Chapter 23: The Long Table

Sam picked me up at six on Saturday, even though he lived across the road.

He walked over, rang the bell, and stood on my porch in a brown suit that had been bought for someone narrower.

"You look like a man who's been told to," Maddie said, from behind me.

"I was."

"By who?"

"The suit."

She grinned and went to get her coat.

The Legion hall had never looked like that.

Someone had taken out the three hundred chairs and the dozen round tables, and put in one table.

It ran down the entire length of the room, forty feet of folding tables pushed end to end.

White paper covered it, with a bench down each side.

There were no place cards.

"We didn't want anyone assigned," said the secretary, who stood at the door in her cardigan with the silver pin back on.

"Where do we sit?" I said.

"It's a table. Sit where you like."

Down the middle of it ran casseroles.

I had never seen so many.

Each sat on a hot pad with a strip of masking tape across the lid, and a name on the tape in a different hand.

None of the handwriting was Dee's.

The circle had brought them in their own names.

The polka band tuned up beside the bar, five men in vests, and the one with the accordion lifted two fingers at me.

My mother was at the head of the table.

She was setting plates.

They were the good plates, the white ones with the gold rim, and she had brought all twenty-four of them.

She laid each one at its place with a small careful click.

"I washed them twice," she said, when she saw me.

"They're beautiful."

She nodded, and put down another.

At the foot of the table the woman from Green Bay and her cousin sat in the places of honor.