Part 3: Fourteen Chairs’ Worth
She had to stop at the curb, because of the trailer.
She got out still in her work smock, with her purse hanging off her elbow. She looked at the trailer. At the comforters. At the chairs stacked seat to seat in the driveway. At her front door standing open on her empty dining room.
“Mom.” Her voice was thin. “What are you doing?”
I set the chair down on the concrete.
I didn’t raise my voice then. I haven’t since.
“I told you this morning. I’ll be needing my things for Thursday.”
“You said the turkey!”
“I said my things. You had a waiting room full of people, and I don’t blame you for not hearing.”
“You can’t just—”
She came up the driveway.
“I have twelve people coming in two days. Arlene is coming. Where am I supposed to put twelve people?”
I’d thought about what I would say to that. And I’d promised the Lord, and myself, that it would not be smart.
“I don’t know, honey. I’m sorry for the trouble. But I’ve got people coming too, and it’s my table, and I can’t seat them on a rug.”
“Who do you have coming?”
“Harold from church, to start. He was going to eat at the cafe by himself.”
That stopped her.
She knows Harold. His wife, Lois, taught her Sunday school.
“You’re doing this to punish me,” she said. Quieter now.
“No. If I wanted to punish you, I’d have had it out with you Sunday night. And then I’d have come Thursday and sat in the corner with my lips pressed together all through dinner. You’ve seen me do it.”
She had.
“I’m not going to do that,” I said. “I’m going to go home and have a nice dinner. That’s all this is.”
Wayne came through the front door just then with Dylan on the other end of the tabletop, carrying it on edge. Both of them found something on the ground to look at.
Stephanie watched ten feet of her father’s work go past her into a stock trailer.
“Curt’s going to ask where it went,” she said.
“Then I expect you’ll tell him.”
I picked my chair back up.
“Where is Curt?”
“McCook. Customer meetings. He’s back tomorrow night.”
“Does he know I’m not coming Thursday?”
She didn’t answer right off.
“I told him you had other plans.”
Well. By then, I did.
Dylan had come back for the second leaf. He stood there holding it in both arms, like a boy carrying a door.
“Mom,” he said. “It’s her table.”
“Go inside, Dylan.”
He didn’t.
He walked the leaf out to the trailer and slid it in flat on the tarp. Then he came back and stood beside me.
He didn’t say another word. He didn’t have to.
I fetched the turkey out of the garage refrigerator myself, and Wayne set it in his cooler.
That made all of it. The table. Two leaves. Twelve chairs. And one bird.
I took only what was mine. Not a fork besides.
Then I went back up the driveway. Because there was one more thing. And it was the one that counted.
“Stephanie. Dinner’s at one o’clock Thursday at my house. The door is open. To you. To Curt. To his mother. To every single one of them. I mean that with my whole heart. I have never in my life shut a door on you, and I’m not starting at sixty-six.”
She was crying by then. The mad kind.
“I can’t just cancel on eleven people, Mom.”
“I know you can’t. I’m not asking you to. I’m telling you where I’ll be.”
I climbed into the pickup.
In the side mirror, I could see her standing in her driveway in that smock. And my grandson beside her. Not touching her. But not leaving, either.
Wayne said nothing until we were clear back on Burlington.
“That boy,” he said, “is going to be all right.”
Wayne and Jim put the table back together in my dining room that night. The legs went right back into the same four dents in the rug.
Then I sat down in one of the twelve chairs. By myself.
And I had my doubts.
I’ll tell you what I prayed, since I’ve told you everything else. I asked the Lord to show me if I’d done a spiteful thing.
He was quiet about it. Which, in my experience, can go either way.
Wednesday at six in the evening, the phone rang.
It was Dylan.
“Grandma, Mom said I can come to yours tomorrow if I want. She said it like I shouldn’t want to.”
“Do you want to?”
A pause.
“Are you making the dressing with the sausage in it?”
“I am.”
“Then yeah.”
Another pause.
“She borrowed card tables. Four of them. From the lady next door and from Dale. They’re all different heights.”
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s ironing a bedsheet to go over them. She’s kind of not talking.”
That hurt me worse than I expected.
My girl. Ironing a bedsheet at six o’clock the night before her first Thanksgiving in her own house.
“You be kind to her tonight,” I said. “And ask her one more time, plain, whether she minds you coming. If she minds, you stay. And I’ll save you a plate of dressing the size of a hubcap.”
He called back in ten minutes.
She’d said to go. She’d said, and he repeated it very carefully: “Somebody from this family ought to be at that table.”
I went and picked him up myself. He slept in his mother’s old room. And at five-thirty Thursday morning, he was standing in my kitchen in his socks asking what he could peel.
By the time it was all done, there were fourteen of us.
At that same oak table. Back in my own dining room, with both leaves in.
Me and Dylan.
Harold.
Wayne and Donna.
Pat and Jim, and Kim with her two little boys, who were four and six and had been promised they could sit together.
