Chapter 2
CHERYL
Iate. That surprised me a little.
The turkey was dry the way Alma's turkey has been dry since the Clinton administration, so I did what the rest of them did and drowned it in gravy.
Colton explained a video game to me, one with an economy in it, and he was extremely serious about the economy.
Brayden told him he was explaining it wrong.
The nineteen-year-old put one earbud in.
Twelve feet away, my husband was holding court on the subject of our spring vacation.
"Where's this again?" Denise said. "The place with the balcony."
"Outer Banks. Duck. We went two years ago, the place with the crooked stairs."
"You booked it already?"
"We did." And then, without breaking rhythm, without even fully turning around, he brought his voice up maybe ten percent and aimed it at the archway. "Cher. What are the dates on Duck?"
The whole card table looked at me.
"June sixth," I said. "Through the thirteenth. Saturday to Saturday."
"June sixth," Tom said, turning back. "Saturday to Saturday."
"Six months out, look at you," Denise said.
"That's her. She books everything."
It was a compliment, said with real warmth, the way a man brags on his wife. Denise made an admiring face, and Marlene said something about how she can never keep dates in her head.
I sat there with my fork in my hand and did the arithmetic on it. He hadn't stood up. He hadn't turned his chair. He hadn't stopped talking to Denise for one second longer than it took to get an answer out of me. Twelve feet is close enough to hand a man information across. It's too far to sit.
"You always sit here?" Colton asked.
"There's a good draft in this corner."
"No, but do you? Always?"
The salt shaker in front of me was one of a pair, milk glass, shaped like a beehive. The pepper lived at the big table.
"Yeah," I said. "Always."
"Weird," Brayden said, without looking up.
The nineteen-year-old pulled her earbud out long enough to say, "It's actually kind of messed up," in a mild, bored voice, and put it back in.
The walnut table got louder the further it got into the wine — everybody over there talking a half beat into everybody else, three conversations going, nobody worried about being cut off, because where else would the conversation go. At the card table we took turns.
"Can I ask you something," Colton said.
"Go ahead."
"Is Uncle Tom rich?"
Brayden groaned. Sydney's mouth twitched behind her phone.
"He's an electrician. He does all right."
"My mom said he's got a truck."
"He does have a truck."
"So he's rich."
"Every man in this family has a truck, bud."
Then Marlene called through the archway from the other room. "Cheryl, honey, is there more butter?"
Every kid at that table looked at me. I got up and went into the kitchen and took the second pound out of the door of Alma's refrigerator, where I'd put it that morning after buying it at the Giant Eagle on Wednesday night with my own money.
I unwrapped it and set it on a saucer. Then I carried it in and put it down between Marlene and my father-in-law.
"Oh, good," Marlene said. "She always has extra."
Nobody asked where it came from. It's been coming from the same place since about 2010.
I went back and sat down.
Dessert took forty minutes to get on the table because Alma won't let anybody else cut the pies. When the plates started stacking I was up before my brain got a vote — six plates to the kitchen, scraped, tap running until it went hot.
Denise came in with the gravy boat. "You don't have to do that."
"It's done already."
"Cheryl."
"It's fine."
"Sit down and have pie. I'll do those."
"You've been on your feet since ten."
"So have you." She set the gravy boat on the counter, where it would sit until I moved it. "Since eight, probably."
"Six."
"See, that's —" She looked at the sink, then at the door, and made the face people make when a thing is about to cost them eleven minutes. "Okay. Well. There's the pumpkin and there's the other one."
She went back out. I stood with the water going over my wrists, looking at the dish towel on the oven handle — the faded rooster, the one I've picked up and used at every gathering in that house since Bill Clinton was president. I reached for it and stopped with my hand about four inches short.
What came into my head came in the same flat voice I use for wondering whether we need milk. I have made this house work for twenty-five years, and it has never once cost anybody a thing to leave me in that corner.
I put my hand down, shut the tap off, dried my fingers on my jeans, and went back to the bedroom and dug my coat out from the bottom of the pile.
Pauline caught my sleeve on the way past the wingback.
"You're not staying for the pie."
"I've got a headache coming."
"You always stay for the pie." Her hand came around my wrist, cool and light as paper. "You cut the pie."
"Alma cuts the pie."
"Alma cuts the pie, you serve the pie." Ninety-one years old, and exact about it. "There's a difference, and don't tell me there isn't."
I patted her hand and she let go.
