Frankenplot: "He Did Fine" (3)

Nobody looked at the head of the table.

That was the thing she would keep. Five grown people in a bright kitchen with the light on over the stove, and not one of them turned a head six inches to the left, because it is possible to know where a thing is without looking at it, the way you know where a wasp is in a car.

She looked once.

The ham was gone off the plate. Or the ham had been moved and was under the potatoes, or it had never been two slices, or her aunt had put down one and she had counted wrong from across a table in a room where she had been holding her own knee hard enough to bruise.

Her mother would say later that the plate had been turned. Her brother would say the plate had not been turned, and that what he remembered was the glass, which had been full and then was not, except that nobody had poured the glass in the first place, so there was nothing in it to go.

The chow chow jar sat by Wes's plate with the buggy facing him.

The cushion stayed down.

---

She had been eleven in this kitchen on a night in August, sent in for a dish towel, and the room had been dark, and there had been somebody at the sink with their back to her, and she had said Mamaw and the person had not turned around, and she had gone back out to the porch and sat down with her cousins and eaten her ice cream.

Mamaw had been at the table on the porch the whole time. Everybody had seen her there.

She had never told anybody. Not because it frightened her. Because she had not been able to make a sentence out of it that did not sound like a made-up thing a child says, and by the time she was old enough to make the sentence she was old enough to know better than to.

That was the whole of it. She had built twenty years of doing what her grandmother asked on eight seconds in a dark kitchen.

---

Her aunt put both hands on the table.

She was fifty-eight years old. She had set that place eleven times. She had washed the plate and dried the plate and put the plate back in the cabinet nobody opened, eleven times, and she had told her own husband, in her own house, that she did it because her sister needed her to and for no other reason on this earth.

She pushed her chair back.

She stood up and she turned all the way around, square to the wall, her back to the table and to the chair at the head of it, and she walked out of that kitchen forward, like a person leaving a room.

Her heel caught the doorframe. She did not stop.

Down the hall, the front door opened and did not close, and the cold came up the hall and into the kitchen, and the flame in the stove pilot laid over sideways and came back up.

Her mother put her hand flat on the table, over the cloth, near the middle, and left it there.

Her brother was crying. He was doing it the way men do who have not done it since they were small, without any of his face involved, looking straight ahead at the window, tears coming down on both sides at once and his mouth in a line. He picked up his fork. He put food on it. He put the fork down.

Wes had seen his aunt go out. He had seen the hand. He had seen the crying.

He put his own napkin beside his plate and he waited, with his hands in his lap, for somebody to tell him what he had done.

---

The heat came on. The cold from the hall met it in the doorway and neither one won.

Her mother got up. She went out backward, and she did it badly, catching the chair leg and putting a hand down on the counter and going on, and she did not gather a single plate, which in that house was the same as a scream.

Her brother went after her, backward, fast, wiping his face with the heel of his hand as he went.

Which left the three of them, and the chair, and the pie that nobody was going to bring in.

She sat with her hands in her lap. Her knee had gone numb where she had been working it.

Wes waited a full minute. She counted it on the clock.

Then he decided the supper was over, because it was over, because half the table had left and the plates were cold and nobody was eating, and he was not going to sit there all night when there were things that needed doing.

He stood up.

She reached for him and did not get there.

He picked up his glass, which had sweet tea in it, and he turned to the head of the table and he raised it, the way a man raises a glass at a rehearsal dinner, not high, just off the cloth.

He said, "I know I'm new."

It was the first sentence spoken in that room in two hours and eleven minutes and it came out of him easy, in his ordinary voice, the voice he used at a parts counter.

"But I've been about as happy as I've ever been, sitting here tonight. And whatever you did, raising them up." He stopped. He was not good at talking and he knew it, and he went on anyway, which was the worst thing about him. "It took. It took real good. She's the best thing that ever happened to me. I wish I'd got to meet you."

He looked down at the chair.

"Anyway," he said. "Thank you for supper."

He drank some of the tea and set the glass down.

And nothing happened.

There was no cold, no sound, no shift in the chair, no smell but ham and the cold air from the hall. Whatever had been in the room did not answer him, then or ever, and she would spend a long time deciding what that meant, and would not settle it, and would go on not settling it in a hundred small ways for the rest of her life.

Wes turned and started stacking plates.

---

He did the dishes. Her aunt's car was gone from the yard by then and her mother had shut herself in the back bedroom and her brother was out under the carport with a cigarette he had bummed off the uncle, and Wes stood at that sink for forty minutes and washed everything in the house, including the pans that had been going since noon, and he got it all in the drainer and wiped the counters down and hung the rag over the faucet.

He looked for the right cabinet for the good dishes and could not find it and left them stacked on the counter.

Her uncle came through at the end and stood in the doorway and watched him finish and said, "Well."

"Yes, sir," Wes said.

Her uncle put his hand on Wes's shoulder for about a second and a half, which was more than he had ever done to anyone in that family, and then he went on out and started his truck.

---

She got her coat off the hook.

The key was in the right pocket where she had put it at six-forty that morning, and it was cold now, and she got her hand around it and stood there in the hall with her coat half on.

Wes was in the kitchen doorway with his own jacket over his arm, waiting on her, and he was looking back once at the table, at the setting at the head of it, and she watched him look at it, and she watched him decide to leave it alone.

She let go of the key and put her arm in the sleeve.

He got the light.

---

The Corolla started on the third try, which is what a dome light left on for three hours will do to a battery that is four years old, and neither one of them said anything about it, and she backed out onto 220 and got the heat going on high.

He was quiet most of the way to Asheboro. Not unhappy. Working on something.

Past the Citgo he said, "Did I do all right?"

Her hands were at ten and two.

"You did fine," she said.

He sat with that.

"I felt like I did all right," he said.

"You did."

He looked out the window at the dark going by. After a while he reached over and put his hand on her knee, on the one she had been working with her knuckles, and she let it stay there.

---

Weeks Later

The thing about her people is they don't put on. You go over there, ain't nobody trying to impress you. It's a little house and everything in it works or it don't and they're not going to apologize for it.

They don't make a show of it either, the supper. That's what got me. Her uncle told me flat out he thinks the whole thing's foolishness, and he was the one doing it the hardest. Seventy-two years old backing up down a hallway on bad knees. Because his mother asked him to. That's it. That's the whole reason.

And they set her a place. Plate, glass, the whole thing. Nobody explained it to me and nobody had to.

I'll tell you the part I keep thinking about. Nobody'd put anything on her plate but the ham. Beans never went that way, potatoes never went that way. And I sat there a good while waiting on somebody to do it, and it come to me: they can't. They can't do it. Eleven years and they still can't put food on her plate like she's sitting there.

So I did it. Somebody had to.

And, man. The whole table. I thought I'd stepped in it. I thought I had gravy down my front.

Eleven years of not being able to and I walk in off the road and do it.

I get emotional. I'm sorry. It was a good night.

I said a few words at the end. I'm not a talker. But I stood up and said my piece to her, to Mamaw, because it felt like somebody ought to, and I told her she did a good job with them, and I meant it.

She never said anything back. Her. She was real quiet the whole way home. She's like that when something gets to her.

No, I'm going to ask her. I got the ring already, it's in my truck, in the console, been in there since August.

I want to do it at the supper. Next year, at the table, in front of all of them. I know you can't talk. That's all right. I'll wait till the end and stand up like I did.

I've been working on what I'll say. I say it in the truck.

I want her grandmother in the room for it.

 

~End~