The young couple renting the house on my other side, Amber and Tyler. They’d moved out from Ohio in August for his job at the hospital and didn’t know a soul to eat with. They brought a baby and a store-bought pumpkin pie they kept apologizing for.
Miss Evelyn, who’s ninety-one and taught third grade to half of Hastings, including my daughter. Pat drives her to church.
And a sophomore from Hastings College named Ben, who mows Miss Evelyn’s yard. He couldn’t get home to Rawlins, Wyoming, because they’d closed the interstate for wind, the way they do.
Twelve chairs and fourteen people.
I put the two little boys on the piano bench at the corner, where they perched like a pair of sparrows on a wire. The baby got passed from lap to lap all afternoon.
Harold came at a quarter past twelve. Forty-five minutes early.
He had on a brown suit and a tie with pheasants on it. He was carrying a Cool Whip tub in both hands like it might go off.
“It’s Lois’s cranberry relish,” he said at the door. “I found her card. I never made it before. I never made anything before.”
He looked down at the tub.
“Her handwriting got so shaky toward the end, I couldn’t tell if it said one orange or two. So I put two.”
“Two is right,” I said.
I had no idea.
“Lois always put two.”
He nodded hard. He came in. I showed him to the chair on my right.
When everything was on the table, the turkey and the dressing and Donna’s sweet potatoes and seven kinds of everything else, I asked Harold if he’d say grace.
I thought it would be a kindness. I didn’t think it through.
He got as far as “Lord, we thank You for this food, and for those who—”
And then he just stopped.
His mouth worked. Nothing came.
Fourteen heads stayed bowed. You could hear the furnace come on.
Nobody rescued him. Nobody hurried him.
Miss Evelyn reached over with her old spotted hand and laid it on his sleeve. And she left it there.
Then the four-year-old on the piano bench, who’d had about enough, said “Amen!” loud enough to rattle the gravy boat.
Harold laughed until he had to take off his glasses.
So did everybody.
“That’ll do,” he said. “That covers it.”
The relish was so sour it would turn your face inside out.
Every person at that table took seconds.
Ben from Wyoming ate four helpings and told Harold it was the best he ever had. I decided right then that boy was welcome at my house until he graduated.
Dylan sat in the chair with the chip out of the rung. He didn’t lean back in it once. I saw him start to, twice, and catch himself.
In the middle of dinner, I looked down the whole length of that table. At the elbows and the passing and Wayne arguing with Jim about a road grader.
And I understood something I hadn’t let myself know for four years.
I hadn’t lent that table to Stephanie because she needed it.
I’d lent it because I couldn’t stand to look at it empty.
I’d always thought the table was for my family. It was for whoever needed a place. It always had been.
Don knew that. He’s the one who went and bought twelve chairs’ worth.
Nobody at my table that day was tolerated. I want that written down somewhere.
The last of them left about four. Harold stayed longest. He stood on my front step holding his empty Cool Whip tub.
“Roberta,” he said. “I’ve been dreading this day since March.”
That was all. He put on his hat and went.
Dylan and I were at the sink. He was drying.
It was getting on toward dusk. The light had gone blue in the yard.
Then headlights swung across the kitchen window. And stopped.
“That’s Curt’s truck,” Dylan said.
I dried my hands. I went to the front door and opened it before anyone could knock.
There were three people on my porch.
Curt, in the back, with his cap in his hand.
Stephanie, who’d been crying and had quit trying to hide it.
And in front, in a good wool coat, with a pie balanced on each palm, was Mrs. Lindquist.
She was the one who spoke first.
“Roberta,” she said. “I have just eaten Thanksgiving dinner off a card table. I’ve eaten off worse. But I have never in my life eaten at another woman’s expense without knowing it. And I’ve come to apologize for a thing I didn’t know I had done.”
Epilogue: Still Learning
I didn’t know what to say to that.
So I said, “You’d better come in. Those look heavy.”
“Sour cream raisin and a pumpkin,” she said. “Neither one’s been cut. We didn’t get that far.”
I pieced the rest of the story together over the next hour, from three people who each told it a little differently.
They had all sat down at one o’clock. At four card tables of four different heights. Under an ironed bedsheet. In a dining room with four dents in the new carpet.
Stephanie’s turkey was a little dry. Her gravy, by her own account, was like wallpaper paste. Nobody said a word about it. The Lindquists, it turns out, are nice people.
About halfway through, Mrs. Lindquist said, pleasant as could be, “Stephanie, where did that lovely oak table go? I’ve been admiring it since June.”
And Stephanie could have said anything.
She could have said it was out being refinished. She’s told me since she had three different stories ready.
Instead she set down her fork and said, “It’s my mother’s. She came and got it Tuesday. She needed it.”
“Is your mother having people?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why on earth isn’t your mother here?”
Curt told me you could have heard a pea roll.
“Because I told her not to come,” my daughter said. In front of her new husband and his whole family. “I told her you needed the big table, and there wasn’t room for her at it.”
Mrs. Lindquist put her napkin down.
“I needed,” she said. “Stephanie, when did I ever say such a thing?”
“In October. You stood in the dining room and said you missed having a big table.”
