**They Ate at My Table Every Weekend and Never Said Thank You. On the Fourth of July, My Mother-in-Law Opened the Drawer She Always Checked and Finally Understood I Knew.

Chapter 1: The Sideboard

The phone call had come on a Tuesday, while I was elbow-deep in a sink full of canning jars.

"We're coming for the Fourth," Rosalind said. No hello. No how are the kids. "All of us. Friday through Sunday. Boone says you've got the room."

Boone had not said that. Boone had said nothing, which with his mother amounted to the same thing.

"Rosalind, we were thinking of keeping it small this year—"

"Don't be silly. It's a holiday. Family comes first." A pause, then the knife, slid in softly. "Unless you've decided we're not family."

She hung up before I could answer. I stood there with soap running down my wrists and stared out at the field, where the corn was knee-high and Boone's father's old red tractor sat rusting by the fence. Everett had built half this farmhouse with his own two hands. I used to think that was why Rosalind acted like she owned it.

Now I knew better.

That was three weeks ago.

Friday afternoon, the cars came up the gravel drive like a parade nobody asked for. Rosalind first, in her silver sedan, then Shawna's SUV, then Krista's minivan with a dent in the bumper she'd never explained. Doors flew open. Six kids poured out and hit my lawn at a dead run, straight through the bed of marigolds my daughter Mae had planted in May.

"Darcy!"

Rosalind wrapped me in her arms. Her perfume was the expensive kind, the kind that clung to your clothes for hours afterward, and under it was something I'd come to recognize over seven years: the smell of a woman who had never once wondered whether she was welcome.

"I hope you're ready for us, honey. We're starving. I didn't even eat lunch, I was saving room."

She was through the door before I could say anything. I followed her into the front hall and watched her do exactly what I knew she would do.

She went straight to the sideboard.

Everett had built it the winter Boone was born, out of oak from a tree that came down in an ice storm. It had three drawers and a slight lean to the left that Boone swore was on purpose. It had stood against the same wall for thirty-four years.

Rosalind bent, slid the bottom drawer open an inch, glanced inside, and pushed it shut. Then she planted both palms on the top and dragged the whole thing three feet sideways, its legs groaning across the floorboards.

"There," she said, slightly out of breath. "It blocks the flow. I don't know how many times I have to tell you."

I smiled. My face felt stiff doing it.

Every visit. Every single one. She checked that drawer, then moved that sideboard, as if the second thing explained the first. For a long time I'd thought it was just one more of her habits, like rearranging my spice rack alphabetically or telling me my curtains made the kitchen look like a waiting room.

Up on the stairs, my son Tucker and my daughter Mae sat side by side, not moving. They each held a paper flag on a popsicle stick. They'd spent all of Thursday evening coloring them at the kitchen table, Tucker carefully counting fifty stars, Mae giving up at eleven and drawing a horse instead.

Shawna came in behind her mother, dropped her purse on my couch like it was a coat rack, and looked around.

"What time's dinner?"

"Six," I said.

"Six?" She checked her phone. "That's forever."

In the kitchen, I heard the refrigerator door open. Krista. She stood in its glow with one hip cocked, scanning the shelves like a woman reading a menu.

"You don't have any of that good lemonade? The pink kind?"

"Not this week."

She sighed and took my last two peaches.

Out the window, one of Shawna's boys was swinging a stick at the tomato cages. I watched a stake go over. I watched a green tomato drop into the dirt.

Rosalind came up behind me and laid a hand on my shoulder. Her rings were cold.

"You look tired, Darcy," she said, low enough that only I could hear. "You really ought to let yourself go a little less. Boone notices, you know. Men always notice."

I didn't answer. I just kept looking at the tomato in the dirt.

"Where is my son, anyway?"

"Hardware store," I said. "He'll be a while."

I'd told him to take his time. I'd told him, in fact, not to come home before five-thirty no matter what, and he'd looked at me strangely but said okay.

Rosalind clapped her hands. "Well! Then you and I can get started on the food. What are we making?"

We. As if she had ever once lifted a spoon in this kitchen.

"It's all taken care of," I said.

She gave me a long look. Then she turned and went back into the hall, and I heard the scrape of the bottom drawer sliding open again.

It went quiet.

Too quiet.

I walked to the doorway. Rosalind stood bent over the open drawer, perfectly still. Her sun hat had slipped back. In her hand was a small white card with her name written across the front in my handwriting.

