I held the back room at the Legion hall for three hours on my sixty-third birthday, five plates, five chairs still EMPTY — and then a man in a leather vest came in with a folded paper with my name on it.
“I want a table nobody can find a seat at,” he said, back when we had two kids and a bad roof.
We had five in nine years, and then the noise got to be TOO MUCH for him.
He met a woman on a message board for old motorcycles, and packed one duffel.
He found himself. I found the NIGHT SHIFT.
Five kids. One mortgage.
I stocked the dairy cooler before dawn and mopped the clinic after supper.
I learned to solder a pipe joint and stretch one pork roast over four suppers.
I let a cracked molar go two years so Yvonne could take the band trip to Rexburg.
Nothing I bought for myself was ever FULL PRICE.
Birthdays I never cheapened, scratch cakes every time, and whoever set the table got the bowl.
One day they would ADD IT UP, I told myself.
They grew, which is the whole point of them.
Trade school. Shift work. A wedding in April nobody could move.
“Maybe next month,” Terrence said, four Marches running.
So this year I asked for one thing, by phone, in my own voice.
“No gifts. NOTHING. Just sit down at the table,” I said.
I made Loretta’s tamale pie and Marvin’s cobbler with too much nutmeg, and pressed a tablecloth I had not used since their father left.
One hour. Two. Three.
Nobody came.
I sat at the head of it and cried into a napkin I ironed that morning.
Then boots on the step.
A man of about sixty stood in the doorway with a gray beard and a patch on his vest, four bikes idling in the lot behind him.
“Are you Doreen?” he said, and he took his gloves off.
“They asked me to bring this before you heard it ANY OTHER WAY,” he said.
He held out the paper, folded twice, my name on it in Yvonne’s handwriting.
And the first line took my hands away from me. ⬇️
Hollis takes his gloves off
Mom, we are at St. Alphonsus with Terrence.
I read it standing. I did not sit down and I did not put the paper on the table, because the table was the thing I had been sitting at for three hours and I was done with it.
The rest of the note was four lines. Terrence went down on Highway 20 at four that afternoon. Yvonne was behind him and stopped. Loretta was already driving up from Idaho Falls when Yvonne wrote it. Nobody had a phone with any battery left and nobody wanted me to hear it from a machine.
The man’s name was Hollis. He said it once and then did not say anything else for a while.
I asked him if Terrence was alive. He said yes. I asked him what alive meant and he said a leg and a collarbone and a night of them watching him, and that the hospital would tell me better than he could.
I got my purse off the chair. My keys were under the cobbler dish and I had to move the dish to get them, and my hands did that fine, and everything above my wrists was gone somewhere else.
Hollis was still in the doorway.
“You’re not sitting down,” I said.
“No, ma’am.”
“Who called you,” I said.
“Not them,” he said.
The tablecloth drawer
I rented that room in June.
I drove over on a Tuesday between the cooler and the clinic, still in the freezer coat, and the man at the Legion desk wanted a hundred and ninety dollars to hold the back room for a September evening. He said most people put it on a card.
I paid cash. I had it folded in the coat pocket in twenties because that is how I have carried money since 1998, and he counted it twice and gave me a receipt with a carbon under it.
That was three months of not fixing the dryer.
I wanted a room they could not eat and leave in twenty minutes. My kitchen is where they stand up. There is a door in my kitchen and it is eleven feet from the table, and every one of my children knows exactly how many steps that is.
The tablecloth is in the drawer under the good towels. It came from Wendell’s mother, it is heavy, and I had not put it on anything since the March he left.
He left with one duffel. That is the whole picture I have of it. He set it by the door the night before like a man going to a job site, and in the morning it was gone and so was he, and the note he left was about the insurance card.
He met her on a message board for old motorcycles. British ones. He was on it for months before her — nights, in the chair, with the laptop hot on his knees, telling me the price of a fender he was never going to buy.
I ironed that cloth on the second of September and put it back in the drawer to keep the fold sharp.
Then I went to work.
Highway 20
St. Alphonsus is an hour and ten if you drive it like a person.
Terrence had a leg in a frame and his mouth was dry and the first thing he said to me was that the bike was fine, which it was not, and then he said sorry about tonight, and he meant the birthday, and I told him to shut his mouth.
Yvonne was in the hall with her coat still on. Loretta got there at ten. Marvin came at eleven with a gas-station sandwich he did not eat. Everett called from Pocatello and then drove down anyway and got in at one in the morning.
Five of them. In a hallway. On my birthday.
Pam’s phone
I stepped out at midnight to call Pam at the clinic and give up my shift, because I had a shift at five and I had never once called off.
Pam said she already had it covered.
