Chapter 29: The Table
A year after the discovery β Laura had marked it on the kitchen calendar before anyone could decide whether marking it was morbid β Ethan set a long table in his yard.
It was not one table, in the end. It was his workbench top laid across sawhorses, plus Laura's folding table, plus Pete's card table, all of them run together under a line of mismatched cloths and unified by Mason jars of whatever was blooming. The kids β Laura's two, pink-cheeked and ravenous from an afternoon of being made to help β strung a drooping line of paper lanterns from the maple to the fence post. Nobody plugged them in until dusk, which was the rule Laura announced and then broke herself, early, because they were pretty.
Pete came with a cooler and a story about a gate he'd hung wrong in 2014 that he was still confessing to at parties. Dana Ruiz came off duty, out of uniform, in a blue dress with her hair down, and Ethan did a small double-take that she registered and mercifully pretended not to. Grace Tillinghast brought a casserole and a three-ring binder labeled SUPPER, which contained, she explained, her mother's recipes and absolutely no township business whatsoever, a claim nobody tested. Henry Osei sent his regrets and a bottle of wine with a card that read, in an archivist's perfect hand: For the record β enjoy.
And Marge came up the walk at six o'clock carrying a pie with both hands, like an offering and like an ordinary dessert, in the deliberate way of a woman who had decided before leaving her house that it was going to be both and neither.
"Apple," she announced. "From my tree. Which is older than everybody here and has opinions about all of us."
Ethan had worried β they had all privately worried, in their separate kitchens β about where she would sit, and whether the middle of the table would feel like a witness stand. It was Laura who solved it without discussing it, simply by pulling out the chair beside her own, midway down, in the thick of everything, and saying, "Marge. Here. I need you where you can reach the potatoes and be reached." And Marge sat down in the middle of it all β between Laura and Pete, across from the kids β and was handed things, and handed things on, and argued with Pete about whether a crust should ever contain lard, and was, for stretches of minutes at a time, visibly and entirely just a neighbor at a table.
Pete had smoked a brisket with the solemnity of a man defusing something. Laura's potato salad vanished in the first pass. The kids ate corn standing up, buttered to the elbows, wholly unbothered by history.
There were toasts, because Pete insisted on toasts and could not be outvoted. To the house, Pete said, raising a jar of lemonade with ceremony. To the street, Grace added. To good fences β Dana said it, straight-faced, and then, at the explosion of laughter, permitted herself a grin β and good neighbors, which was the part of the saying everybody always forgot to quote.
Then it quieted, the way a table does, in the blue hour when the lanterns came into their own and the plates were mostly done. Laura stood with her glass. She had not planned it; Ethan could tell, because Laura planned everything and had planned this evening down to the seating, and he could watch her understand, in real time, that something needed saying and that she had been elected by nobody but the moment.
"To Mick," she said. Her voice held. "Who I never got to know, and somehow got to know. Who kept the receipts." A breath went around the table β not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, the two things trading places in several throats at once. "He wrote it all down, when writing it down was the only useful thing anybody did. So." She raised the glass a little higher. "To the uncle who did the paperwork. May we all be so stubborn about the truth."
"To Mick," the table said, in its several voices, and drank, and then β because grief handled honestly has always had this property β they were laughing within the minute, really laughing, the kids demanding to know why everyone was laughing and crying at the same time and being told, truthfully, that grown-ups were just like that sometimes.
Marge, when Ethan glanced down the table, was wiping her eyes with the corner of her napkin and smiling into it at the same time.
"You all right?" he mouthed.
She nodded, and mouthed back: "Staying."
She stayed until the lanterns were the brightest things on the street, and she helped carry dishes in, and Ethan walked her home along the fence line in the dark, the two porches lit ahead and behind them like something the evening had decided to frame.