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I looked around at the offerings heaped on the table. Cornbread baked in the cast-iron skillet he’d seen me use every day. Biscuits that didn’t look a thing like Granny’s or mine, but I knew he probably got a recipe off an internet search, since neither of us had written our recipes down. There were bowls of condiments like jams and pickled red cabbage, bush beans with potatoes, a dutch oven full of chicken and dumplings that was still steaming. There was a ham and fried hominy.
These was all the foods that I’d been telling Gus about in the quiet evenings we’d spent in front of an unlit fire. The ham Granny had made a few Sundays a year, the biscuits she made nearly every day, the potato candy I tasted in my mind whenever I thought of my mama.
Gus locked eyes with me, his smile nervous. He was asking for my reassurance. I couldn’t give it verbally, not without breaking down and drowning the table in tears of gratitude, but I did grasp his hand. He squeezed back and, before I knew it, lifted my hand to his mouth and brushed a kiss across my knuckles, rubbing his thumb on the back.
I wiped a tear with my napkin and sniffed. “When did you make all this?”
He smiled. “I had some help.”
“I made the vinegar pie.” Sofia’s blue eyes brightened as she straightened in her chair. Her hair was a reddish chestnut, but even with Bethany’s platinum blonde bleach job, she looked more and more like her mother every day.
“I made the beans,” Bethany said. “They’re probably soggy and gross, and I had to google a recipe and blend it in with Granny’s because, God help that woman, she had terrible handwriting.”
I smiled. “She couldn’t even tell you the amounts if she tried. It was justput in enough to come up tohereon the side of the bowl.”
“She’s sorry she couldn’t be here, but Ma made the apple cake and the chicken and dumplings,” George said. “She swore she didn’t add any lemon or oregano, although she did suggest it.”
“To the cake or the dumplings?” I laughed.
“Both, probably.” Gus laughed. “Waylon smoked the ham, and Soula made the chow chow.”
My eyes dropped to the relish. Soula’s best dish was barbecue takeout. The closest that woman got to a recipe was adding milk to cereal.
“Once I realized lactic fermentation was involved, I was in,” Soula said. “Especially, since all I really had to do was run vegetables through a food processor.”
After Gus and George chanted the Greek hymn in memory of the dead, everyone looked at each other. “Okay,” Gus said, “at the sound of the bell, I’m going to serve the cake, and we’ll begin the silent portion of the meal. After dessert, we’ll serve dinner, and... well, I don’t actually have an appetizer, but I have a feeling we’ll all be stuffed to the gills by then, anyway. Any final words?”
He looked around and everyone shook their heads.
He chimed a small glass dinner bell he’d procured from who knows where. Its crystalline note rang once, resounding through the otherwise silent space, marking the beginning of the dumb supper.
The dearth of dinner conversation amplified the scrape of utensils on plates and the ice clinking in our glasses. Somehow, we maintained communication anyway. Sofia fought back laughter when Athena farted really loudly, and then everyone else struggled to hold it together when Soula had to rush her diaperless baby away from the table when it turned out not to be just a fart.
I locked eyes with Gus, and his gaze lingered on mine. There was something bigger about the way he looked at me. In the little ways he kept finding to touch me until he just decided to give in and leave his hand on my upper thigh.
When the food was passed, George or Waylon offered a small symbolic portion of each dish to the plate at the empty chair. We ate with unusual reverence.
All of us were connected by our careers in deathcare. We couldn’t discuss it at this table, but I imagined, at least in part, our thoughts turned to those whom we served. George and Bethany, and the hundreds of decedents they’d interred or cremated; Soula and the bodies she’d autopsied, agonizingly chasing down leads to get the data to determine causes of death; me and the skeletal remains of long buried bones, even poor decapitated Barry, who had been temporarily laid to rest on this very table.
But two of us here tonight were more intimately connected with death than the others. Connected in ways beyond what we knew professionally.
I knew Gus had gathered us here to perform this ritual for me. So that I could once again feel Granny’s presence in this house that I’d so meticulously maintained after her passing.
But Granny didn’t come tonight.
She wasn’t the one occupying the empty chair.
Waylon had witnessed lives lost as a detective, but they’d been a professional hazard.
His sister’s was personal.
When she’d taken her life, she’d left him wracked with pain and guilt. I’d seen Waylon sometimes, in those fleeting dark moments,where the grief still threatened to stop his own heart. I’d never talked about it with him. I didn’t have to.
Sometimes, those hit the hardest by death could recognize it in others.
There was an infinitesimal shift in the air. It felt heavier. Suffocating and wet as a swamp in August, though the temperature stayed put. Maybe even growing a few degrees cooler. I tugged my sweater tighter around my shoulders.
The candles on the table seemed to dim for a moment, like a trick of the light. I glanced up abruptly, watching everyone’s faces. No one had noticed. They continued dining just as peacefully as before, if awkwardly due to the silence.
