Chapter 9
TOM
Idrove out to Grandma's on the twenty-second, a Monday, four in the afternoon, and didn't tell Cheryl I was going.
If I'd told her she'd have been home waiting on the report, and I'd have come back through the door with something to hand her. Look what I did. She thought I was working late and I let her think it.
That house in December has a plastic wreath on the door with a red bow gone pink from twenty winters. She had the front room lamp on at four in the afternoon, because she keeps the shades down now.
I sat out in the driveway two minutes before I went in, which I've never done at that house in my life.
I've been coming up that gravel since I was two years old.
There's a spot by the porch step where I chipped a tooth in 1977.
The mailbox post is the one my grandfather set, and I've straightened it twice since.
"You're not eating," she said, before I was through the door.
"I ate."
"You look thin in the face."
"I'm fifty-six, Grandma. This is just my face."
She made instant coffee, which she's made since 1972 and which is genuinely bad, and we sat at the kitchen table with the vinyl cloth. She had the paper open to the obituaries, which is how she starts every day, checking the score.
We got through the furnace guy, who charged her ninety dollars to tell her the filter was in backward, which she has told four people about and will tell four more.
We got through my cousin's boy going into the Navy.
She wanted to know whether a person can put a car in somebody else's name, which I did not ask about, because with her you find out in April what the question was in December.
"Pauline's hip," she said.
"Bad?"
"They want to do the other one. She won't." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the vinyl. "She'll go down on the back step in that house one of these days and then they'll do it anyway, and she'll be in Beaver Falls with her daughter, and I'll be here."
That's the closest that woman has come in my whole life to saying she'd miss somebody.
"I want to ask you about the table," I said.
She turned a page. "What table."
"Christmas. The seating." I set my cup down. "Why does Cheryl sit at the card table?"
She looked up. Her eyes at ninety-seven are exactly as sharp as they were when I was nine and she caught me in the garage with my grandfather's cigarettes.
"Because that's where I put her."
"Right. I'm asking why."
"Tommy." She folded the paper — not annoyed, just settling in, the way she does when a thing has to be said plainly to somebody slow. "The big table seats ten. There's twenty-two of us. Somebody sits at the other one. That's arithmetic."
"It's the same somebodies every year."
"Because that's how it's set."
"That's not arithmetic. That's a list."
She put her hands flat on the vinyl. Her wedding ring hangs loose on her now. Seventy-eight years she's worn it, twenty-one of them a widow.
"You want me to say something ugly. I'm not going to, because I don't feel anything ugly. I like Cheryl. I've always liked Cheryl. She's a good worker, she's good to Pauline, she raised a nice girl."
"That's not the?—"
"You're my grandson." She said it flat, the way you'd read off a measurement.
"My son's son. You were in this house every Saturday from the time you were two years old.
Your father sat in that chair before you, and his father sat at the head where I sit now, and when I go, somebody in this family will sit there, and it won't be somebody who came in by marriage. "
"She's been married into this family twenty-five years."
"And you've been my grandson fifty-six."
It sat there on the vinyl between us in a kitchen that smells like coffee crystals and Jergens.
I'd driven out there with an argument built — time, loyalty, twenty-five years of sweet potatoes — and every piece of it had assumed she thought she was doing something to Cheryl.
She didn't. She thought she was doing arithmetic.
Blood is one number, marriage is another, and a room gets seated accordingly, the way the good plates come out for the priest.
I'd come out for a signature nobody was ever going to sign.
"You want more coffee," she said.
"No."
"There's a coffee cake in the freezer from the church."
"I'm all right, Grandma."
"It's a good one. It's not the almond." She got up anyway, which took her a while, and opened the freezer and stood there looking into it with the cold rolling out around her. Then she shut it without taking anything and came back and sat down.
"So she'll never sit next to me in that room."
