Chapter 23: A Seat at the Table

Dutch's warehouse had a new door, a new lock and a long table down the middle of the cellar floor.

The company had paid for all of it.

Dutch hated the table, and he had set it up himself anyway.

"It's a fire hazard," he grumbled, putting a pot of chili down in the center. "Four people and an oxygen tank eating on a fighting floor."

"It's a nice table," Perry said.

"It's a table."

My grandmother's wheelchair sat at the head of the table with its oxygen tank strapped to the back.

She had insisted on coming, and she had insisted on the head, and she had insisted on a bowl of Dutch's chili.

"It smells like a tire fire," she announced.

"It's my mother's recipe," Dutch said.

"Your mother was a menace."

"She was."

My grandmother tasted it.

She said nothing, put down the spoon, picked it up again and finished the bowl.

I sat across from her, with a split lip and a cut over my eye that Dutch had glued shut.

I had a plate in front of me and, for once, nobody to fight.

Perry sat next to me.

He had brought a loaf of bread, and he had cut it badly, and nobody had said so.

"Pass the butter," I said.

He passed it.

He did it without looking at me, and I took it without thanking him, and I could feel him trying not to smile.

"You know what I want?" Dutch said, with his mouth full. "I want to have a word with whoever matched that woman against a seventeen-year-old."

"You said yes," I said.

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