The little screen on the flip phone glowed green in the dim kitchen, and the three words sat there like a dare. Save me a plate. Dennis and I looked at each other across the steel counter. A pot of beans simmered on the back burner, and from the dining hall came the sound of the Sunday crew setting out folding chairs. Dennis reached for the phone, but I got to it first. I am seventy four years old, and I have never let a bully set my table.
I typed four words with my thumb, the way my grandson taught me. Come on down, Loretta. The name on the phone company printout was Loretta Sipe. Forty years ago she worked the sewing line at the upholstery plant, two stations down from me. She was a pretty, sharp tongued girl, and she was in love with Earl before I ever was. He turned her down gently in 1983. After that she told everyone in the plant that I had trapped him. I had not spoken to her since the day of the layoffs.
We did not have to wait long. Twenty minutes later, a gray sedan pulled into the fire hall lot, parked crooked across two spaces, and sat there with its engine running. A woman got out slowly. She was my age, small and thin, in a camel coat and a church hat, with a purse held in front of her like a shield. She came across the gravel with her eyes on the ground. At the side door, she stopped, looked up at me, and said in a voice like a rusted hinge, “I did not think you would answer.”
I let her in. I do not know why. Maybe because Earl would have. I sat her at a corner table in the empty hall and put a plate in front of her. Roast turkey left over from the morning service, green beans, a spoonful of sweet potatoes, and a roll. She stared at it as if it might bite. Dennis stood against the wall with his arms folded, still as a statue. I poured her a glass of tea. And then I said, “Loretta, you have my full attention. Tell me what you did.”
Bitterness is a house with one occupant, and she spends forty years sweeping rooms nobody will ever visit.
It took her twenty minutes to say it. She had lived alone since her husband died in 2009. A year ago she moved to a senior apartment in Hickory, and in October she saw my picture in the church newsletter, holding the casserole for the Thanksgiving dinner. Something curdled in her. She told us she had spent forty years being angry about a man who had barely known her name. She bought a phone, found an app that lets you borrow any number, and learned how to make a text look like it came from whoever you pleased.
The number of Earl was the first she tried. She remembered it from the plant directory, 1986, because she had written it on the inside of her wrist with a ball point pen the night before she asked him to the Christmas party. When the line was dropped and put back in the pool, it was an easy thing to ask for it. She was not proud of the app, or of the group text, or of the second text that followed. She wanted me to be alone on Thanksgiving. She said, “I wanted you to feel left out of something, just once.”
Dennis finally spoke. His voice was low and unsteady. He said that Lacey had cried for a whole week over a message she never wrote. He said his wife had nearly lost her mother in law over a lie. He said Loretta had hurt more people than she knew, and that he was calling the police the next morning. I held up my hand. I told my son that in thirty six years at the plant, the one thing I learned about people is that the ones who hurt hardest are the ones who have been hurt longest.
“Dennis,” I said, “sit down and eat something.” He looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Then he looked at the woman at the corner table, who was crying silently into a paper napkin, and something in his face gave. He pulled out a chair. Across the hall, the Sunday crew had stopped setting up chairs and were standing in a respectful half circle. Ronnie, the chief, cleared his throat and said, quietly, that he would be glad to call the sheriff when I said the word. I said not yet.
We made a deal, Loretta and I, over the second helping of sweet potatoes. She would turn in the app and the phone and apologize to Lacey in person. She would see a counselor. And she would come to the fire hall kitchen every Sunday morning for a year and work beside me, peeling potatoes, wiping counters, and listening. If at the end of the year she still wanted to stay away from my family, I would let her. She agreed before I finished the sentence. I think she had been waiting for somebody to give her a task for forty years.
Lacey came on Wednesday with the baby on her hip. I braced myself. The two of us stood in my kitchen, with the lamb thawing in the sink for Christmas, and for a long time neither of us said anything. Then she put the baby in my arms and covered her face. “Mama, I never said it,” she sobbed. “I would never.” I said I knew. I said I should have called her before I believed a screen. I said that in the future, if somebody tells me something awful, I will pick up the phone and ask.
Loretta worked the kitchen every Sunday until the next Thanksgiving, and she turned out to be the fastest potato peeler in Catawba County. By autumn the men called her Miss Lo and saved her the crispest roll. Last week, at the long table, she set down a jar of jelly I had made from the herb that grows by my back steps, and she smiled at me across the table. I am seventy four years old. Every Thanksgiving now, I set a plate for the woman who tried to take my family. I save her the best seat.
