Part 2: Nine-Sixteenths
Wayne and Donna have lived beside me for twenty-six years. Wayne is retired from the county roads department. He still runs about thirty cows out toward Ayr. Which means he owns a sixteen-foot bumper-pull stock trailer.
Donna had me at her kitchen table with coffee before I’d finished the first sentence.
I told it plain. And I didn’t run Stephanie down, because she’s my daughter.
Wayne listened with his arms folded.
“So you need the table hauled,” he said.
“The table. Both leaves. Twelve chairs. And a turkey.”
“I power-washed the trailer after I took calves to the sale barn in October. It’s clean as it’s going to get. I’ll lay a tarp down.”
He thought a minute.
“How do the legs come off?”
“Bolts. Up in the corners. Don always used a socket.”
“Nine-sixteenths, probably. I’ll bring the set.”
He looked at me over his coffee cup.
“You sure about this, Roberta? Once it’s on the trailer, it’s on the trailer.”
“I’m sure I’ve got company coming and no place to put them.”
Donna had been quiet.
“How much company?”
“Harold. And me.”
“Our kids are at his folks’ in Sioux Falls this year,” she said. “I was going to do a turkey breast and feel sorry for us.”
She laid her hand flat on the table.
“What time?”
“One o’clock.”
“I’ll bring the sweet potatoes and the green bean thing.”
That made four.
By supper, it was nine. Because Donna told Pat across the street.
Pat and her husband, Jim, had their daughter Kim home with her two little boys. Kim’s husband works for the railroad, and he was sitting on a train somewhere west of North Platte. The railroad doesn’t care one bit what day it is. Pat had been dreading her own kitchen.
She called me herself.
“Roberta, is it true you’re having people? Because I will pay you money.”
“Bring the boys,” I said. “Bring a relish tray.”
Tuesday morning, I called Stephanie at the dental office where she works the front desk.
I wasn’t going to show up at her door without a word. I won’t do that to anyone. Least of all my own child.
“I’ll be by at four,” I said. “I’ll be needing my things for Thursday.”
“The turkey? Mom, I was going to—”
I heard her cover the phone and say something to a patient.
“Okay. Fine. Dylan’ll be home from school. I’ll just buy another one. I have to go, we’re slammed.”
“Stephanie, I mean all my things.”
But she’d already hung up.
I stood there holding the phone. And I decided the Lord had heard me say it, even if she hadn’t.
It was a gray day. The sky was the color of a galvanized bucket.
At four o’clock, Wayne backed his pickup and stock trailer up my daughter’s driveway as neatly as parking a car. I rode beside him with a stack of old tied comforters in my lap. Not my good quilts. The ones that go over the garden when it frosts.
My grandson answered the door.
Dylan is fifteen. All wrists and ankles. In a hooded sweatshirt he’s worn every day since school started.
“Grandma? Hey, Wayne.”
He looked past us at the trailer.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ve come for my turkey and my table, honey. I’m having dinner at my house Thursday.”
He frowned. “You’re having it here.”
“No. Your mother has a full table this year.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your new grandma’s family is coming. That’s twelve, with you three. And there’s twelve chairs.”
I watched him do the same arithmetic I’d done Sunday night. He’s good at math. It didn’t take him long.
“So you’re not coming,” he said. “To Thanksgiving.”
“Not to this one.”
He turned and looked down the hall at the dining room.
The table was already set. Two days early.
She’d laid out a cream tablecloth I didn’t recognize. Candles. Little cards at each place, the names written in her careful handwriting.
I’ll admit that went right through me. She’d worked hard on it. She wanted so badly for it to be right.
Dylan looked at it a long time.
“It’s your table,” he said.
“Yes, it is.”
“Does Mom know you’re taking it?”
“I told her this morning I was coming for my things. I don’t believe she heard all of it.”
I put my hand on his arm.
“You don’t have to help with this, Dylan. You can go up to your room, and nobody will think one thing about it.”
He pushed up his sleeves.
“Where do you want the plates?”
We stacked her dishes on the kitchen counter. Carefully. Every plate, every glass.
I folded her cream tablecloth in thirds. I laid the name cards on top of it, in order, so she wouldn’t have to work out the seating all over again.
I wasn’t there to wreck her dinner.
I was there for wood.
Wayne got down on his back under the table with a trouble light and a ratchet.
“Nine-sixteenths,” he said from underneath. “Told you.”
Dylan and I started on the chairs.
We carried them out two at a time and set them in the driveway. I showed him how to wrap each one. Comforter over the back, tucked under the seat, so the top rails wouldn’t rub.
He’d done four.
He tipped the fifth one over to get at the legs, and he stopped.
“Grandma. There’s writing on this.”
I knew what it was before I even looked. I hadn’t thought about it in years.
Under the seat, in carpenter’s pencil, in printing as square as a fence post:
Steph’s. Reglued 11-89. She leans back.
“That’s your grandpa,” I said. “Every chair he ever fixed, he wrote down who broke it and when. He said a chair ought to know.”
Dylan turned over the one beside it.
Jim dropped it. Easter 94.
That was Pat’s Jim, from across the street.
He turned over the next one.
Roberta stood on it to hang curtains. Knows better. 2001.
“That is a lie,” I said. “I did not know better.”
He almost smiled.
Then he turned over the eighth chair. The one with a little chip out of the front rung.
And he went still.
Dylan. Reglued 2019. So does he.
He was eight years old that year. Don had three more years in him. And nobody knew it.
Dylan crouched there in his mother’s driveway with his hand flat on the bottom of that chair seat.
He was eleven when his grandfather died. He doesn’t talk about it. Not ever.
“He wrote me down,” he said.
“He wrote all of us down.”
“I didn’t know he did that.”
“Neither did your mother. She never once turned one over.”
I had to stop and look up at the sky for a second.
“He’d be proud of how tall you got.”
Dylan wiped his face on his sleeve, quick, the way boys do.
Then he wrapped that chair himself. He did it slower than all the others. He tucked the comforter in twice.
I had the eleventh chair in my hands, and Dylan was coming behind me with a table leaf, when Stephanie’s car turned into the driveway.