She snapped it shut so fast her bracelets rattled.

Chapter 2: Three Weeks

Rosalind straightened up and turned around, and for one second her face was naked. Not angry. Frightened.

Then the mask slid back.

"Silly place for a card," she said, and tucked it into her purse without reading it. "Somebody's going to lose that."

"It's for you," I said.

"I'll read it later." She patted the purse. "Now, where's the iced tea?"

I poured it. My hands were steady. Three weeks ago, they wouldn't have been.

Three weeks ago, I'd been sitting at the kitchen table at eleven at night with the farm stand cash box open in front of me, counting it for the third time.

We sell eggs and strawberry jam and, in August, sweet corn out of a little wooden stand at the end of our drive. It isn't much. Honor system, a coffee can with a slot cut in the lid. Every Sunday night I empty the can into a metal cash box and put the box in the bottom drawer of Everett's sideboard, because that's where Boone's mother had kept her egg money back when this was her house, and it felt like tradition.

That money was for Tucker's braces. Six hundred and forty dollars was what I'd counted it should be.

It was three hundred and ninety.

I counted it again. Then I went back through my notebook, the little spiral one where I write down every sale, and I started to see it. Not one big theft. A steady leak. Forty dollars. Sixty. Thirty. Every few weeks, going back to March.

Going back to every weekend Rosalind and her daughters came.

I didn't want to believe it. I sat there at that table and argued with myself like a lawyer. Maybe I'd miscounted. Maybe it was one of the kids. Maybe Boone had borrowed some and forgotten to tell me. I asked him, carefully, the next morning.

"Why would I take the jam money?" he said, frowning over his coffee. "Is some missing?"

"Probably I just added wrong," I said, and hated myself a little.

That was the thing about Boone. He was a good man, a gentle one. He'd fix a neighbor's fence without being asked and sit up all night with a calving heifer. But when it came to his mother, something in him went quiet and small, like a boy in a church pew. That's how Mom is. He'd said it so many times it had worn a groove in our marriage.

He'd said it on Memorial Day, when I came out of the kitchen with a tray of iced tea and found paper plates smeared with barbecue sauce stuffed into my zinnias. Two whole briskets gone. Forty ears of corn I'd shucked on the porch that morning. And Rosalind, licking her fingers, asking why I hadn't bothered to make a dessert.

"That's how Mom is," Boone had said, and shrugged, and gone to get the trash bags himself.

So I didn't tell him what I suspected. Not yet. I needed to be sure.

The next weekend they came, I did something I'm not proud of. I stood at the kitchen window with a dish towel in my hands and pretended to dry a plate I'd already dried. And I watched Rosalind go into the front hall alone.

She opened the bottom drawer. She took out the cash box. She lifted the lid, peeled off two bills, folded them small, and slid them into her bra. Then she put the box back, closed the drawer, and dragged the sideboard three feet to the left.

"It blocks the flow," she called to nobody.

I set the plate down so carefully it didn't make a sound.

That night, after everyone left, I went out to the barn and found the rubber egg stamp we use on our cartons. HOLLIN LANE FARM, with a little hen. I sat on an overturned bucket under a bare bulb and stamped every bill in the cash box, one by one, in the bottom corner, small and faint. Then I wrote the serial numbers in my notebook.

The next Monday I went to Bulloch's Market and the farm co-op and pulled every receipt I could find since March. I sat at that same kitchen table and added them up.

Three thousand two hundred and eleven dollars.

I looked at that number for a long time. Then I started planning.

Now, three weeks later, I stood in my kitchen and listened to the house fill with noise. Doors banging. Somebody's kid crying over a skinned knee. Shawna on her phone, loudly, telling someone that "the farm thing" was "so rustic, you'd die." Krista's husband was out back already, standing by our big black grill with his hands on his hips.

At five o'clock, Rosalind walked into the kitchen with her empty glass. She looked at the stove, which was bare. She looked at the counter, which was clean. She looked out the back door at the grill.

"Darcy," she said slowly. "Why is the grill cold?"

Chapter 3: The Table

"It's cold because nothing's cooking on it," I said.

Rosalind set her glass down on the counter, hard. "Then what in heaven's name are we eating?"

"Dinner's on the table at six. Like I said."