“I said I missed it. I did not say I needed yours.”
It all came out then.
Mrs. Lindquist had done Thanksgiving for forty-three years in a farmhouse outside Holdrege. Her husband died two winters ago. Last summer she sold the place because she couldn’t keep it up, and she moved to an apartment here in Hastings to be near Curt.
The household goods went at auction on a Saturday in July.
She stood in her own yard and watched a man from Kearney load her dining table onto a trailer for a hundred and forty dollars.
“I cried from Holdrege to Hastings,” she told me in my front room, still in her coat. “Better than fifty miles. Do you think a woman who’d just done that would put another woman out of hers?”
What my daughter had done, she’d done out of plain fright.
She’d had one marriage fail. She had a brand-new mother-in-law who had run a famous Thanksgiving for four decades and shook hands like a county commissioner. She heard one wistful sentence in October and built a demand out of it.
Then she worked out that there were twelve chairs and thirteen people.
And that the thirteenth was the one who always took over the kitchen.
“Because you do, Mom,” Stephanie said.
She was sitting on my davenport, twisting a tissue.
“You come in and you take the spoon out of my hand. You’ve done it my whole life. I wanted her to see I could do one thing by myself.”
That was fair.
It stung. And it was fair.
I run a kitchen like a sergeant. Don used to say so. I never once listened.
“You could’ve told me that,” I said. “You could’ve said, Mom, sit down and let me burn it. I’d have sat. I’d have hated it, but I’d have sat.”
“I know.”
“What you did instead was count me.”
“I know.”
She could hardly get it out.
“I stood in that room today with those card tables, and everybody being so nice about it. And I thought, this is what I asked my mother to make room for. I asked her to give up her own chair at her own table so I could look like I had one.”
Curt hadn’t said much. He’s not a talker. But he spoke up then, and I thought better of him for it.
“I asked her whose table it was,” he said. “Right there at dinner. I’d figured it came from her first house. She’d told me you had other plans, Roberta, and I took that the way it was said. I should’ve picked up the phone and asked you myself. That one’s on me.”
He turned his cap around in his hands.
“When she told it, I said, get your coat. And Mom said, get the pies.”
“Dale’s wife is doing my dishes,” Stephanie said. And she laughed. And she cried while she did it.
I sat down beside my daughter and put my arm around her. She leaned into me the way she did when she was six.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“I know you are. I’m sorry I took the spoon.”
There was one more thing to say. I said it kindly. But I said it.
Sorry is where you start. It doesn’t put things back the way they were.
“The table stays here, Stephanie. It was a loan, and I’m calling it in. You’ll have one of your own. There’s a sale somewhere every Saturday, and I’ll go to every one of them with you till we find it. But this one lives in this house. And you have a place at it any day of your life you want one.”
She nodded.
She didn’t argue. I think she was relieved.
“Come see something,” Dylan said from the doorway.
He led his mother into the dining room. He turned over the fifth chair.
She read it.
Steph’s. Reglued 11-89. She leans back.
She laid her fingers on her father’s pencil marks. And she made a sound I hadn’t heard out of her since his funeral.
Then Dylan turned over his own chair. She read that one too.
Dylan. Reglued 2019. So does he.
And she pulled that tall boy’s head down onto her shoulder and held on.
Mrs. Lindquist had come to stand beside me. She ran her hand along the back of the nearest chair.
“Pressed backs,” she said. “My mother had these.”
Then, not looking at me: “It’s a hard thing, giving up your table. I ought to have known one when I was sitting at it.”
“Arlene,” I said.
It was the first time I’d used her name.
“Take your coat off. I’ve got coffee, and you’ve got pie.”
We sat down again, the five of us, at one end of a ten-foot table with the leaves still in.
Arlene cut the sour cream raisin. It was the best I have ever put in my mouth, and I told her so. She told me my dressing recipe wasn’t leaving that house without her. Curt ate two turkey sandwiches standing up in the kitchen, like a man who hadn’t had a proper dinner.
Stephanie sat in her own chair.
About halfway through her pie, she leaned back in it.
Nobody said a word.
Dylan looked at me. I looked at Dylan.
We found her table the second Saturday in December, at an estate sale in Kenesaw.
Arlene spotted it. Round oak on a pedestal. Three leaves. A hundred and sixty dollars. Curt and Wayne hauled it home in the same stock trailer.
Arlene and I have been to four more sales since, hunting chairs to go around it. We’re up to seven.
Harold comes to Sunday dinner now.
So does Ben. When the interstate is open, and when it isn’t.
Stephanie makes the gravy at my house. And I sit on a stool with my hands tucked under my legs and keep my mouth shut. She says it’s the finest present I ever gave her.
The week after Thanksgiving, I took Don’s carpenter pencil out of the junk drawer, where it had sat since he died.
I turned over the chair Arlene Lindquist had sat in. It had never been broken, so there was nothing written on it.
I wrote something anyway.
Arlene. Brought the pies.
Then I turned over my own chair, and I added a line right under his.
Still doesn’t know better. But she’s learning.
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
