Chapter 23: One Hundred Fifty-Six Cards

My mother had set the table for ten in a kitchen built for four.

She had pushed the dining leaf against the wall.

She had borrowed chairs from three neighbors.

The new one stood at the corner, near the stove, with a green cushion tied to the seat.

"That one's yours," she told Maura.

"It's beautiful."

"It's a kitchen chair, dear. Sit down before the roast gets cold."

Nine of us sat down.

Besides my mother, Maura and me, there were the dispatcher in a good cardigan and the gray-mustached driver with his wife.

The lobby guard came with his grown son, who had driven my mother home from the closing.

The man from next door came in his bathrobe, because he had lost the argument about changing.

Maura sat beside me with her left hand on the tablecloth.

Every eye at that table found the ring and tried to look somewhere else.

"Let's pray," my mother said.

"Mom."

"It's short."

It was short.

Then it was loud, and everybody was passing the potatoes.

I watched the table fill with noise and elbows.

In the hospital dining hall nobody had ever raised a voice above the clink of plastic forks.

When the plates were cleared and the pie was out, my mother went to the sideboard and came back with the shoebox.

She set it in front of me.

"I've read them all twice," she said. "I think it's time you heard them from somebody else."

"Mom, you don't have to."

"I know I don't. Hand them round."

She took off the lid.

One hundred fifty-six cards lay inside, in order, each in its own envelope.

She had written the Sunday on every corner in her small neat hand.

I took the first one out and gave it to the gray-mustached driver.

He put on his reading glasses and opened it.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Wife Sent Me to a Psych Ward, So I Gave Her a Big Surprise from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.