Chapter 19: Fourteen Chairs

The widower next door built the table himself, and he told me nobody was allowed to help.

"Seventy-four years old," his sister said from the porch steps, "and he still won't let a woman hold a level."

"It's a very good level."

"It's a very good level that you've been holding upside down since noon."

He looked at the level.

Then he turned it over and said nothing, and Libby had to walk to the far end of the lawn to laugh.

It was Friday afternoon, and the cottage lawn had turned into a work site.

His nephew, the locksmith, had brought four sawhorses and two long planks of pine from his truck.

The captain, as everybody called him, planed the edges by hand.

Kenzie sanded.

She sat on an overturned bucket in one of my old sweatshirts, working a block of sandpaper along the plank.

She had a smear of dust on her cheek.

Nobody had told her to do it.

She had arrived at noon and asked what needed doing, and the captain had pointed at the sandpaper.

I carried chairs.

By two o'clock I had fourteen of them lined up along the porch, and no two matched.

Two were wicker, from my mother's sunroom.

Three were folding chairs from the bakery, with FRIDAY SPECIAL stenciled on the backs.

One was a stool the nephew had made in school.

One had a leg shorter than the rest, and Libby had folded a paper napkin four times and wedged it underneath.

"Fourteen," I said. "I only have a table for twelve."

"Fourteen is fine," said the captain.

"Is it fourteen people?"

"It's fourteen chairs. People's a different question."

I counted on my fingers.

Kenzie and her fiancé and his parents made four.

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