry for myself in a very thorough way.
Around eleven o’clock, I thought of Harold.
Harold sits two pews ahead of me at the Methodist church. He buried his wife in March, after fifty-one years.
That very morning in the fellowship hall, I’d asked him what he was doing for Thanksgiving. He said his boy was in Seattle and couldn’t get away. He said he’d probably just go out to the cafe on the highway.
“They do a nice turkey plate,” he said. “Comes with pie.”
And I’d said, “Well, that’ll be nice,” and gone to find my coat.
Because I had a dinner for twelve to think about.
I sat there at eleven at night, ashamed of myself.
Not on account of Stephanie.
On account of Harold. And that turkey plate. And the fact that it had taken being left out myself to notice somebody else who was.
Monday morning at eight, I called him.
“Harold, it’s Roberta. I’m having Thanksgiving dinner Thursday, and I want you at it. One o’clock.”
There was a pause.
“I thought you were at your daughter’s.”
“I was. Now I’m having it here.”
“Roberta, I don’t want to be anybody’s charity.”
“Harold, I have a twenty-two-pound turkey and nobody to eat it. You’d be mine.”
He laughed. The first laugh I’d heard out of him since March.
“Can I bring something?”
“Bring yourself. Wear a tie if you feel like it.”
I hung up feeling better.
Then I walked into my dining room to see about a tablecloth.
A braided rug with four dents in it. A china hutch.
Nothing else.
I stood there a good long while.
My daughter has asked me, and I’ve asked myself, whether I went and got that table to hurt her.
I was hurt. I’d be lying to say otherwise.
But I went because I’d asked a grieving man to dinner, and I owned a table, and it was across town holding up somebody else’s Thanksgiving that I wasn’t welcome at.
A person is allowed to need her own things.
I put on my quilted vest and walked next door.