She narrowed her eyes. Behind her, Shawna had wandered in, phone still in her hand, and Krista leaned in the doorway eating my peach.

"Something's off with her," Shawna said to her mother, as if I weren't standing right there.

"Oh, honey, something's been off with her since the day Boone brought her home." Rosalind laughed, light and pretty. "I told him. Didn't I tell him? A girl who grew up in a trailer outside Halsey doesn't know how to run a house like this. She doesn't know how to host. She thinks hosting is hiding in the kitchen and looking put-upon."

It landed exactly where she aimed it. It always did.

My mother had raised me in a single-wide with a leaky roof, and she'd fed every kid on our road anyway, out of one cast-iron pan. I'd told Rosalind that story my first Thanksgiving here, thinking it would make her like me. She'd been using it ever since.

"Grandma," said a small voice.

Mae stood at the bottom of the stairs with her paper flag.

"Mommy made our flags for the parade. Do you want to see?"

Rosalind glanced down. "That's not a flag, sweetheart, that's a horse. Flags don't have horses." She turned back to me. "You see? She can't even teach them that."

Mae's chin wobbled. She lowered the flag slowly, the way you'd lower something you suddenly realized was embarrassing.

I crossed the kitchen and knelt in front of my daughter. "It's the best flag in Linnet County," I told her. "Horses are allowed. I checked."

She sniffed. Tucker came down two steps and took her hand without a word.

I stood up. I looked at my mother-in-law. And I felt the last bit of whatever I'd been holding onto for seven years let go, quietly, like a knot coming loose.

"Six o'clock," I said. "Dining room."

At six, they came. All of them. Rosalind at the head, where she always sat, in the chair that used to be Everett's. Shawna and Krista on either side. Their husbands. The six kids, elbowing for space. My own two at the far end, next to my empty seat.

The table was beautiful. I'd made sure of it. My grandmother's white tablecloth. Mason jars of black-eyed Susans. Real napkins, folded. And down the center, five big silver serving platters I'd borrowed from the church, each one covered with a domed lid.

"Now this is more like it," Rosalind said, and shook out her napkin. "See, Darcy? You can do it when you try."

Shawna held her phone up. "Hang on, I'm getting this for my story. Farm dinner, hashtag blessed."

"Go ahead," I said. "Everybody, please. Help yourselves."

Rosalind reached for the nearest lid and lifted it with a little flourish.

Underneath, on the shining platter, lay a single sheet of paper. A receipt from Bulloch's Market. March fourteenth. Two pork shoulders, four pounds of ground chuck, buns, chips, three cases of soda. One hundred eighty-seven dollars and forty cents.

Rosalind stared at it.

Krista lifted the next lid. Receipts, fanned out like a hand of cards. April. Then the next. May. Memorial Day, with the brisket receipt on top, circled in red. Then June.

The last platter, in front of Rosalind's plate, held a single folded sheet of my good stationery. On the front I'd written: TOTAL.

She opened it. I watched her lips move.

Since March: $3,211. You're welcome.

Below it, smaller: The Garrow's Bend Grange is holding a Fourth of July potluck tomorrow at noon. Everyone brings a dish. You're all invited. Bring something.

Nobody at the table made a sound. One of the little boys picked up a receipt and tried to eat a corner of it.

Shawna lowered her phone. "Is this a joke?"

"No," I said. "That's dinner. I've been serving it for four months. I thought you'd like to see the menu."

Rosalind's face went from white to a deep, blotchy red. She stood so fast her chair scraped.

"You petty, ungrateful little—"

Headlights swept across the dining room window. Gravel crunched in the drive.

Boone was home.

Chapter 4: Boone

Rosalind was out the front door before the truck's engine had stopped ticking. I heard her heels on the porch steps, quick and sharp, and then her voice, already wet.

"Boone. Oh, Boone, thank God."

I stayed where I was, at the end of the table, with my hand on the back of Mae's chair. Through the window I could see my husband climbing out of his truck with a bag from Pickard's Hardware, and his mother throwing herself against his chest like a woman fleeing a house fire.

Shawna and Krista went out after her. The husbands stayed seated, looking at the receipts, the way men look at a dog that might bite.

Tucker tugged my sleeve. "Are we in trouble?"

"No, baby," I said. "Nobody here's in trouble but the grown-ups."

