Two Extra Chairs

Eli mother had said the dinner would be small, and knowing her for thirty-some years, he brought extra chairs.

He carried four folding chairs up the front walk at nine o'clock on Monday morning, two under each arm, past a porch pumpkin she had carved with the grim precision of a woman who did not trust any face she hadn't drawn herself. The house was a narrow two-storey on a street two blocks over from Kesting Row. He had grown up in it. It still had the dent in the front hall wall where he'd learned to ride a bike indoors, and on every holiday of his life it had smelled like onions cooking in butter.

"Wow, you brought chairs," said his mother, from the kitchen. She didn't turn around.

"For the small dinner."

"The small dinner is all of six people."

"Then I brought four chairs for six people. I did the math on the way over."

"Put them in the basement."

"Ma."

"Put them in the basement, Eli, and then come here and tell me if this is too much turkey."

It was a turkey. It sat on the counter in a roasting pan the size of a canoe, bronze and enormous, with a thermometer sticking out of it like a flag on a conquered hill. Eli looked at it for a while.

"How many kilos?"

"Nine."

"For six people."

"It was the smallest they had."

"They had a five-kilo bird in the flyer. I saw it. It was on the front page."

"It looked lonely," said his mother, and began, with some force, to peel a potato. She was a short, broad, sharp-eyed woman in an apron that said KISS THE COOK, which she had bought for herself and which had never once, in Eli's opinion, been a joke. "Besides. You never know who turns up."

"Who's turning up? You said six. Me, you, Auntie Joy, Uncle Ray, Mr. Kerrigan from next door, and Bernadette from bingo."

"And whoever turns up."

"That's a guess, Ma. That's not a guest."

"Then it's a good thing I'm not the detective," said his mother. "Go get the butter tarts."

***

Eli had been dreading the butter tarts since the first of the month.

It wasn't the tarts. The tarts from the bakery on Verdun Street were the best in Old Millhaven, and possibly the province. It was the woman who made them. Mrs. Kowalczyk had a memory like a bear trap and a grudge that was twenty-two years old, and the grudge was about a butter tart, and Eli had apologized for it nine times, twice in writing, and had been told each time that he had said it with his mouth.

His mother knew all of this. She had placed the order under Auntie Joy's name.

"It's a coward's move," Eli told the empty sidewalk, and pushed open the bakery door.

The bell rang. The shop was warm and golden and loud with the noise of a long weekend, and the line ran almost to the street. Eli joined the end of it. He kept his head down, the way he did at a crime scene when he wanted to be mistaken for furniture.

It took eleven minutes. When he reached the counter, Mrs. Kowalczyk looked at him for a long moment over the tops of her glasses, and in that look he saw every one of the twenty-two years.

"Name?" she said.

"It's under Joy. My aunt."

"I know whose aunt." She vanished into the back and came out with a white box tied in string. She set it on the counter and did not let go of it. "Four dozen."

"Thank you."

"I put a few extra in."

Eli blinked. "Why?"

"Because it's a holiday," said Mrs. Kowalczyk, "and because I am a better person than you." She let go of the box. "Happy Thanksgiving, Detective."

"Happy Thanksgiving, Mrs. Kowalczyk."

"The one with the raisins is yours," she said. "I want you to think about it."

He did not know what that meant. He thought about it all the way home.

***

By one o'clock, the small dinner was not small.

Auntie Joy arrived first, with Uncle Ray and a lattice-top apple pie she carried in both hands like a bomb she had been asked to defuse. Mr. Kerrigan came over from next door, a retired bus driver of about eighty who wore a tie to everything and had one hearing aid, which he turned off when he was bored. Then came Bernadette from bingo, who had brought her son, who had brought his girlfriend, who had brought her father, who had brought a dish.

"It's a potluck," Eli's mother announced from the kitchen doorway, to a front hall that now held nine people. "I would never say it's a potluck. But everybody brought something."

"You said six."

"I said it would be small. Look at it." She waved a wooden spoon at the crowd. "It's small. It's cozy."

Eli's phone buzzed in his pocket. It was a text from his cousin Dee, who worked for a law firm downtown and therefore knew how to leave a situation. *Stuck in Calgary with the in-laws. Tell Auntie I'm sorry. Tell her I'm fine. DON'T tell her I said "stuck."*

He told his mother. His mother said Dee was going to give a full report on Tuesday, or she would hear about it at Christmas.

By two o'clock, there were three sweet potato casseroles. Nobody had planned this. They stood in a row on the dining room sideboard, each with a different topping, like three tiny rival kingdoms. One had marshmallows. One had pecans. One had, for reasons the owner declined to explain, crushed cornflakes.

By three o'clock, the power went out.

