第18章 The Last Meeting in the Back Room

The September book was called *The Given Light*, and it was about six people who made a garden on a piece of borrowed land, and it was the last book the Wellerby Reading Circle would discuss in the back room at Denby's, and everybody knew it walking in, and nobody said so for the first forty minutes. Vernon noticed that. He had been noticing things for seven years now, the way he had noticed mailbox flags for thirty-four. There was a way a room behaved when it was avoiding a subject, and it was not a bad way, and it was not dishonest. It was the way a family eats a meal on the night before someone leaves: carefully, and about other things, because the meal is the last ordinary thing and nobody wants to spend it on the leaving. So they talked about the garden. Junie said the book cheated, because the people in it got the land for nothing. Romy said that was the whole point, that the book was about what you do with a thing you didn't pay for, and that everybody in the room should read the last chapter twice. Annette said the prose was doing more work than the plot and she resented it. Katia said she had read the book in nine days, which was fast for her, and everyone clapped, which she hated and allowed. Then Glenna took the notebook out of her bag, and laid it on the two doors, no, on the table, and took out the cards. "Fourteen," she said. "One for each of the fourteen names in this room's history who still live within an hour of it. There's one for each of you, and there are four more for people who aren't here, and I'm going to leave it at that, because the rest is for the last Sunday in September, at the Grange." "You're doing it at the Grange," Junie said, though she had known. "The last Sunday," Glenna said. "Fourteen chairs. Wood stove. Somebody's making coffee. If you come, you come, and if you don't, nobody asks. That's the whole invitation." She dealt the cards around the table, faces down, and everyone looked at the back of their own card and did not turn it over, because the circle had a way of understanding these things without a rule, and the way was: wait. "Now," Glenna said. "Finish your tea. This is the last tea in this room and I intend to sit here until the pot is empty." So they did. They sat, and the light went long on Court Street, and Junie went out and came back with the coffee cake she had been holding back and served it on the paper plates from the cabinet, and Cassie's baby fell asleep across two chairs, and Blythe, who had come off a night shift and had not been able to sleep before it, put her head back and closed her eyes without anyone mentioning it, and the room got quieter in the way rooms do when the talking is done and the being is the point. Junie stood behind the counter of her own bakery that afternoon and did the arithmetic one last time, and the arithmetic did not want to be done. She had been selling bread on this street for nine years and the building had been in her name for eight, and she could still remember the day the lawyer had slid the deed across the table and she had signed it with a pen that did not work and had to sign it again. She had painted the front room herself. She had bought the ovens secondhand from a bakery in the county seat that had closed, and had driven them over in a borrowed truck at two in the morning, and had stood in the empty shop with the doors off their hinges and felt, for the first time since the divorce, like a person with a map. Now the ovens would go first, because the venting, and the man from Halberd had said it like a fact of nature, and it was. The strange part was that she was going to be all right. That was the strange part. She had spent eight years making the building pay out of spite and the spite had turned into a life, and she was going to take the money and move three doors down and paint a new front room, and she would miss the back room more than the building, and she knew it, and there was nothing to be done with a fact like that except to serve the coffee cake and let the room be quiet. She looked across the table at Glenna, who had her hands around the empty pot. Sadie, at the end of the table, looked around the ring of eight chairs one more time and did what she had been doing all year, which was to memorize. She memorized the crack in the second window, running up from the sill like a river on a map. The brown teapot with the chipped spout. The way the west light came in and lay across the table like something laid out to dry, the same sentence she had thought in September and could not improve on. Junie's flour-dusted apron, which she was still meaning to untie. Annette's card, face down in front of her, her hands folded on top of it as if she were keeping a secret she had not yet decided to keep. Vernon's tote on the back of his chair. Romy standing in the doorway with the ice, because there was no more ice to bring, so she brought the bag anyway. Then Glenna's pot was empty, and there was nothing for it but to get up. They stacked the cups. They wiped the table. They found the coats. Somebody turned off the lamp and the room went to the color of the window. Sadie was the last one in the room, and she stood in the middle of it for a second and looked at the ring of chairs, and it occurred to her that the room was already just a room, and had been for a while, and that the whole thing — the thing she had photographed on a corkboard and read eleven times — had never once been the room. She took out her phone, because it was the only thing in her bag that could hold a thing, and did not take a photograph, because a photograph of an empty room is a photograph of an empty room, and she had learned that much in a year. She put the phone away and stood there and did the other thing, which was the thing Vernon did with the mailboxes and Romy did with the corners and Glenna did with the list, and which nobody had ever once written down: she committed the room to memory on purpose, in order, like a route. Second window, crack like a river. West light across the table. The chair with the split cane seat. The matchbook under the leg. The smell, which was yeast and cold butter and old paper, and which would be somewhere else next month and would not smell the same. Then the room was finished, and there was nothing left to do in it but go. She turned off the light and went out. The bell over the bakery door rang once behind them, and Junie locked the door, and the streetlight came on, and it was the second Sunday of September, and none of them said it, and all of them knew it. ---