Chapter 23: The Second Table

My mother looked out at the figure under the maple for as long as it takes to dry a gravy boat.

Then she raised her hand and waved.

It was the wave she gives the mailman, and the school bus, and every car that has ever slowed on Putnam Street.

Under the tree, a hand came out of a coat pocket and waved back.

"She told me you did that," I said. "Eleven years ago. At six in the morning, with a trash bag."

"Did I?" My mother frowned. "I thought it was somebody's husband who'd been put out."

"Mom."

"I'm only saying, baby. I wave at everybody."

She switched off the kitchen light, and when I looked again, the sidewalk was empty.

At eleven the next morning, Tom's truck backed up to our curb with a tarp over the bed.

He pulled the tarp off.

It was the table.

It was white oak, nine feet long, with a top and trestle legs that locked with wooden pegs.

"I finished it at one this morning," Tom said, to the street. "It's a table. It's for no particular reason."

"It's very big," said my mother, from the porch.

"I know."

"Our door is thirty inches."

"I know that too," Tom said. "I measured it in October."

It took Tom, Ray and the retired railroad man twenty minutes.

They got it up the steps on its side, with Tom at the heavy end taking the whole weight on his shoulder.

Ray steered the legs.

The railroad man called out, "Left. Your left. No, her left," and none of us knew whose left.

At the door the screen came off its hinges, then the door itself.

My mother stood back in the hall with both hands over her mouth and watched a nine-foot table go through her front room by inches.