Chapter 24: The Long Table

On the first Sunday of December, Winifred set the long table in the Fairclough dining room herself.

She set out five plates and then a sixth, and she put the sixth at the far end.

"For Deborah," she told me, from the doorway. "If you say so. If you don't, I'll take it away myself."

"Leave it there," I said.

"You're sure."

"No. Leave it anyway."

She nodded and went back to her knitting bag.

I stood at the head of the room, in my own green coat, over a sweater of Cora's.

The Boston cardiologist had listened to my heart for half an hour that week, then taken off his headphones and looked at my father.

He said it was steady, and he didn't know why.

He said I needed an operation in the spring and a long list of boring habits.

He said I should plan on being irritating for fifty years.

My father had written the date of the operation on the kitchen calendar in red pen, with no "after" anywhere near it.

The front door opened, and the house filled with noise.

Tiernan came in first with a pie from the diner in both hands.

He had a job now at the county library, shelving, and he hated how much he liked it.

Above his head, small and gold, hung the number.

It read 41.

It had been 1 on the pier.

It went up by one every time somebody in Harlow Point said a plain yes to him: the library, the pier fishermen, the woman at the diner.

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