While Josh peeled, Margaret told him about the Thanksgivings of her own childhood — the farmhouse table, the cousins, the year the turkey caught fire and they ate pie for dinner — and Josh listened the way teenagers listen when a story is actually good, which is to say he stopped checking his phone. I sat at the counter shelling beans and thought about how this kitchen had sounded, a year ago, when Mark's family lived here: the television too loud in the living room, Margaret quiet, the air tight with things nobody said. Now it sounded like this. It sounded like peeling and talking and my mother's laugh.
Tina arrived Wednesday evening with two pies in carriers and a third, smaller pie she set down with a flourish. "That one's for Josh," she said. "He asked for extra filling last year and I remembered."
"You remembered," Josh said, and hugged her, and I watched Tina's face do something complicated — surprise, mostly, at being hugged for remembering a pie.
The house smelled like every good November I could remember from childhood: butter, and onions, and the particular warm spice of Margaret's stuffing, which she made the same way every year and would not let anyone help with. "The stuffing is mine," she announced when I offered. "You can do the green beans. You cannot ruin green beans. Probably."
I did the green beans. I set the table on Wednesday night, because Margaret liked the table set the night before, "so the morning is for cooking, not for fussing." Seven settings. Six chairs I knew, and one extra chair pulled from the study, which Margaret insisted on placing herself, adjusting it twice until it sat exactly right.
"Who's the seventh for, Grandma?" Josh asked, carrying in the extra chair.
"For whoever needs it," Margaret said, and would not elaborate, and Josh caught my eye and shrugged, and we both let it go.
That night, after Josh went home and the pies were cooling on the counter and the house had gone quiet, I stood in the dining room looking at the table. Seven plates. Seven glasses. The good silverware Margaret only used twice a year. And I thought about the first night I had come home, thirteen months earlier, when this same dining room had held Mark's trophies on the mantel and my mother's photographs on a back shelf, and I had slept in my childhood bedroom listening to a house that did not feel like mine or hers. The table looked different now. Or maybe I did.
Chapter 38: The Table
On Thanksgiving morning, I woke in my own small apartment ten minutes away, and for a moment I lay in bed listening to the quiet and feeling the particular loneliness of a holiday morning spent alone. The apartment was small — one bedroom, a kitchen I could cross in four steps — but it was mine, and I had chosen it, and most days that was enough. On Thanksgiving morning, though, I missed the noise of a full house the way you miss a tooth.
Then I got up, showered, dressed in the sweater Margaret had given me for my birthday, and drove to Cedar Bluff with a bag of rolls and a bottle of wine, and the loneliness evaporated somewhere around the third traffic light.
Margaret was already in the kitchen when I arrived, fully dressed, her hair done, an apron over her good blouse. "You're late," she said, which was untrue — I was twenty minutes early — and handed me a paring knife. "The turkey's in. Now we wait, and while we wait, you can tell me if you think the table looks right."
We went into the dining room together. The table was set exactly as it had been the night before: seven settings, the good silverware, the glasses catching the morning light. Margaret stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, surveying it the way a general surveys a battlefield.
"It looks right," I said.
"It looks right," she agreed. "The extra chair doesn't look strange, does it? It doesn't look like we're expecting someone who isn't coming?"
"It looks like we're ready for whoever comes," I said. "Which is what you said."
"Well." She adjusted one fork by a quarter of an inch. "That's what I meant."
Eleanor arrived at eleven with a casserole dish and a bottle of wine and no invitation, because Eleanor had not needed an invitation to Margaret's table in twenty years. "I brought the sweet potatoes," she announced, setting the dish on the counter. "And before you say anything, Margaret Keller, I know you didn't ask for sweet potatoes, but your table has room and my sweet potatoes are better than your green beans, and Diane's green beans are — " she glanced at me — "adequate."
"My green beans are fine," I said.
"They're adequate," Eleanor repeated, patting my arm. "There's no shame in adequate."