The Empty Chair

The chair came first, before any of them. Carl Hennessy had bought it at an estate sale in 1971 because it was sturdy and ugly and nobody else wanted it, and he put it in the back room of the hardware store next to the paint mixer. When his wife started a sewing group two years later, the chair was simply there, the way a stone in a field is there. Nobody chose it. It chose itself. For thirty-some years the five of them had sat in a loose ring under the buzzing fluorescent tube. Dorothy in the rocker because of her hip. June on the folding stool because she liked to be able to spring up and put the kettle on. Iris in the green armchair with the burn mark. Margaret on the old church pew they'd dragged in sideways. And Connie, always Connie, in Carl's ugly estate-sale chair, because she had sat there the first Tuesday and never seen a reason to move. Now it was October, and the chair was empty, and none of them would sit in it. They had arrived the way they always did, in the ten minutes either side of two o'clock, stamping the wet off their shoes, complaining about the same weather they had complained about for three decades. Dorothy brought the lemon cookies. June put the kettle on. Margaret unrolled the quilt-in-progress across the long table, a wedding-ring pattern in blues and creams, and they all looked at it, and then they all looked at the chair, and then they looked away. "We could fold it up," June said. "Put it behind the shelving." "We are not folding up Connie's chair," said Dorothy. "It isn't Connie's chair. It's Carl's chair. Carl's been dead eleven years." "It's Connie's chair," Dorothy said again, in the voice that ended things, and June put four mugs on the table instead of five and said nothing else about it. Margaret threaded a needle by the window light. She was the youngest of them, only sixty-six, which in that room made her practically a child, and she had learned across twenty years of Tuesdays that the others did their grieving sideways, through cookies and kettles and arguments about furniture. If you waited, it came out. You only had to keep your hands moving and wait. So she licked the thread, and she pushed it through the eye, and she waited. "She'd hate this," Iris said finally, from the green armchair. "All of us sitting here like a funeral. She'd tell us to get on with the borders." "Then let's get on with the borders," Margaret said. And they did. They pulled the wedding-ring quilt toward themselves, each woman taking an edge, and they bent their grey heads over it, and the empty chair sat in the lamplight holding nothing at all, which is the hardest thing a chair can be asked to do.