Wayne and Jim put the table back together in my dining room that night. The legs went right back into the same four dents in the rug.
Then I sat down in one of the twelve chairs. By myself.
And I had my doubts.
I’ll tell you what I prayed, since I’ve told you everything else. I asked the Lord to show me if I’d done a spiteful thing.
He was quiet about it. Which, in my experience, can go either way.
Wednesday at six in the evening, the phone rang.
It was Dylan.
“Grandma, Mom said I can come to yours tomorrow if I want. She said it like I shouldn’t want to.”
“Do you want to?”
A pause.
“Are you making the dressing with the sausage in it?”
“I am.”
“Then yeah.”
Another pause.
“She borrowed card tables. Four of them. From the lady next door and from Dale. They’re all different heights.”
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s ironing a bedsheet to go over them. She’s kind of not talking.”
That hurt me worse than I expected.
My girl. Ironing a bedsheet at six o’clock the night before her first Thanksgiving in her own house.
“You be kind to her tonight,” I said. “And ask her one more time, plain, whether she minds you coming. If she minds, you stay. And I’ll save you a plate of dressing the size of a hubcap.”
He called back in ten minutes.
She’d said to go. She’d said, and he repeated it very carefully: “Somebody from this family ought to be at that table.”
I went and picked him up myself. He slept in his mother’s old room. And at five-thirty Thursday morning, he was standing in my kitchen in his socks asking what he could peel.
By the time it was all done, there were fourteen of us.
At that same oak table. Back in my own dining room, with both leaves in.
Me and Dylan.
Harold.
Wayne and Donna.
Pat and Jim, and Kim with her two little boys, who were four and six and had been promised they could sit together.
The young couple renting the house on my other side, Amber and Tyler. They’d moved out from Ohio in August for his job at the hospital and didn’t know a soul to eat with. They brought a baby and a store-bought pumpkin pie they kept apologizing for.
Miss Evelyn, who’s ninety-one and taught third grade to half of Hastings, including my daughter. Pat drives her to church.
And a sophomore from Hastings College named Ben, who mows Miss Evelyn’s yard. He couldn’t get home to Rawlins, Wyoming, because they’d closed the interstate for wind, the way they do.
Twelve chairs and fourteen people.
I put the two little boys on the piano bench at the corner, where they sat like a pair of sparrows on a wire. The baby got passed from lap to lap all afternoon.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.