I said I know, I’m telling you now, and she said no, Doreen, it’s been covered since last week. Somebody called and asked me to take you off the fourth and the fifth.
I asked her who.
She said a woman. She said the woman knew my badge number.
I stood in a parking garage stairwell and could not think of a single person alive who knows my badge number.
Four Marches
Yvonne was on the bench outside when I came back. She had that look she gets when she has decided to say a thing.
I asked her why Terrence never came in March. Four Marches. Every year the same sentence out of him.
“He was at Dad’s,” Yvonne said. “All four of them.”
The account name
Hollis came to the hospital at seven in the morning with coffee in a cardboard tray and a manila envelope under his arm.
He is not in a club that rides for show. It is eleven men in Rexburg who fix each other’s bikes and pull people out of ditches on Highway 20, and Terrence has been the youngest of them for six years, and I did not know that either.
He said Terrence asked him to bring the envelope. He said Terrence asked him twice, once before the surgery and once after, so he figured it was not the drugs talking.
Inside was a printout. Nine pages, stapled at the corner.
A bank statement, one line highlighted, and the same line highlighted on eight more pages, one for each year.
BRITISH IRON FORUM — SUB — $15.00. Then twenty, further down the years.
The account it came out of was mine. My old debit card, the credit-union one from before the divorce, the one I stopped using and never closed because closing it wanted a trip downtown in the middle of a weekday.
The forum handle on the top of the last page was not Wendell’s name.
It was mine. My maiden name. Doreen Skaggs, and under it, member since 2017, and a little grey line that said thanks for nine years.
He met her on my card. Those last months he talked to her at night in my chair, and for nine years the money came out under the name I had before he ever met me.
Fifteen dollars a month. Then twenty. My name.
The duffel
Wendell came at nine.
He came in through the double doors with the same duffel. Green, one strap gone and replaced with a dog lead, the same bag from the morning by the door, and I have not seen it in nine years and I knew the sound of the buckle before I turned around.
He had a woman with him who stayed by the vending machines and did not come closer.
He started talking before he got to us. He said he’d driven from Twin, he said he’d have come sooner if anyone had called him, he said he’d been trying to get all five of them in one room for the better part of a year and it takes a thing like this, and wasn’t that a hell of a thing.
He said he had brought Terrence’s spare boots. He held up the duffel like a receipt.
I put the nine pages in his hands.
He looked at them for a while. Longer than a man looks at something he doesn’t understand.
“That’s an old account,” he said.
Loretta took a page off the top. Then Marvin took one. Yvonne did not take one, and that told me the rest of it.
Wendell said the card was joint, which it was not. He said fifteen dollars, Doreen, fifteen dollars, and then he said it again with his hand out, and then he said that if I wanted to talk about money we could talk about the ten years he paid the mortgage on a house he did not sleep in, which was four years, and Everett said the number out loud from the wall.
He said he never hid anything from anybody.
Marvin asked him, in front of the nurses’ station, what he told them every March.
Wendell said he told them their mother was a hard woman to sit down with.
Yvonne put her page on the chair.
“I told him you’d never look,” Yvonne said. “I was the one who said it.”
She said she’d been telling him that since she was twenty-two, because it was easier than telling him no, and she wanted me to hear it from her before her brothers said it kinder.
Wendell picked the duffel back up. He asked if somebody could take the boots in to Terrence.
Nobody moved. He set it down and left it there, and the woman by the vending machines went out the doors ahead of him.
The bag sat in the middle of the waiting room until a nurse asked whose it was.
“Nobody’s,” Loretta said.
September, the same room
I went back to the Legion on the eighteenth for my deposit.
The man at the desk had it in an envelope with my name spelled right. He said they’d cleaned the room, and then he said, well, mostly, and gave me the key.
The tamale pie was gone and the cobbler dish was washed and stacked. The tablecloth was still on the table, five plates still where I set them, because nobody who works there was going to be the one to fold up another person’s good cloth.
I had a hundred and ninety dollars in an envelope in my coat pocket and Terrence in a chair by the door with the leg out straight, because he wanted the ride and Loretta drove him and he cannot do stairs yet.
I started at the far corner, the way you do, walking the cloth in toward the middle.
Terrence knocked his knuckle on the table.
“Leave it out,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who has been setting a table for people who keep saying next month.
If you’re in the mood for more stories about things that linger, check out The Building on Sedalia Pike Was Page Six of Nine Years, or perhaps The Card Was in a Library Book Warren Never Opened for a tale about secrets kept. For something with a bit more of a somber tone, you might appreciate The Number My Mother Paid a Gravedigger to Keep for Twenty-Two Years.
