Chapter Ten - Sunday Supper
CHAPTER TEN
Sunday Supper
By the third Sunday after I left Nashville, I had learned that Ada Reeves could invite you to dinner without making it sound like an invitation.
“Six o’clock,” she had said when I came into Switchback Cafe for coffee that morning.
I had been carrying a paper bag of groceries and trying to remember whether I had bought salt.
“What’s at six?”
“Sunday.”
“I’m aware.”
“Good. Saves time.” She poured coffee into my travel mug.
“People eat here after closing.”
“People?”
“Usually.” I waited. Ada raised one eyebrow.
“Was that an invitation?”
“No. Invitations require an answer. I’m telling you there will be food at six and an empty chair if you want it.”
Then she charged me for the coffee and started wiping the counter. I spent the afternoon telling myself I would not go.
At five forty-two, I changed my shirt.
At five fifty-one, I was driving down the ridge. That irritated me enough that I almost turned around. The CLOSED sign already hung in the cafe window. Light spilled around the blinds. I stood outside with my hand on the door.
I had spent most of adulthood walking into rooms of strangers beside Eli—label dinners, radio parties, after-show lounges where people greeted me with the concentration of someone trying to remember whether my name mattered.
Smile. Stand half a step back when photographs began.
Know when Eli needed rescuing from a conversation without making the rescue visible.
A room without Eli should have been easier. I had no idea what to do with my hands. The door opened. Ada found me still standing there.
“You planning to eat on the sidewalk?”
“I was considering it.”
“Cold choice.” She stepped aside. I went in. The small cafe tables had been pushed into one uneven line. Serving bowls filled the surface: roast chicken, green beans, potatoes, biscuits, a neglected salad, and a pie with one slice already missing.
“I thought dinner started at six.”
“It did,” Ada said.
“Who ate the pie?”
“Evidence is inconclusive.” A man near the end of the table raised his fork. I recognized him from my first morning—the one who had brought apples into the cafe.
“Cal Boone,” he said. “And I deny everything.”
“You’re the step person.”
He pointed at me with the fork.
“That is a deeply insulting way to introduce a carpenter.”
“You owe Ada for pie.”
His expression changed.
“She told you that?”
“She tells everybody everything except what they actually ask.”
“Now you understand the town.”
Ada put a plate in my hands.
“Sit.” There were eight people around the table, and not one of them applauded. That should not have mattered.
It did. Ada gave names without biographies.
Cal. Mrs. Velez from the library. A high school science teacher named Jonah Price.
Two sisters who owned the hardware store and corrected each other’s stories before either had finished telling them.
A paramedic named Robin who had come straight from a shift and looked capable of falling asleep upright.
The woman beside me introduced herself as Beth and then immediately asked Cal why the railing outside the post office still leaned. Nobody asked who my husband was. For the first ten minutes, I mostly listened.
The conversation moved without concern for whether I understood it: someone’s septic tank, a snowplow-route argument, a teenager who had backed a truck into the planter outside town hall and apparently improved it.
I ate potatoes. Nobody asked whether I liked them.
It felt strangely luxurious. Then Beth turned to me.
“You’re the singer’s wife, right?”
The table did not go silent, but it changed.
Only slightly. A fork paused. Robin looked up from her plate. Cal reached for a biscuit he did not need. Curiosity, finally visible. Ada did nothing to stop it. I appreciated that too.
“Yes,” I said.
Beth nodded. “My daughter sent me the television clip.”
“I figured people had seen it.”
“She thinks your husband is an idiot.”
“Beth,” one of the hardware-store sisters said.
“What? I didn’t say I thought it.”
“You were about to.”
“I was deciding.” A laugh moved around the table, easing the awkwardness without turning me into the joke.
Beth looked back at me. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“That is what people usually say right before asking another question.”
Her mouth twitched.
“Fair.” She returned to her chicken. And that was it. No one demanded a statement. No one told me what Eli must have meant. No one asked how much money was involved. The conversation recovered its former shape. I had expected relief. Something sharper came instead.
I was so accustomed to being useful in rooms that being left alone inside one felt almost like exclusion.
Nobody needed me to smooth anything. Nobody needed me to remember an anniversary, explain a lyric, rescue a conversation, or make a famous man more comfortable.
I was only eating. I did not know why that felt difficult. Mrs. Velez leaned toward me.
“Ada says you’re up at the Bennett cabin.”
“She says a lot.”
“That she does. Your aunt used to donate mysteries to the library after tearing out the last page if she disliked the ending.”
I blinked at her.
“She did what?”
“Said bad endings should not be allowed to survive.”
