第15章 Fourteen Chairs

Junie Denby spent the first week of September looking at rooms, because a person who has decided to sell a building does not get to sit still afterward. She took Romy with her, because Romy was the only one who could look at a room and tell you in ten seconds whether people would be comfortable in it, which was a skill she had built over nine years of other people's houses and one year of a car. They saw the church hall first. It was clean and had a kitchen and a good furnace and a cross on the wall the size of a bicycle, and Romy stood in the middle of it and said, "It's fine if you're fine with the cross." "I'm fine with the cross." "Are you fine with what it says to Katia and Vernon and the two people who aren't here?" Junie looked at the cross for a moment. "All right. What else." They saw the Legion hall. It had a bar and a pool table and a permanent smell of cigarettes that had soaked into the paneling in the 1970s and never left, and the man who showed it to them ran his finger along the bar and said, "We had a ladies' auxiliary used to meet here Thursdays," and Junie said, "We're reading a book about a gravedigger," and the man said, "We got a lot of those," and they left. They saw the laundromat, which a man was trying to rent out as an event space, and which had eight dryers still bolted to the wall, and Romy said, "No." They saw a room above the hardware store, which was where the circle had begun eleven years ago, and it was empty and cold and the floor sloped, and Junie stood in it a long time and then said, "I started here. I'm not ending here. That would be a loop, and I hate a loop." They saw the library's meeting room, which Miss Upham showed them herself, with the pride of a woman who had fought for every shelf in the building. "You'd be welcome," Miss Upham said. "Wednesdays and Sundays, no charge, no donation, no sign-in sheet. The board would like it. It would look good in the minutes." It was the best offer they got, and Junie stood in the middle of the room with her arms crossed and could not say why it was wrong, and Romy said it for her. "We need a room we can leave a mess in," Romy said. "A pot on a hot plate. A table we can put a scratch in. You'd be watching your own floor." Miss Upham looked around her reading room with its two long tables and its lamps and its perfect quiet, and smiled, and said, "You're right, and I'm disappointed, and you're right," and walked them back out through the children's section, where a poster of a bear was holding a book, and did not hold it against them. They saw the Grange. It was a long low building at the edge of town with a hall that had a stage and a kitchen and a wood stove the size of a small car, and it was cold in September and would be colder in January, and it had forty folding chairs stacked against the wall and a piano nobody could play and windows that let in the whole of the west. Romy walked the length of it and stood at the far end and looked back at the door. "How many chairs would we set out?" Junie said. "Eight," Romy said. "Eight and the table. Nobody sits more than eight in a circle." "Then what's it for, all the space?" "For afterward," Romy said. "For the part where people stand around and don't want to leave. That's what a room is for. You want a room that has somewhere to stand." Junie looked at the long hall and the west windows and the stove, and got out her phone and called the number on the door. --- That was the room. The rest was arithmetic and people. The arithmetic was that the Grange wanted two hundred a month for the winter and would take a hundred and fifty for the use of the hall only, Sundays, and Junie and Annette sat down at Annette's table for ten with a pencil and did it together, which they had never once done, and it took them eleven minutes and one argument to arrive at a plan. Annette's idea, in the end, was not the dinner. "Fourteen," she said, reading from the notebook's copied pages, which Sadie had printed for her. "There are forty-two names in here. Of the forty-two, by my count, fourteen still live within an hour. Fourteen people who sat in that room at least once in eleven years." "Fourteen chairs," Junie said. "Fourteen chairs," Annette said. "Not a dinner with invitations. Just chairs. We set fourteen chairs in the Grange for the last Sunday in September, and we tell them where and when, and whoever comes, comes, and whoever doesn't, doesn't, and nobody has to explain why they didn't." Junie sat back. "That's a good idea." "I have them occasionally." "You have them constantly. You just dress them up until no one believes you." Annette did not laugh, and then did, and shook her head, and wrote *14 chairs* on the paper, and put down the pencil. --- The other thing that happened in September happened on a Wednesday, and Junie only heard about it later. Annette drove out to the Grange with a bucket and a scrub brush and a bottle of something with bleach in it, and she did not tell anyone, and she went at the floor on her hands and knees. Romy was there because Junie had sent her to measure the kitchen, and they met in the long hall with their buckets, the retired English teacher and the woman who cleaned houses, and neither of them said anything for a while, and then Annette said, "I don't know how you do the corners," and Romy said, "With the brush that's in your hand," and that was all that was said about January, and about the room, and about the offer of the bed, and it was enough, because they were both on the same floor doing the same work, and there is no apology like that anywhere, and no one has ever needed one. At the end of it they stood at the west windows with the light coming in and looked at the long empty hall. "It'll be cold," Annette said. "The stove works," Romy said. "I checked. It wants a new gasket and it wants a flue cleaning, and I can do the gasket." "You can do the gasket." "I can do the gasket." Annette looked at her for a moment, and then said, "I'm sorry about January." "I know." "I'm not asking you to say it back." "I'm not going to," Romy said. "But I heard it." And she picked up her bucket and her brush and went out to the car, and Annette stood in the west light a minute longer, and then followed her, and drove home, and took the folded letter out of the drawer, and wrote one more sentence on it, and put it back. ---