The Wanting Table

THIRTEEN

The Wanting Table

Okay everybody. Finally, the last story in the book. Hope you enjoyed the ride. I fell in love with these characters and have written several more books. So far, no end in sight for this series, in fact, I have written a spinoff already called Pixel

Four months on, the hook by the door holds the following: a torn red vest, a lanyard that says VISITOR, my mother's cardigan, a tote bag, a second tote bag, a set of keys to a rambler in Vancouver, and a lead.

The lead belongs to a dog that is not ours.

Her name is Biscuit and she belongs to the man in 4B, whose name turns out to be Gerald, and who had a knee replacement in September and could not walk her for five weeks, and who now simply assumes -- the way you assume the sun -- that at seven in the morning a nine-hundred-year-old creature of appetite will knock on his door and take his beagle round the block.

"He hasn't asked me since October," Ash said, when I raised it. "That's the point, Cora. He's stopped asking. He just leaves the lead on the handle."

"That's called being taken advantage of."

"That's called being relied upon," said Ash, with the dignity of a man who has waited nine centuries to be inconvenienced by a neighbor.

He is also, still, at Costco every Saturday at one-thirty. Renata still cannot hire him. Renata has stopped bringing it up, and at the summer staff barbecue she put him down as a plus-one, which Deloris reported to me personally, at the sample cart, in the manner of a woman relaying a papal decree.

Above the hook, framed, is a wax rubbing of a floor stone in Northumberland.

We do not talk about it much. It's just there, the way a thing on a wall is there. Sometimes I catch him standing in front of it with his coat half on, and I don't say anything, and eventually he finishes putting his coat on.

✦ ✦ ✦

Thanksgiving is at Margot's. It has been Thanksgiving at Margot's since a text message in June, and my sister has had four months to prepare, and I would like the record to show that I warned everyone.

"She's laminated the place cards," Priya tells me on the phone, on the Tuesday.

"Of course she has."

"Cora, there are twenty-two people."

"How many did she invite?"

"Fourteen," says Priya. "The rest is drift."

✦ ✦ ✦

The night before, we are in my kitchen at eleven o'clock making two pies neither of us was assigned, because Margot's spreadsheet gave us "a salad" and Ash took personal offense.

"A salad."

"It's a supporting dish--"

"Cora, I have been carving things and tending fires since the Anarchy. Your sister has assigned me lettuce."

"You've been assigned lettuce because the last time you cooked for eleven people you started a conversation with Aunt Deb about her marriage that is still going on."

"That was August--"

"It's still going on, Ash. She's living with her sister."

He concedes the point by putting more butter in something than the recipe permits.

And at some point after midnight, with flour on the counter and the radio going and a pie that is definitely going to be under-set, he stops and looks at me for slightly too long.

"What."

"Nothing," he says.

"You're doing the face."

"I'm allowed a face."

"Say it."

"I've been to a great many houses on the fourth Thursday in November," he says. "Some of them were very fine. I have never once been to one where anyone was expecting me at four o'clock." He goes back to the butter. "That's all. It's not a large thing."

It is, obviously, an extremely large thing, and I take him to bed and demonstrate the extent of my agreement in a manner that leaves the pies unattended for a considerable period and results in exactly the setting problem I predicted.

✦ ✦ ✦

Here is the guest list, because it matters later.

My mother. Margot and Priya. Uncle Ray, with a phone containing four hundred photographs of a boat. Aunt Deb, unaccompanied, radiant. Cousin Denise and her husband, reconciled since June by means nobody has ever fully explained and which I have privately attributed to a coat closet. Priya's parents. Priya's grandparents, fifty-two years married, who behaved so memorably at the engagement party that Margot has seated them at the far end near a door.

Two of Margot's neighbors, because drift.

And Peter Halloran, of Vancouver, Washington, who has been coming to Sunday dinner at my mother's house since August, and who arrives at half past two carrying a pie in a tin that belonged to his wife, and stands in the doorway holding it and says, "Ruth's tin. She'd have wanted it in a proper kitchen."

My mother takes it off him and says, "It'll be in a proper kitchen," and that is the entire exchange, and I have to go and look at the coats for a minute.

✦ ✦ ✦

Dinner is at four. Twenty-two people. Three tables shoved into a line and covered with two tablecloths that do not match, which Margot has decided is "eclectic."

Ash carves.

He was not assigned carving. He was assigned lettuce. But Margot's designated carver is Uncle Ray, and Uncle Ray started on the boat at ten past three, and by half past three the situation at the sideboard required intervention.

I want to describe what it looks like when a nine-hundred-year-old creature of appetite carves a turkey in a suburban dining room, because I don't think I will ever see anything funnier. He does it with total silence and total attention, the way he does everything small. He has taken his jacket off. His sleeves are shoved up. There is a line.

"He's very good at that," says Priya's mother.

"He's had practice," I say.

"What is it you do?" she asks him.

And Ash -- who has said consulting to every stranger who has ever asked him that, who said it to Renata and to Trevor at a membership desk and to Aunt Deb at a party in June -- puts down the knife, and thinks about it, and says:

"I work Saturdays at the Costco on Halsey."