“That sounds exactly like her.”
“She also played piano badly.”
“I remember that.”
“We still have the old upright in the music room.”
Something in my body changed before I could hide it. Mrs. Velez noticed.
“You play?”
“A little.” That was a lie so practiced I almost missed saying it. I had played piano since I was seven. I had written songs since I was fourteen. But somewhere along the way, answering that question honestly had started requiring too much explanation. Mrs. Velez did not challenge me.
“Room sits empty most afternoons. Key’s at the desk.”
“Thank you.” Across the table, Jonah asked whether anyone had signed up for the winter coat drive. The subject moved on. I took another bite. The conversation had released me again.
Halfway through dinner, Robin’s phone rang. She stepped outside to answer it. One of the sisters began packing leftovers into containers without asking whose they were. Cal told a story about rebuilding a porch for a man who refused to admit the porch had been built wrong in the first place.
“You can repair almost anything if the foundation’s sound,” he said.
He was talking about a porch. I made myself keep it that way. Ada caught the look anyway. She said nothing.
After dinner, people cleared plates without being assigned. I reached automatically for the stack nearest me. Ada took it out of my hands.
“I can help.”
“I know.”
“Then why—”
“Because Robin cooked the beans, Cal brought bread, Beth washed last week, and you are new.”
“I can still wash dishes.”
“You can.” Ada handed the stack to Jonah instead. He carried it toward the kitchen without protest. The refusal bothered me more than it should have. I followed Ada to the counter.
“I don’t need special treatment.”
“This isn’t special treatment.”
“Then why won’t you let me help?”
She looked toward the table where everyone else was arguing about whether the missing pie slice counted as theft if the thief had baked the pie.
“Because you keep offering before anybody asks.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Ada folded a dish towel.
“You do that a lot?”
“What?”
“Find a job before you find a chair.”
The sentence reached somewhere I had not armored.
“I like being useful.”
“Nothing wrong with useful.”
Her gaze came back to me.
“Long as it isn’t the rent you pay for being allowed in the room.”
I looked away. The cafe window reflected the interior lights over the dark street. For a moment, my own face floated there between the pie case and the coffee machine.
“Everybody is suddenly very interested in what I did for my husband,” I said.
Ada waited.
“The reporters. Lawyers. People online. They keep calling me his creative partner now.”
“Were you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to be?”
The answer should have been obvious.
Instead I heard myself say, “I don’t know.”
Ada leaned one hip against the counter.
“What did you make that wasn’t for him?”
I thought of the notebooks. There were dozens of unfinished songs. Verses written during sound checks. Melodies recorded while Eli slept. Lines I had never shown him because they did not fit his voice, his albums, his audience.
“When?”
“Recently.” I almost laughed.
“That narrows the field.”
“Does it?” I rubbed my thumb against a nick in the wooden counter.
“I haven’t finished a song under my own name in fifteen years.”
The words came out without drama. That made them worse. Ada did not tell me fifteen years was too long. She did not say I still had time. She did not ask whether Eli had stopped me.
She only said, “That sounds different from not writing.”
“I write all the time.”
“For him.”
“Mostly.”
“But you didn’t say you haven’t written a song in fifteen years.”
No. I had not. I thought of the library’s empty music room. The upright piano. A key at the desk. There had always been scraps of me left over from Eli’s work. I had called them scraps because nobody was waiting to hear them.
“Maybe I don’t know what my songs sound like anymore.”
Ada shrugged.
“Seems like an excellent reason to make one.”
“You make everything sound annoyingly uncomplicated.”
“No. I’m saying go make one ugly song in the library and see what it sounds like. You don’t have to solve the next five years before lunch.”
Behind us, Cal announced that he was taking the last biscuit before anyone could establish a committee about it.
I smiled. This time I noticed myself doing it.
When I left, nobody hugged me. Beth told me to watch for deer on the ridge. Mrs. Velez reminded me about the library key. Cal said he would look at my back step Tuesday if it was not raining. Ada packed one slice of pie into a paper box and put it in my hands without asking whether I wanted it.
I drove back to Alder Ridge with the heater low. The cabin was dark when I arrived. I carried the pie inside, set it on the counter, and opened the curtains even though there was nothing outside to see but my own reflection. The evidence bin sat across the table.
Beside it was the notebook I had started the year before and abandoned after six pages. I opened it. Three unfinished verses. A grocery list. A line about a porch light that had nothing to do with the old song. I read that line again.
Then I wrote another beneath it. No one was waiting for the result.
No deadline. No album.
No husband asking whether the second verse was ready. The freedom of that frightened me. I kept writing anyway.