By the time Boone came through the door, he was carrying his mother half-propped against his side, and his face had that look it got sometimes. The boy-in-the-pew look.

"Darcy." He set the hardware bag down on the sideboard. Then he noticed the sideboard wasn't where it belonged, and something flickered behind his eyes, but he let it go. "What's going on? Mom says you—"

"She humiliated me." Rosalind pressed a tissue to her face. "In front of my grandchildren. She served us garbage, Boone. Paper. She said we were freeloaders. She said—"

"I didn't say freeloaders," I said quietly. "I just showed the bill."

Boone looked past me, at the dining room. At the silver platters, lids off. At the receipts.

He walked in slowly. He picked one up. Memorial Day, the brisket, circled in red. He picked up another. Then the sheet that said TOTAL.

I watched him read it. I watched the number land.

"Thirty-two hundred?" he said.

"Since March."

"Darcy, we're not—" He rubbed the back of his neck. "We're not hurting for money. Are we?"

"We're not hurting," I said. "But we're not rich, either. You know what thirty-two hundred dollars is, Boone? It's the transmission on the truck you keep putting off. It's half of Tucker's braces. It's the new roof on the chicken house." My voice wavered and I made it stop. "It's me standing in the checkout line at Bulloch's every Friday, putting things back."

He didn't say anything. He just looked at me, like he was seeing something he'd walked past for years.

"Oh, please." Rosalind had followed him into the dining room. Her tears had dried with remarkable speed. "We are his family. Since when does family keep receipts? Everett never once kept a receipt on his own mother."

"Everett's mother brought a pie to every Sunday dinner until the day she d!ed," Boone said, almost absently. "I remember that."

Rosalind's mouth tightened.

"Fine," she said. "Fine. If this is about money, I'll write you a check. I'll write you a check for every hot dog. Is that what you want, Darcy? Is that what this is? You've always wanted to make me look small in this house."

"It isn't about the food," I said.

That stopped her. It stopped Boone, too.

"Then what is it about?" Boone asked.

I looked at my husband. I had rehearsed this in the barn, under that bare bulb, a dozen times. None of the versions sounded right now.

"The farm stand money," I said. "The jam and egg money. For Tucker's braces. I keep it in the cash box in the bottom drawer of your dad's sideboard."

Boone frowned. "You said you added wrong."

"I lied. I didn't add wrong. Two hundred and fifty dollars is gone. A little at a time, since March. Every weekend they came."

Krista made a small sound. Shawna said, "Oh my God, are you accusing our kids?"

"No," I said. "I'm not accusing the kids."

I looked at Rosalind.

Every bit of color left her face. Her hand drifted to her purse, then stopped, as if it had thought better of itself.

"That," she said, very quietly, "is the most disgusting thing anyone has ever said to me."

"Mom," Boone said.

"I raised you in this house. I kept that drawer for thirty years. And she stands here, in my dining room—"

"It's not your dining room," Boone said. He sounded surprised to hear himself say it.

Rosalind turned to him, stricken. Then she turned to me, and her voice dropped low and steady and cold.

"You have no proof. Not one shred."

I took a breath.

"Open your wallet, Rosalind."

Chapter 5: The Stamp

For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the ceiling fan clicking on its third rotation and one of Krista's boys asking, loudly, if they could have pizza instead.

Rosalind didn't move.

"I will not," she said, "be searched like a common criminal in my own son's house."

"Nobody's searching you," I said. "I'm asking."

"Mom." Shawna's voice had changed. "Just open it. Show her. Then we can go."

Rosalind looked at her eldest daughter as if she'd been slapped. Then, with a sharp little laugh, she unsnapped the purse and yanked out a red leather wallet and flung it open on the tablecloth, right on top of the Memorial Day receipt.

"There. Happy? Credit cards. Driver's license. A picture of my grandchildren. Go ahead, Darcy. Count my cash. I've got—" she pulled out a fold of bills "—a hundred and twenty dollars of my own money, which I took out of the bank in Ferris on Wednesday—"

She stopped.

Because she'd unfolded the bills to wave them at me, and the top one had turned in the light from the window, and there in the lower corner, faint and blue, was a tiny hen.

HOLLIN LANE FARM.

Nobody said anything. Boone leaned over the table. He took the bills from his mother's hand, gently, the way you'd take scissors from a child. He turned each one over. Three of the six had the stamp.

