Chapter 24: The New Table

On the following Sunday, I set the dining table in my mother's house with roses in the middle.

Not lilies.

Lorna had brought them at seven that morning, in a bucket, from the grocery store.

She had put them on the porch step and rung the bell and gone back down the hill before anyone opened the door.

"She's here every day at seven," Grandma said, watching from the window. "She leaves something and goes."

"What did she leave yesterday?"

"The paper. And a loaf of bread. And a note that said sorry, which I put in the stove."

"Grandma."

"It was a good note. I just didn't need it." She tapped her cane on the floorboards. "Save the sorry. Do something useful."

I laughed and carried the roses to the table.

The table had been refinished.

Theo and the deckhand had stripped it on Thursday, with the lumber yard manager standing over them and telling them what they were doing wrong.

The old stain was gone, with the white ring from my father's glass, and the nick where Cal had dropped a carving fork in the third grade.

It was pale and plain, and it smelled of pine.

I set the places myself.

At the foot, where Dad used to sit, I put Theo.

At the head, where nobody had ever really belonged, I put my grandmother.

My mother's chair stood at my right hand.

Her gray cardigan with the pearl buttons hung over the back of it, and nobody had asked me to put it there.

In the front hall, a nail held a new frame.

The old card was back in it, with its scorched corner and its slanted ink.

Theo and I had written the rest on a second card on Friday night, at the kitchen counter, in my best handwriting and his worst.

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