Chapter 29: The Table
They put three tables together end to end in the middle of the Blue Plate and covered them with the good cloths, the ones Ruth kept in the office closet for occasions she would not name in advance, and by six o'clock on that Saturday in May the diner held more people than it held on a Sunday after church.
It was a year, give or take, since the deed had changed hands and the lot had become Ruth's in law as it had always been hers in fact. She had not wanted a party about it. Parties about paperwork embarrassed her. But Dale had pointed out that a year was a year, and Sal had pointed out that he had been saving a ham for something, and Megan had pointed out that if Ruth didn't let people mark it, they'd mark it anyway in the parking lot. Ruth had surrendered, outvoted by love.
The club came in their good shirts. The regulars came in their Sunday ones. Ruth's niece came down from South Bend with a pie safe and two teenagers who had been briefed, clearly, on the volume of the company. Hannah drove in from Indianapolis with Eli asleep for the last forty miles of it, arriving with a drawing in his fist for his grandfather โ a motorcycle, unmistakable, with a rider whose beard took up half the page.
"That's you," Eli explained. "The beard is the biggest part. Mom said."
"It is accurate," Walt said gravely, and put the drawing in his shirt pocket, where it stayed all night.
They sat Walt at the head of the table. This was Dale's doing, and there was no escape; the head of the table had been left open with the inevitability of weather, and sixty years at the edge of things had not prepared him to be put at the center of them on purpose. He sat down awkward and happy, the way a dog sits in a boat, and Hannah, on his right, reached over without thinking about it and straightened his collar, and then looked faintly surprised at her own hand, and he looked faintly surprised too, and neither of them said anything, and it was one of the best moments of the evening.
Sal fed them like a man defusing something delicate. Ham, and scalloped potatoes, and green beans with the good fat in them, and rolls Ruth made twice a year and wouldn't write the recipe down for. Eli ate two rolls and a geological quantity of potatoes and regarded the table from the height of a booster seat like a small king reviewing a parade. The talk went the way talk goes when nobody at the long table is performing: loud at Dale's end, where an argument about carburetors achieved the status of theology; quiet at Ruth's end, where the women were giving the new clinic nurse a thorough review.
When the ham was done and the coffee had come around twice, Dale stood, hit a glass with a spoon, and said the thing he'd plainly been rehearsing.
"A year ago this lot belonged to a landlord in Fort Wayne," he said. "Now it belongs to the woman who earned it forty years running. The club's got a scholarship with a good man's name on it. And the man at the head of this tableโ" he looked at Waltโ "is going to make a toast, because he's the only one here who hasn't thanked anybody out loud yet, and we're all getting old waiting."
Laughter. Applause. Walt stood up slowly, a big man unfolding, holding the coffee mug in front of him, and looked down the length of the table โ at Dale and Sal, at Ruth, at Megan, at Hannah, whose shoulder was already making its small adjustment.
He had never been able to say the large things. He had spent sixty years letting his hands do the talking, and the words came out the way his feelings usually did: in the smallest number that would hold them.
"Everything broken can be looked at," he said. "Most of it can be fixed."
Eleven words. He sat down. The table made a sound like a held breath letting go, and Hannah laughed and cried at the same time, quietly, into her napkin, and Ruth, who never cried, wiped her eyes on the good tablecloth and dared anybody to mention it.
Dessert was pie, two kinds. Eli did not see the dessert. Somewhere between the toast and the coffee's third round he had gone down like a felled sapling, sideways against his mother's shoulder, one hand still fisted in the hem of her sleeve, asleep with the total completeness of a five-year-old in a room full of people who love him โ while the talk went on around him and his grandfather sat at the head of the table in the warm noise of it, a man among his repairs, all of them holding.