"Oh! Which department?"

"Samples," says Ash. "With Deloris."

And that's it. That's all of it. Nobody at that table finds it remarkable, and he picks the knife back up, and I stand in my sister's dining room and have to put my hand on the back of a chair.

✦ ✦ ✦

There is one bad moment. There's always one, and I've stopped being surprised by it.

It's around the second glass, and one of Margot's neighbors -- a man, mid-fifties, the kind who talks across people -- says something to his wife about her plate. Just a small thing. The size of the portion. Said lightly, in front of eleven people, in the voice men use when they have been doing it for thirty years and it has stopped being a decision.

And the whole end of the table hears it and does the thing everyone does, which is nothing.

I look at Ash.

He has gone still. Not the stillness that means he's about to be pulled. The other one -- the one where the room gets a fraction colder and everybody notices without knowing why, and I know, with total certainty, that he can see the entire architecture of that marriage laid open like a floor plan.

He could end it in a sentence. One true sentence, out loud, at a Thanksgiving table.

He picks up the gravy.

"Sorry -- could I trouble you?" he says to the man, pleasantly. "I've been trying to reach that for ten minutes and I'm too proud to ask twice."

The man laughs. The moment goes. The wife looks at Ash for about a second and a half longer than she needs to.

Later, in the kitchen, I say, "You wanted to."

"Very much."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I'd have done it for me," he says, scraping a plate. "Not for her. She's the one who'd still be in the car on the way home." He shrugs. "It's not my house and it's not my marriage and I'd have been the most honest man in the room for about four seconds and she'd have paid for it for a fortnight. That's the whole calculation. It's never got any easier."

✦ ✦ ✦

At six, Margot stands up and taps a glass, and Priya says "oh no" with great affection, and my sister produces the binder.

Twenty-two people. Two mismatched tablecloths. A woman in a jumpsuit the color of a traffic cone holding a nine-pound laminated binder above her head like the Cup.

"Most of you," Margot says, "have been extremely rude about this binder."

"Here we go," says my mother.

"For four years--"

"Six," says Uncle Ray.

"--and I want to say, in front of everybody, that this year the binder was useful." She opens it to a tab I have not seen before, which is at the back, and which is labelled in silver Sharpie: RECOVERED.

I put down my fork.

"A hundred and nine," she says.

I hadn't known the number. I knew she was working on it; I knew about the market list and the emails and the woman at the fair and the four Saturdays she spent driving to addresses in three counties with a story about a wax recall. I did not know the number.

"A hundred and nine of two hundred and forty," Margot says, "which is forty-five percent, and I'm not finished, and next year it'll be more." She closes the binder. "That's the toast. The toast is: I made a mistake at my kitchen table, and I have spent five months undoing as much of it as one person can, and I would like everyone to know that I did it with tabs."

Twenty-two people who mostly do not know what she is talking about applaud a binder.

And at the far end of the table, next to my mother, Peter Halloran raises his glass and says, quite clearly, "To Margot's tabs," and I watch my sister's face do something I will keep.

✦ ✦ ✦

He gets called at 6:40, between the plates coming off and the pie going on.

I see it happen from four seats away -- the stillness, the emptying, the half-second where he looks for me and finds me. He gets one word out.

"Sorry," he says.

And the chair is empty.

Twenty-two people. Three tables. A room full of my family and Priya's family and two neighbors and a widower from Vancouver, and an empty chair with a napkin still folded on the seat.

Here's what happens next, and it takes about six seconds, and I have thought about it every day since.

Uncle Ray says, "Where'd he go?"

And my mother -- without looking up, without a flicker, buttering a roll -- says: "He's had a call. He does consulting."

"On Thanksgiving?"

"Well, that's the job, Ray," says Ellen Delaney.

And Margot stands up, and takes his plate, and covers it with a second plate, and puts it in the warming drawer. She doesn't announce it. She doesn't look at me. She does it the way you'd do it for anybody, and then she sits back down and asks Priya's father about his hip.

And Priya says, "Denise, pass the beans," and the table closes over the gap like water.

✦ ✦ ✦

I go outside anyway, because I'm still me.

It's cold. Margot's back step. The kitchen light coming through the door and the noise of twenty-two people behind it.

Peter comes out after about ten minutes with two cups of coffee and hands me one without asking, and stands there, and doesn't say anything for a while, which is a thing I have learned he does on purpose.

"February the ninth," he says eventually.

"I know."

"First one's coming. Christmas, then February." He drinks his coffee. "Your mother's put me down for both, which I didn't ask for and haven't argued about."

"She does that."

"She does." A pause. "He'll come back, you know."

"I know."

"No," Peter says, "I mean I've thought about it properly, and I'd like to say the thing rather than have you work it out in a car park." He turns the cup. "I sat in my house for five months and every single person I know was very kind to me and not one of them came back. They came once. You get a fortnight of casseroles and then you get a Christmas card." He shrugs. "He came back. He'd not been asked. He'd nothing to gain and he came back in a car, on a Sunday, with nowhere to be." He looks at me. "That's not a thing that gets pulled out of somebody. You can't summon that. There's no candle for that."