It went, as these things do, at the exact moment Eli's mother plugged in the electric roaster, which was already sharing a circuit with the stand mixer, the toaster oven, and a slow cooker of meatballs that nobody had asked for. There was a soft click, a long sigh from the refrigerator, and then the whole house went silent, and nine people stood in the kitchen holding things.

"Nobody move," said Mr. Kerrigan, from somewhere near the basement stairs. "I drove a bus for thirty-eight years. I know a blackout when I see one."

"It's three in the afternoon," said Eli. "There's sunlight."

"Not in the basement," said Mr. Kerrigan, with great dignity, and he went down the stairs with a flashlight he'd produced from inside his jacket like a magician.

It took twenty minutes and one low argument over which breaker was which. The lights came back. The refrigerator hummed again. Eli's mother, who had not moved once, said "Well," and handed him a potato peeler.

"Everyone take one thing off that plug," she said.

It tripped again at four, when Bernadette's son plugged in a phone charger. It tripped a third time at five, when, as far as anyone could tell, nobody had plugged in anything at all. Mr. Kerrigan said it was the house showing its age. Eli's mother said the house had been fine in 1987 and she was not going to take that kind of talk from a fuse box.

***

The food, meanwhile, was going wrong.

Nobody could say exactly how. The stuffing came out of the oven the colour and texture of a roof shingle. The gravy grew a skin. Uncle Ray's famous dinner rolls, from his father's recipe, rose in the pan to an impressive height and then collapsed all at once, like a small bridge. Auntie Joy's pie lattice slid sideways in the heat and settled, under the weight of its own filling, into something Eli's mother described, kindly, as "a hat."

The cat, a vast orange animal of no fixed age who belonged to the house and to nobody in particular, strolled through the kitchen at half past four with a dinner roll in his mouth and the air of someone leaving a bank.

"That one was mine," said Uncle Ray, watching him go.

"That one *was* yours," said Mr. Kerrigan.

The turkey was fine.

It sat in the middle of all that wreckage, bronze and shining and perfectly done, and when Eli's mother lifted the foil the whole kitchen went quiet for a second, out of respect. The skin crackled. The steam rose in one long slow curl. Even the cat came back to look.

"There," said his mother. She wasn't smug. She sounded like a woman who had just won a quiet argument with the universe. "That's how it's done."

***

At half past five, Eli set the table.

It took four tries. The dining table had been stretched to its full length with both leaves and a card table shoved against one end, with a bedsheet over the whole thing that his mother had ironed at seven that morning. He counted places. He counted guests. He counted chairs.

There were fourteen guests, and his mother had set sixteen places.

"You miscounted," he said.

"I did not."

"Fourteen people, Ma. I counted twice. There's two extra at the end."

"Always two extra," said his mother. She was smoothing a napkin beside the nearest plate, a habit her hands had without her. "My mother did it. Her mother did it. You set two more than you need, and you never take them away until the dishes are done."

"Why?"

"In case somebody turns up."

"Who?"

"That's what turning up means," said his mother. "You don't get told."

He looked at the two chairs. They were the good ones, the ones with cushions, set side by side at the window end of the table with their napkins folded and their forks laid straight. They looked ready. They looked patient. For a reason he couldn't have explained to anyone, they looked as if they had been waiting there long before he came in to count them.

The cat jumped up onto the nearer one and began to wash a paw.

"Not that one," said his mother, without turning around.

The cat looked at her. It was the look of a creature that respected nobody. Then it got down, slowly, and left the room.

"I did invite someone," Eli said at last.

His mother's hands went still. "Who?"

"A guy from work. Bishop. He said maybe."

"Maybe is a yes wearing a coat," said his mother. "Is he bringing anyone?"

"He doesn't have anyone to bring."

It came out flatter than he meant it to. His mother looked at him, the sharp, kind, unhurried look she had used on him since he was four years old, and said nothing at all. She only tapped the nearer chair twice with one finger.

"Then that's his," she said. "And the other one is for whoever."

***

He had asked on Friday, at the end of a long day, in the car outside the laundromat. He had done it badly. He'd said it like a joke so it wouldn't have to count, and Nate had said, "I'm not really a dinner person," and Eli had said, "Nobody is, that's why there's pie," and Nate had looked out the window for a while at the grey street and said, "Maybe."

That was all. Eli had texted him the address on Saturday night and gotten no answer. He had checked his phone eleven times on Sunday and four times that morning, and twice more in line at the bakery, with his head down.

He had a theory about Nate's weekends. The theory had a bottle in it. Somewhere around Sunday afternoon, Eli had decided that Thanksgiving was a good day to be wrong.

***

They sat down at six.