"That's our egg stamp," he said.

"That's—" Rosalind's eyes darted. "That could be from anywhere. I bought eggs from you. I buy eggs from your stand all the time."

"You've never paid for an egg in your life," Krista said, and then put her hand over her own mouth like the words had escaped without permission.

I opened my spiral notebook and laid it on the table, turned toward Boone. The serial numbers, written in my careful printing. "Check them," I said.

He did. One number. Then the second. Then the third. His finger moved down the column, slower each time.

When he looked up, his eyes were wet.

"Mom," he said. "It was for Tucker's teeth."

Something cracked in Rosalind then. Not a confession, not exactly. More like a dam that had been holding back years of something sour.

"Oh, Tucker's teeth," she mocked, her voice rising. "Do you know what I have, Boone? I have a two-bedroom condo by the highway and a Social Security check and a husband in the Ferris cemetery. Your father left you this house. Not me. You. Thirty years I kept that kitchen, and I got a condo, and she"—her finger swung at me like a pistol—"gets the house, and the land, and my son, and the drawer where I kept my egg money. So yes. Yes, I took a little back. It was mine before it was ever hers."

Her words hung in the air.

I had wondered, for three weeks, what I would feel when she finally said it. I'd expected triumph. Instead, I felt the strangest thing. I felt sorry for her. Just for a second. Then I looked down the table at Mae, still holding her horse flag in her lap, and the feeling passed.

"Rosalind," I said, "I never took anything from you. Everett did what Everett did. I just married your son and fed your family."

Boone set the bills down on the table, slowly, one by one.

"Mom, you'll pay it back," he said. "Every dollar from the stand. You'll pay that back by the end of the summer."

"Boone—"

"And you won't come here again without asking. Not you, not Shawna, not Krista. You call. You ask. And Darcy says yes or no."

Shawna stood up so fast her chair tipped. "We didn't steal anything!"

"No," Boone said, turning to his sisters. "You just ate thirty-two hundred dollars of my wife's work and threw your plates in her flowers."

Shawna opened her mouth. Shut it. Looked at the receipts. Her phone, still recording, was face-down on the tablecloth, and when she finally picked it up she stopped the video without a word.

Rosalind gathered her wallet with shaking fingers. She stuffed the bills in, stamped and unstamped together, and stood. She did not cry. I'll give her that.

"Get the children," she said to her daughters. "We're leaving."

Ten minutes later, three cars backed out of our drive, much faster than they'd come in. One of the boys waved out the back window. Mae waved back with her horse.

Boone stood in the front hall with his hands hanging at his sides. He looked at the sideboard, three feet out of place, its legs having worn little pale tracks in the floorboards over the years.

Without a word, he put his shoulder to it and pushed it home.

Then he turned to me. "Darcy. What did the card say? The one in the drawer?"

Chapter 6: Bring Something

I didn't tell him that night.

That night we ate grilled cheese at the kitchen counter, the four of us, with the window open and the frogs going in the ditch. Tucker made his sandwich into a flag shape with a butter knife. Mae fell asleep sitting up with her cheek on her arm. Boone carried her upstairs, and when he came back down, he sat across from me and didn't say anything for a long time.

"I should have seen it," he finally said.

"You didn't want to."

"No." He rubbed his eyes. "Every time you said something, I heard Dad. Let it go, son. She's had a hard life. He used to say that about her. I think I just kept saying it after he was gone."

"I'm not asking you to stop loving her," I said.

"I know." He reached across and put his hand over mine. It was rough from the fence wire. "You should've told me sooner, Darce."

"You should've asked sooner," I said, but I turned my hand over and held his.

The Garrow's Bend Grange potluck started at noon on Saturday. The grange hall is a white clapboard building with a tin roof and a bell nobody's rung since 1962, and every Fourth, the whole road shows up. Mrs. Pruitt with her deviled eggs. The Okonkwo boys with a cooler of homemade root beer. Old Lyle Stambaugh with the same cherry cobbler he's brought for forty years, which is too sweet and which everyone eats anyway.

We brought my mother's cast-iron cornbread and two dozen jars of strawberry jam for the raffle table. Tucker carried the jam. Mae carried her flag.

It was the first Fourth in seven years I didn't spend standing over a grill sweating while somebody told me I was doing it wrong.