Tom found me by the front door twenty minutes later with my tote over my arm.
"You're ready?"
"Whenever you are."
"There's pie."
"You have pie."
He looked at me a second, then went and did his goodbyes, which took eleven minutes, because Whitakers say goodbye the way other families put on a wedding. Alma kissed my cheek at the door, smelling like Jergens.
"You'll bring the potatoes at Christmas." Not a question.
"We'll see."
She patted my arm like I'd said yes.
The truck was cold. Tom ran the defroster with the wipers going to clear the scrim of ice off, waiting on me to say something, which he'd been doing since the coat closet.
"That kid," he said, backing out. "Marlene's grandson. He didn't mean anything by it."
"I know he didn't."
"Kids just say stuff."
"He's twelve. He was doing math, and he got the right answer."
He put it in drive. We went down the gravel and out onto the county road, headlights climbing the hill and dropping down the other side.
"He embarrassed you," Tom said. "In front of everybody. I get it."
"That's not it."
"Then what."
A mailbox went by with a plastic turkey zip-tied to the post.
"You sat down," I said.
The cab went quiet. He didn't ask me what I meant.
"Cher."
"You heard him ask me. I watched you hear it. You looked at me, you looked at that empty chair, and then you pulled your chair in and ate."
"What was I supposed to do?"
"I don't know. That's the honest answer. I don't know."
"Grandma's ninety-seven years old."
"I'm aware."
"The seating is her thing. It's her one thing, she's been doing those little cards since my dad was in high school.
" His hands adjusted on the wheel, ten and two.
"Nobody in that house thinks you're a child.
Nobody. You're the one everybody goes to.
Denise texts you before she texts her own mother. "
"I know."
"So it's a table."
"Okay."
"It's a folding table in an archway."
"Okay."
"Everybody knows you're family, Cheryl."
The heater finally caught up and the warm air came over my knees. The tote was between my feet with the spoons in it, still clean, washed at somebody else's sink for a meal I ate in another room.
"If it's a table," I said, "then it doesn't matter which one you sit at."
"That's what I'm saying."
"No. Listen to what you're saying." I turned in the seat to look at his profile, lit green off the dash.
"If the table means nothing, then you sitting there means nothing, so you could have moved.
Twenty-five years, Tom. Twenty-five Thanksgivings, twenty-five Christmases, Easters, birthdays, your mother's funeral lunch.
Every single time, that thing that means nothing has put you in one room and me in another.
And every single time, you took the good chair. "
"I didn't take it. It's where my card is."
"You sat in it."
"Because that's where—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "You have never said one word about this. Ever. Twenty-five years. You joke about it. You made the joke today before Grandma even finished the sentence."
"I know I did."
"So how am I supposed to—" He shook his head. "You laughed."
"I did."
"So."
"So I laughed."
"Say something," he said.
"I'm thinking."
"That's worse than yelling."
"I'm aware."
He ran the wipers once through a spit of sleet and shut them off.
"You want me to turn the heat down?"
"It's fine."
"Your feet get cold in that car."
"It's your truck, Tom. My feet are fine."
He turned it down anyway, one click, and put his hand back on the wheel.
"Twenty-five years and you've never once been mad at me over my family."
"That's not true."
"Name one."
"Your cousin's wedding in Youngstown. I sat in a car for forty minutes in August because your uncle wanted to talk to you about a boat."
"That was 2008."
"It was 2009. And I'm not bringing it up to fight, I'm telling you the file exists." I looked out at the dark going by. "I keep a small one. Most wives do. The difference is I've never opened it in front of you."
He was quiet a second.
"Is it open now?"
"It's on the table. It isn't open."
We came into town and the lights of the Sheetz washed through the cab and out again. His hand went tight on the wheel, then loose, then tight, and he was doing a thing he almost never does, which is hunting for a sentence and not finding one.
"I'll talk to her," he said finally.
"Don't."
"Why not?"
"Because that's not what I'm asking for."
"Then tell me what you're asking for, because I honestly don't know."
I didn't have it yet either. It wasn't a chair. If Alma had rearranged that whole room and put me at the walnut table like a correction, I'd have been just as sick over it.
We turned onto our street. The porch light was on, because I'd left it on at ten that morning.
"If the chair is meaningless, Tom," I said, "you could have left it."
He put the truck in park without shutting it off, and sat there with his hands in his lap in the ticking cold, looking through the windshield at our own front door. He didn't have one word for me.