The Seat He Let His Grandmother Choose (When His Family Came First #10)

Chapter 1

CHERYL

The sweet potatoes rode on my lap the whole way out because the trunk still smelled like fertilizer.

Tom had bought two bags of it back in October, thrown them in, and left them there eleven days, and the smell had never entirely gone.

So there I was in the passenger seat of his Silverado with a nine-by-thirteen pan on a folded beach towel across my thighs, hands flat on the foil, the heat coming up through the cotton like something alive.

"You could put it on the floor," he said.

"It'll slide."

"I drive fine."

"You drive like a man who thinks yellow lights are a suggestion."

He smiled at the windshield without looking over, the half-smile that only uses the left side of his mouth.

He had the good flannel on, the gray-blue one that makes his eyes look like weather coming, and his knuckles were cracked from three weeks of pulling wire in an unheated warehouse out in Hamlin.

"Grandma ask for the marshmallow ones or the pecan?"

"Both."

"She asked for both?"

"She asked for pecan. Then she called back Tuesday because Denise's kids won't eat pecans." I shifted the pan an inch off the seam of my jeans. "There's a second one behind your seat."

"You made two."

"I made two."

He glanced over. "That's a lot of sweet potatoes for people who are gonna fill up on rolls."

"It is."

At the light on Pine he put his hand on my knee, above the towel, warm off the vent, and left it there till the light changed. We didn't say anything else until the turn at Baker Road. It was a good drive out. I want that down before anything else.

Alma's place sits at the end of a gravel horseshoe with a dogwood in the front yard that's been dying politely since about 2009. The driveway was already packed. I was counting cars before my feet hit the ground, running the math on plates and chairs the way I always do.

"Eighteen," I said.

"Eighteen what?"

"People. Nineteen if Uncle Ray shows."

Tom got the second pan from behind his seat and carried it wrong, one hand flat under the middle of it, so I took it back at the porch steps and neither of us said a word about that either.

Inside it was heat and noise and turkey that had been in the oven since six.

Alma keeps that house about eight degrees warmer than anybody needs, because she's ninety-seven and her hands are always cold.

Same brown recliner. Same lamp with the pleated shade.

Same wall of school pictures running back far enough that half those kids are divorced now.

"There she is." Denise came out of the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder — Tom's cousin, fifty, kind, permanently in the middle of a sentence. "Cheryl. Thank God. Where does the good gravy boat live?"

"Left of the sink, top shelf, behind the punch bowl."

"How do you know that."

"Because I put it there in April."

She laughed and went and got it, which is more or less how the day goes.

I set my pans on the sideboard, took my coat back to the bedroom, came out with my sleeves already shoved up.

The tote stayed by the door where I could get at it — extra serving spoons, roll of foil, the tin of ginger candies Marlene likes, two AA batteries because that meat thermometer eats them.

Pauline was in the wingback by the window, sunk down so far her chin was nearly on her chest.

"That chair's too soft for you."

"It's the chair they put me in."

"Give me a second."

I went and got the straight-backed one from the hall, the cane seat, and swapped them while she held onto my forearm to lower herself down. She weighs nothing now. Her hand on my arm was cool as a coin off the dresser.

"You're a good girl," she said.

"I'm fifty-three."

"You're a good girl," she said again, satisfied, and that was the end of it.

Then a twelve-year-old with a cowlick wanted the bathroom.

"Through there, past the coats."

"There's a lock on it."

"There's no lock on it. It sticks."

Denise's husband wanted to know if I'd seen the electric knife, which was in the drawer under the microwave where it lives.

Somebody's toddler put a fistful of olives in my hand because he'd changed his mind about them, so the olives went back in the bowl.

Then I checked the oven, because Alma has a habit of switching it off when she means to turn it down, and sure enough she'd switched it off.

She was at the stove in her good apron, the one with the strawberries, poking at the giblets with a wooden spoon. At ninety-seven she still does the bird herself and won't let anybody near it.

"You're late," she said, without turning around.

"We're twenty minutes early."

"Denise came at ten."

"Denise lives four miles away."

"You live nine."

I learned not to take that personally somewhere in my thirties. It took me most of my thirties to learn it. I got the strainer down for her out of the cupboard over the fridge, where she can't reach anymore, since she's five foot one now and used to be five four.

"Cheryl. Taste this."

I tasted it. Salt.

"Needs pepper," I said, because you can't tell Alma a thing needs salt. She takes it as a remark about how she was raised.

"Then put pepper in it."

I put pepper in it. She stood there with her arms folded while I did it, tasted it again herself, gave one nod.

"Is that Denise's boy in the front room, the one with the hair?"

"That's Brayden."

"He's got a look on him."

"He's fifteen, Alma."

"Your Rachel never had a look on her." She turned to check the rolls. "Your Rachel was a pleasant child."

Which is as close to a thank-you as that transaction was ever going to come, and I'll take it, because it's what's on offer.

I should say here that she had me out on a Tuesday in 2011 and taught me how to get a pie crust right.

She drove to my mother's funeral in Altoona in February, on bad roads, in a car she had no business being in.

In twenty-five years she has never once said an unkind word to my face.

I liked her then. I still do. That's the part nobody wants to hear.

Something went over in the front room — a chair — and a two-year-old started up.

"That's the plant stand," Alma said.