Halfway through the afternoon, while the kids were running sack races on the grass behind the hall, I saw a minivan with a dented bumper pull into the gravel lot.

Krista got out alone.

She stood by the van a minute, like she wasn't sure of the rules. Then she reached into the back seat and brought out a foil-covered pan and walked toward me across the grass.

"It's just brownies," she said, holding them out. "From a box. I don't— I'm not much of a cook."

"Neither was I, once," I said, and took them.

She looked down at her sandals. "I didn't know about the money. I swear I didn't. But I knew about the rest. The food. The plates." She swallowed. "Mom always said you owed us. Because of the house. I just went along with it. It was easier."

"It's always easier," I said.

She nodded. Then she pulled a white envelope from her back pocket. "She asked me to give you this. She wouldn't come."

Inside were five fifty-dollar bills. No note. Just the money, folded flat, and on top of it, the small white card I'd left in the bottom drawer.

She'd opened it. The corner was soft, like it had been handled a lot.

Boone came up beside me with a paper plate of Lyle's cobbler and looked over my shoulder. I turned the card so he could read it.

On the front, in my handwriting: Rosalind.

Inside:

Everett told me once that his mother had a rule for this house. Nobody leaves this table hungry. And nobody comes to it empty-handed. I've kept the first half for seven years. Starting this weekend, I'm keeping the second.

If you ever want to come to my table as family, I'll set your place myself. Just bring something.

Boone read it twice. He didn't say anything. He just put his arm around me, and I felt him breathe in, slow and deep, like a man coming up from under water.

That night, from the grange lawn, we watched the fireworks go up over the soybean fields. Mae sat on Boone's shoulders, waving her horse flag at every burst. Krista sat on a blanket next to us with her two boys, and when the big gold one went off, she reached over and squeezed my hand, just once, quick.

Back home, after the kids were asleep, I put the two hundred and fifty dollars back in the cash box and slid it into the bottom drawer of the sideboard. Right where it belonged. Against the wall where Everett had set it thirty-four years ago.

I stood in the dark hall for a minute with my hand on the oak.

I didn't know if Rosalind would ever come back. I didn't know if she'd ever learn to knock.

But for the first time since I'd married into this family, I wasn't waiting to find out.

Epilogue

The next Fourth of July, the sideboard was still against its wall. Nobody had moved it all year.

Rosalind had paid back the rest of the stand money by Labor Day, in three envelopes, each one delivered by Krista, each one with no note. At Thanksgiving she came for dinner, because Boone called and asked and I said yes. She brought a store-bought pumpkin pie and set it on the counter without a word. She did not rearrange my spice rack. She did not mention my curtains. At the end of the night, at the door, she said, "Thank you for dinner, Darcy," stiffly, like a phrase from a language she was still learning.

It was enough. It was more than I'd had in seven years.

Shawna didn't come at all. She posted something online about "toxic in-laws" and Boone muted her, and that was that. Some people aren't ready, and some never will be. I've learned you can set a place for someone without waiting in the doorway for them to sit down.

This year, the phone rang on a Tuesday in June, while I was canning strawberries.

"Darcy." Rosalind's voice. A pause, a long one. "I was wondering. If you're having people for the Fourth. If it would be all right if I came."

I looked out the window at the field, where Tucker, in his new braces, was chasing Mae through the corn rows.

"It would be all right," I said.

She came Saturday at noon. Alone. She knocked, and waited, and when I opened the door she was standing on the porch in a much smaller sun hat, holding a cast-iron skillet wrapped in a dish towel.

"It's cornbread," she said. "I don't know if it's any good. Everett's mother's recipe. I found it in a box."

The edges were burnt. The middle had cracked. It was, I'm almost sure, the first thing she had baked in years.

"It's perfect," I said, and took it from her.

She stepped into the front hall. Her eyes went, just for a second, to the sideboard. Then they came back to me.

She didn't touch it.

Mae came thundering down the stairs with a brand-new paper flag, this one with fifty stars, carefully counted, and a horse galloping across the stripes.

"Grandma! Look! I made one for you!"

Rosalind took it. She looked at the horse for a long moment.

"Well," she said, and her voice did something I'd never heard it do before. It softened. "Horses are allowed. I checked."

That afternoon, I set the table with my grandmother's white cloth and Mason jars of black-eyed Susans. And at Everett's end of the table, without anyone telling me to, I set one extra plate.