The dining room smelled like turkey and sweet potato and the aluminum of too many pans. Extra chairs from the church basement. A football game talking to itself in the next room. Kids cutting through with rolls they were not supposed to have yet. Warm light. A pie in Patrice’s hands, still hot through the towel, the kind of pie that meant someone could sit down.
Derrick Hale was fifty, at the head because his mother was gone and somebody had to be. His wife, Patrice, forty-eight, set the pie on the one clear square of table. His sister Vanessa, fifty-three, stood behind the empty chair at Derrick’s left. She had not taken her coat off. The look on her face had been in the car, in the kitchen, all year.
She did not sit.
“Before we say grace, tell her who that empty chair is for.”
Derrick’s hand stayed on his fork.