It was a loud table. It was the kind of table where nobody finished a sentence, because someone else was already telling a better one. Mr. Kerrigan gave a toast that went on for four minutes, took a long detour through the 1979 transit strike, and ended with the words "and that is why I am grateful for turkey." Bernadette's son tried to carve the bird, was gently overruled by Eli's mother, and handed the knife to Uncle Ray, who carved it like a man defusing something.

Then the breaker tripped for the fourth time, and the whole house went black, and fourteen people sat in the quiet with their forks in the air.

"Nobody move," said Mr. Kerrigan.

"Nobody is moving," said Eli's mother. "Somebody light a candle."

They lit eleven. By the glow of those, and one flashlight, and the open door of the fridge that somebody had propped to see by, they ate Thanksgiving dinner at a table the size of a small runway. The stuffing was a brick. The gravy had a skin. The marshmallow salad slid off its plate. The pie hat was served with a spoon.

The turkey was perfect.

"This," said Mr. Kerrigan, with his mouth full and a candle shining in both lenses of his glasses, "is the best Thanksgiving I have had since 1979."

"What happened in 1979?" said Bernadette's son.

"I'll tell you after the pie."

Somebody laughed. Then everybody did. It built the way a wave builds, low and then all at once, until Uncle Ray had his forehead on the table and Auntie Joy was wiping her eyes with a napkin and Eli's mother, at the head of the table, was laughing so hard she had to put her fork down. Eli found he was laughing too. It surprised him. It had been a while.

***

The knock came at twenty to seven.

It was two taps, low and uncertain. Eli almost missed it under the noise. Then something in him went still, and he put down his napkin and said, "I'll get it," and nobody looked up.

The front hall was dim. He took the flashlight off its hook, thought better of it, and hung it back. Then he opened the door.

Nate Bishop stood on the porch with his coat open and one hand in his pocket and a twenty-count box of Timbits from Tim Hortons in the other, still in the bag, with the receipt tucked under the tape. He looked as tired as ever. But his eyes were clear, and when he leaned in a little to say hello, he smelled like cold air and car heater and nothing else at all.

Eli didn't say a word about that. He filed it where he could look at it later.

"I almost didn't," said Nate.

"I know."

"I stood at the end of the street for ten minutes."

"I know. My mother's been watching from the window." She hadn't. But it was exactly the kind of thing she would have done.

Nate held out the bag. "I didn't know what you bring."

"Nobody does. That's the secret. Come in."

Nate stepped over the threshold, and then he stopped.

It was a kind of stop Eli had seen before, on sidewalks and in stairwells and once in the middle of a parking lot. His head turned a little to one side. His hand rose, not quite touching his ribs, like a man listening to a radio playing in another room. Something far off. Something that was not Eli's business. Eli let him have it. He stood in the front hall with the dark house breathing behind him and waited.

It lasted about three seconds. Then Nate shook it off, the way he always did, straightened his shoulders, and walked down the hall toward the sound of fourteen people laughing in the candlelight.

He stopped again at the dining room door.

Eli, behind him, couldn't see his face. He could only see the back of the coat and the line of the shoulders, and the way Nate stood very still in the doorway of a room full of noise. The candles threw long, warm light down the table. Uncle Ray was in the middle of a story. Auntie Joy was holding the hat pie like a baby. And at the window end, side by side, with their napkins folded and their forks laid straight, sat two empty chairs.

Nobody had told him. Nobody said a word. But Eli watched Nate's eyes go to those two chairs and stay there, and he watched something pass across the back of Nate's neck, quick and quiet, like the shadow of a cloud crossing a field.

Nate didn't make a joke. Eli had been braced for a joke.

"Sit," said Eli's mother, getting up. She had seen him at once, the way she saw everything, and she was already pulling out the nearer chair. She didn't make a speech. She didn't say his name or ask him a question. She just took the bag from his hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world, set it in the middle of the table, and said, "You're late, and the turkey's the only thing that survived. Sit down. It's still warm."

Nate sat.

Somebody passed him a plate. Somebody else passed the potatoes. Mr. Kerrigan leaned across the table and said, loudly, "You like a bus? I drove one for thirty-eight years," and Nate said, "Not much," and the whole table laughed, and he very nearly smiled.

The other chair stayed where it was, right beside his. Nobody moved it. After a minute Eli understood that nobody was going to, and that his mother had decided it somewhere around the second blackout without telling a soul.

Nate looked at the empty chair for a long moment. Then he picked up his fork.

Eli sat down across from him and ate his turkey and did not say a single word, which was, by a wide margin, the hardest thing he had done all week.

The lights came back on at seven. Nobody cheered. In the sudden hard glare of the overhead bulbs, fifteen people and a cat looked up at one another and agreed, without speaking, that they would rather have kept the candles.