It was the plant stand. I set it back on its feet, swept the dirt up with the little brush out of the utility closet, and got the toddler a paper cup of water he had no interest in.

Tom was in the living room with a beer, telling Mitch something about the Steelers, head tipped back laughing. He was happy. That house is his the way a house you grew up visiting stays yours.

At quarter past two Alma came out of the kitchen with the place cards.

She's written them by hand every year I've been coming, blue ballpoint, those little folded cream cards she bought in bulk from a paper store that went under in 2003. She's still got half a box. She'll die with a quarter of it left.

The dining room table is the walnut one, two leaves in, running the whole length of the room under the fixture with the fake candles.

Ten chairs. Past it, in the archway to the den, the card table — olive green, padded vinyl top, cigarette burn in one corner from a party in the eighties.

Four folding chairs, plus two from the kitchen to make six.

Everybody calls it the kids' table, which is what they called it in 1999, when I was twenty-eight with a diamond chip on my hand.

Alma worked her way down the walnut table setting cards. She's never asked anybody where they'd like to sit and she wasn't about to start. Her hands shake a little at rest but they don't shake when she's working.

I stood in the archway with a stack of folded napkins, counting seats against bodies.

Ten at the big table. Alma at the head, Tom's father at the far end. Denise and her husband. Mitch and his wife. Pauline, Marlene, Tom.

And one empty chair beside Tom.

I saw it the way you see a step that isn't there. The chair was pulled out a little, card standing on the plate, water already poured.

"Is Daniel coming?" Mitch said, going by behind me.

"He's not," Denise said. "Texted this morning. He's at Bree's parents' in Erie."

"He texted you?"

"He texted the whole group. Nine-forty."

Alma had heard. She was two feet from that chair, straightening a fork.

"His place is set," she said.

Nobody argued, because it wasn't put out there as an argument. It was the way you'd tell somebody the porch light's on.

Then she looked up and saw me in the archway with the napkins, and pointed with two fingers toward the card table.

"Cheryl, honey, you're in there with the kids."

Heat came up the back of my neck. Denise's eyes went to that empty chair and came off it again. Mitch stopped with his beer halfway up. Whoever was at the sink shut the water off.

They were all waiting on me, and I had a stack of napkins in my hands and nowhere to set them down.

So I did the thing I'd been doing for twenty-five years.

"Still haven't graduated," I said.

Three people laughed. Mitch snorted into his beer. Denise said, "Oh my God, Cheryl," in that fond way people use when you've just gotten them off the hook. Alma smiled a little, pleased, because as far as she was concerned I'd agreed with her.

Tom laughed too. Not a big one. The automatic kind you give a joke you've heard a hundred times. He was already sitting down.

I took my napkins in to the card table. Six places — Denise's two boys, ten and fifteen; a cousin's girl of nineteen who hadn't looked up from her phone since she got there; Marlene's grandson Colton, twelve, the cowlick, the one who'd asked me about the bathroom.

And me, at the corner, where the folding leg's been shimmed with a coaster since before Rachel was born.

I made that joke the first time in 2003.

I know the year because Rachel started first grade that fall.

I'd been coming out to that house four years by then, and something had gone sideways with the seating — a cousin's new husband got a spot at the walnut table and I didn't. I could feel the whole room notice it.

So I said it. Still haven't graduated. No planning behind it at all, the way the good ones come, and everybody laughed, Alma included, and the moment turned from something people were looking at into something people were enjoying.

I felt like I'd caught a dish before it hit the floor.

After that I said it every year. It turned into a bit. Denise started watching for it. One Easter I forgot, and Mitch actually prompted me — "Cheryl, you gonna do the thing?" — so I did the thing, and everybody laughed.

The food came out. Alma said a short grace thanking God for the hands that made the meal without going into whose. Somebody opened the second bottle. The noise came up the way it does. I passed the rolls to Colton and he took four.

"Aunt Cheryl," he said.

"Mm."

He had his fork upright in his fist, looking past me at the walnut table, at the whole width of that room, working something out with the flat unembarrassed logic of a kid who hasn't learned yet which questions cost money.

"How come you're still a kid?"

The nineteen-year-old looked up from her phone.

The big table kept right on talking, but a pocket of the room went still, the way water goes still in one spot when something drops into it, and I could feel it moving outward from where I sat.

Twelve feet. That's what it is, my chair to Tom's. I paced it off later in an empty house in my socks, because I wanted the number.

Across those twelve feet, Tom was already looking at me.

He'd heard it, and he knew I'd heard him hear it, and his face did something I had not once seen it do at that table in twenty-five years.

His jaw came forward. His eyes went to the empty chair beside him with Daniel's card standing on the plate.

His hand went flat on the cloth, the way a man's hand does right before he pushes up out of a seat.

For about a second and a half I thought he was going to stand.

Then Mitch said something to him about the second half, and Tom's mouth moved, and he answered, and his hand came off the tablecloth and picked up his fork. He pulled his chair in six inches and started to eat.

"Aunt Cheryl?" Colton said.

"Eat your potatoes, bud. Your grandma made those."

He shrugged, satisfied, twelve years old, and ate.

I sat with my hands in my lap a minute. The pan I'd gotten up at six to make was way down at the far end of the walnut table, in front of a man I've met four times.

And next to my husband, on a full setting, water poured, fork squared up on a folded napkin, was a chair for somebody who wasn't coming.