"I didn't say never. Don't be dramatic, it doesn't suit you." She got up to rinse the cup, which also took a while. "When Pauline goes, there's a chair. When your father goes, there's a chair. That's how it works. That's how it's always worked."
I sat there and did the math on that offer. My wife could have a seat beside me if enough people died first.
"Are you bringing the sweet potatoes?" she said, over the water. "You never answered my message. Nobody answers a message anymore."
"I answered it."
"You did not."
"I put the thumb on it."
"That's not an answer, Tommy. That's a picture of a thumb."
"I'm making them."
She turned around with the cup in her hand. "You are?"
"I am."
"Cheryl's not making them?"
"No."
"Well, hers are better." No malice in it whatsoever, just a woman stating the case. "You'll do them too dry. She does something with the syrup."
That's the one I couldn't let go by.
I didn't stand up and I didn't raise my voice. I have never raised my voice to that woman in my life, and I wasn't going to start at fifty-six in a kitchen with a wall calendar from the funeral home.
"Then you should've treated her like somebody you wanted at your table," I said.
She stood at the sink holding the cup. Nobody in this family talks to her that way. Not my father. Not my uncle when he was alive. For about six seconds the refrigerator was the loudest thing in the county.
She set the cup in the rack and dried her hands on the towel, one finger at a time, the way she does.
"That's a hard thing to say to me."
"I know it."
"Twenty-five years, and she never once said a word to me about it."
"No," I said. "She never did."
Grandma nodded like that settled it, like the quiet was a verdict instead of the evidence, and came back and sat down and picked up her paper.
"Don't make Christmas unpleasant over a chair," she said.
Don't make Christmas unpleasant over a chair. Twenty-five minutes of that aimed at me and I couldn't hold it for the length of one cup of coffee.
"Yeah." I got up and got my coat. "Well. Somebody's been keeping it pleasant a long time."
She didn't look up. "Two o'clock. Don't be late, the ham comes out at two."
I made it as far as the door.
"Tommy."
I turned around. She was holding the paper without reading it.
"Your grandfather put me at the little table once," she said.
I stood there with my hand on the knob.
"Nineteen fifty. His mother's house on Federal Street.
I'd been married three years, I had your father on my hip.
" She smoothed the paper flat. "There were eleven of us and eight chairs.
His mother put me and the two other wives out in the kitchen with a card table on the good linoleum, and we ate off the everyday plates. "
"What'd he do?"
"He ate his dinner." Not a scrap of complaint in it. "That's what men did. I wasn't going to make a thing of it. I'd have been mortified if he had, in front of his mother."
"Were you upset?"
"I was twenty-two years old with a baby and a husband who worked at the mill six days a week. I don't remember what I was."
She turned a page.
"You put a wife in the kitchen for three years and then you put her at the table. That's how it went. It came around. Everybody's turn comes."
"Grandma. It's been twenty-five."
She didn't look up.
"Well," she said. "Some people's turn comes slower."
I didn't have anything for that. A twenty-two-year-old on a linoleum floor in 1950, waiting her turn, deciding somewhere along the way that the waiting was the fee. I could have stood in that doorway a year and not moved her an inch.
I drove home the long way, out past the reservoir, because I wanted the extra eleven minutes.
There was no argument, no fact, no number of years that was going to make Alma Whitaker agree my wife belonged at that table. It was never about deserving with her. It was about category. So I could keep going back for a permission slip until she died, or I could quit asking.
Somewhere around the spillway it came at me sideways, plain as a wall stud.
Cheryl had never once asked me to get her a seat.
Not one time in three weeks of me offering.
She'd said no every time I tried, and I'd taken that for pride, and it wasn't pride at all.
She'd been telling me the truth. She didn't want a chair.
She wanted to know that the man she married wouldn't sit in one that came at the price of leaving her across the room.
And the only person on this earth who could hand her that was doing forty-five past a frozen reservoir in a Silverado with a bag of marshmallows on the passenger seat.