Chapter 6: The Sunday Table

On Sunday I made my grandmother's sauce in a rented pot that was too small.

It was the first thing I had cooked in Austin, and by noon the whole stairwell of the building smelled like garlic and tomatoes.

The retired man in 3A knocked on my door at one o'clock.

"Whatever that is," he said, "I'm not leaving until I know what's in it."

"Sunday sauce. There's pork and beef, and a lot of patience."

"Do you need someone to taste it?"

"I need someone to sit down and eat it," I said. "At five. There's a pot of rigatoni, too."

I had not planned to say it.

It just came out, because I was tired of eating alone.

He went down the hall and knocked on two more doors, and by two thirty I had five yeses.

The problem was the chairs.

My apartment had one wooden chair and a bed, and I had invited five people.

At four thirty there was a knock, and the man from 3A stood in the doorway holding a folding chair under each arm.

"Spares," he said. "I keep them for when my daughter comes, and she never comes."

Behind him came the couple from 2B, carrying a kitchen stool and a piano bench, and a graduate student in socks with a beanbag.

"It's all we have," the graduate student said.

I looked at the mismatched seats around my small table, and I had to look away for a second.

I had sat in every kind of chair in my life except the one that had been brought for me.

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