Behind us, through the door, somebody drops something and twenty-two people cheer.

"So he'll come back," says Peter. "That's all. I'd stop doing the arithmetic if I were you. It's the one bit that isn't in doubt."

✦ ✦ ✦

At 7:20 my phone lights up.

Twenty minutes. A woman in Gresham, alone, her first year without her mother. She lit it because she said the house was too quiet to be in.

Then:

I'm coming back. Don't let Ray near the carving.

Then, thirty seconds later:

Cora. Which door is the front one? I've never come to this house from outside.

✦ ✦ ✦

I want to describe this properly, because it's the last thing in this account and I have been trying to get it right for a month.

He does not appear in the room.

At 7:34 on Thanksgiving evening, at a house on a street in Southeast Portland, in a corner of a world with a hundred and thirty-one of my sister's candles still loose in it and fourteen hundred brass stamps sold and no mechanism anywhere to make any of it stop, a nine-hundred-year-old creature of appetite walks up a garden path from the street like a man arriving at a dinner party.

And knocks on the front door.

Twenty-two people are in that house. There is a line for pie. Somebody's grandchild is under the table.

And Margot -- who made him, who has spent five months undoing it, who has a tab in a binder labelled RECOVERED and a wax rubbing framed in her sister's hallway -- hears it first, and gets up, and opens the door, and says:

"There you are. We kept you a plate."

✦ ✦ ✦

We're the last to leave, because we always are now, and because there were four hundred boat photographs and Uncle Ray had not been through them chronologically.

In the car, Ash is quiet for about six blocks.

"She kept a plate," he says.

"She did."

"In a drawer. There's a drawer that keeps things warm." He looks out of the window. "Nine hundred years, Cora. I've been in a great many houses on that particular Thursday and I have stood in a corner of every single one of them being the thing that turned up, and tonight I knocked on a door and a woman in an orange jumpsuit told me there was a plate in a drawer."

"That's Margot's warming drawer. She's very proud of it. Do not get her started on the warming drawer."

"I'd like to get her started on the warming drawer."

"I know you would."

He is quiet another block.

"They didn't ask where I'd gone."

"Ray asked."

"Ray asked once, and your mother handled it, and then nobody asked again, and the food kept moving." He shakes his head slowly. "I've spent my whole existence arriving in rooms as an event. Tonight I was -- Cora, tonight I was a person who stepped out to take a call."

"Yeah."

"Do you know what that is?"

"Yeah," I say. "That's the whole thing. That's what you've been asking for since the first Tuesday."

✦ ✦ ✦

At home, the hallway light is on because we left it on, and the rubbing is on the wall above a hook with a dog lead on it.

He stops in front of it, the way he does.

HE CAME WHEN CALLED.

"You know what she got wrong," he says.

"Alice?"

"She only had the one night." He's still looking at it. "It was the truest thing she knew about me and it was accurate and she cut it into a floor and it's outlasted everything else in that county." He turns round. "But she only had the one night, so she wrote down the part where I arrive."

"And?"

"And it's the least interesting thing about me," says Ash. "It's the only thing that isn't up to me. Anybody with fourteen ninety-nine and a lighter can have that." He takes his coat off and puts it on the hook, on top of the vest and the lanyard and the lead and my mother's cardigan. "I'd like something on a stone that says I stayed."

I go over and put my hands on his face, which requires reaching up, and which I intend to go on doing until I am seventy-eight and have opinions about load-bearing walls in a nursing home.

"You've got something better than a stone," I tell him.

"Have I."

"You've got a warming drawer."

And he laughs -- the unguarded one, the one nobody designed -- in a hallway on Twenty-Eighth with bad water pressure, on the fourth Thursday in November, in the fifth month of the rest of it.

✦ ✦ ✦

The candle is in the drawer in my kitchen, under the takeout menus, where it has been since the night I lit it.

Because I did light it. That's the founding fact of all of this and I'm not going to go coy about it on the last page: one Tuesday in June, two glasses in, a woman who believed in load-bearing walls and the Oxford comma and nothing else whatsoever, putting a lighter to a wick because her sister had annoyed her.

Eleven seconds. Everything since.

I have put a flame to his name twice in my life. That night, by accident, wanting nothing off him. And once in a wet field in Northumberland, on purpose, knowing exactly what it took from him. I would spend the second one again tomorrow. I think about the first one most days.

I take it out sometimes and look at it. His name is on the top, pressed into a hundred percent soy by a woman with a double boiler and an Etsy account, and it is the ugliest, cheapest, most consequential object I have ever owned.

I am not going to light it a third time.

Not because it frightens me. Because the only thing that candle can do in all the world is make him arrive -- and arriving, it turns out, was always the least of him.

He's in the next room with a library book about pallet flow and a dog that isn't ours asleep on his feet, and at seven tomorrow morning a man called Gerald will leave a lead on a door handle without asking, and on Saturday at one-thirty a woman with a bad knee will look at a clock, and in February a widower in Vancouver is going to need somebody in his house who isn't kind for a fortnight.

Nobody's calling him.

He's just here.