Frankenplot: "He Did Fine" (2)

The cobbler went around to the right.

Peach, out of jars her mother had put up in July, in a dish with a chip on the handle that had been chipped a long time. The spoon in it was too big for it. Everything on that table was the wrong size for what it was in, because the right pieces were in a cabinet nobody opened.

Wes served himself a small amount, the way a man does when he doesn't know how many people the dish has to cover.

The refrigerator came on.

It was the loudest thing in the house, and when it kicked off eleven minutes later it was louder still.

Her brother had put both hands flat on the table. He was thirty-one years old and he had a job with a phone company and he was looking at his own hands the way a man looks at a dog that has been told to stay.

Wes ate his cobbler.

He was good at this. That was the thing about him. He had sat in a tree in November for four hours at a stretch since he was nine years old, and he had learned a long time ago that a body that wants to move can be told no, and that the telling gets easier after the first twenty minutes.

He ate slowly. He set his spoon down between bites. When the dish came back around he looked at it, and looked at how much was left, and did not take more.

Her aunt got up and brought the meal in.

It came in backward. Ham first, because ham was the end of it. Then the beans, then the potatoes, then the slaw, then the rolls, which were cold by then and which nobody was going to eat, and finally the chow chow, which had not been opened, and which her aunt set down in the middle of the table with the lid still sealed and the buggy facing out.

Wes looked at it.

Then he looked at her, and his face did a small thing, and he looked back at the jar.

She put her fork down.

He reached for the jar, and turned the lid, and it gave with the sound a new jar gives, and he took a spoonful the size a person takes of something they have never had, and he passed it left.

Her uncle took some. Her mother took some. It went around the whole table and came back with maybe a third of it gone, and not one person had made a face, and Wes put it down next to his plate where he could see it.

He had been carrying that jar since Asheboro.

The clock over the stove was the kind that ticks. Nobody in that house had heard it in years.

---

The place at the head of the table had ham on it.

Her aunt had served it. She had served it the way she served everybody, without looking at it, the same two slices, and then she had sat down.

Wes had watched her do it.

He had watched the whole thing from the beginning, the chair, the squaring, the plate, and he had not said anything, because nobody was saying anything, and he was not a man who needed things explained twice.

Now he looked at the plate.

The ham was on it. The beans had not gone that way. The potatoes had not gone that way. The slaw had stopped at her mother and turned around.

He waited. He gave it a while.

Then he picked up the bowl of beans and leaned out over the corner of the table and spooned some onto the plate at the head, and set the bowl back, and went and got the potatoes and did the same thing, and squared the potatoes up beside the ham where they were not touching, which is how you do it for somebody who does not like their food to touch.

He sat back down.

Her mother had gone very still with a roll in her hand.

Her brother's ears had gone the color of the jar lid.

Wes tucked his napkin a little further into his lap and picked up his fork and waited, like a man who has done what needed doing and is prepared to wait for whatever comes next.

Nobody had told him about the potatoes.

Nobody alive at that table had told him about the potatoes.

---

There is a thing a person does with their hand under a table when they cannot do anything with their face. She did it. Her knuckles went into her own knee hard enough to bruise, and stayed there, and nothing happened above the tablecloth at all.

Her coat was on the hook by the door, sixteen feet away, with the key in the pocket.

She had taken it off her ring at six-forty that morning, sitting on the edge of the bed with her boots already on, and she had put it in the coat because the coat was what she would be wearing when she did it, and she had spent the drive down thinking about when. After the plates. Before the pie. In front of her mother, was the thing, in front of all of them, because he would want that and because she wanted to watch her mother's face when he got it.

She had not thought one time about the supper.

She had told him in the parking lot and told him again in the car and had not thought about it once for herself.

Wes reached over and moved the salt closer to the head of the table.

"Wes."

It came out of her at a normal volume. It sat in that room like a dropped pan.

Her mother's chin came up. Her uncle turned his whole head. Her aunt did not move at all, which was worse than the other two together.

And Wes looked up, and smiled at her — she had said his name, at a table, in front of her family — and he raised his eyebrows at the ham and gave her a small nod, meaning: this is good.

Then he went back to eating.

She had spent it. That was all. It was gone and she had nothing for it.

---

Her uncle finished before anybody.

He always did. He was a man who ate like the food was a task on a list, and he had been the first one done at that table for sixty years, and on any other night he would have pushed back, and put his plate in the sink, and gone out to the carport for the one cigarette a week his doctor did not know about.

He put his fork across the plate. He put his napkin beside it. He got his hands on the arms of the chair and stood.

Then he stepped back from the table without turning, and took a step, and another one, feeling for the doorway with his heel.

He was seventy-two and his knees were shot and he went slow.

Wes watched him go.

He watched the whole way, over his own shoulder, turned in his chair as far as the chair would let him, and his face while he watched was not a face he had made yet that night. His jaw had come forward a little. He had stopped chewing.

Her uncle got to the doorway and got through it and was gone up the hall, backward, one hand on the wall.

Wes turned around to the front again.

He sat there for a second with his hands on either side of his plate.

Then he picked up his fork and went on eating, and his shoulders had come down maybe an inch from where they had been, and he did not look at anybody, and he did not look at her.

He had decided something. She could not tell what.

---

The house made the noises a house makes. The heat came on in the floor registers. Something dropped in the yard, a pine cone off the big one by the ditch, and rolled a little on the carport roof and stopped.

Her mother ate.

Her brother ate, badly.

Her aunt had not touched her plate in some time. Her aunt was looking at the tablecloth about eight inches in front of her own plate, at nothing, at the weave of it, and one of her hands had come up off the table and was at her collarbone, flat, the way you hold yourself when you are about to be told something over the telephone.

And then the room smelled like cherry cough drops and hairspray.

It came all at once and it was not faint. It was the smell of a purse being opened. It was the smell of the front seat of a Buick in 1994 and of a coat closet and of a woman's neck when you are small and being held, and there was not one thing in that kitchen that could have made it, not the ham, not the cobbler, not the candle nobody had lit.

Her mother stopped with her fork halfway.

Her brother's eyes came up.

Her aunt made a sound through her nose, very small, once.

The chair at the head of the table took weight. It did not scrape or rock. It settled, the way a chair settles, the wood of it letting out one soft complaint and then holding, and the cushion on it went down and stayed down.

Nobody at that table was breathing except Wes.

Wes was eating his beans.

He got another forkful and put it in and chewed it and looked around at the five of them sitting there frozen with their food in front of them, and whatever he read in it, he read it as something about him, because he set his fork down and touched his mouth with his napkin and checked his shirt front for a spill.

There wasn't one.

He looked at her, and his eyebrows went up, just slightly, just for her, asking the only question a man can ask without speaking.

Am I doing all right?

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