Chapter 24: Last to Sit

The next Thanksgiving, we set the table for twelve.

Daniel and I had been married since June.

We owned a brick house in Stamford with a kitchen too small for the guest list.

My old sixty-two pieces of bone china sat in the Wexford Club kitchen, where the staff used them every day.

For this table I had bought twelve new plates, white and thin.

I set every one myself that morning, and not one of them was paper.

My mother arrived at nine with a sack of potatoes and took over the oven.

The old cook came at ten, eighty-five years old, in her good black dress.

A young man from the club kitchen had volunteered to drive her, and she held his arm up the steps.

She inspected my gravy.

"It needs pepper," she said.

"My mother told me the same thing."

"Then she's a smart woman."

"I heard that," said my mother, from the stove.

By noon the house was loud.

Two more people from the Wexford Club kitchen arrived together in their good coats.

They carried a tray of rolls they had made at four that morning.

The club manager had brought them in his own car.

He shook my hand in the hall and looked at the floor.

"The table in the staff room," he said. "They sit at it first now. I was told you'd want me to say so."

"I didn't tell you to say anything."

"The woman with the gray hair told me," he said. "She said you'd be too polite."

The small gray-haired woman who had told him stood behind him in a tweed coat, holding a pie.

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