The Empty Chair
Chapter 02 - The Empty Chair
Paul read my father's note twice, very slowly. Then he laid it on the counter and asked whether Daniel had seen it.
That was how I knew there was something in it he understood and I didn't.
“What did you arrange on Tuesday?” I asked.
He looked at the kitchen window. The neighbor's maple had shed nearly all its leaves overnight. A single yellow one clung to the glass where the rain had pressed it.
“Margaret, Dad may just be with a friend.”
“He told me to ask you.”
“I made a few calls. That's all.”
“What calls?”
Daniel appeared in the doorway wearing one sock and carrying his spelling notebook. “Where's Grandpa?”
I put the letter under the fruit bowl. “He went out early. We'll find him.”
My son watched our faces. Children rarely believe the words that follow a silence like that. He put his notebook on the table, sat down, and began tying the shoe he hadn't yet put on.
At eight ten I drove him to school. He wanted to know whether Grandpa would be there when he got home. I said I hoped so, which was honest but not very useful. At the entrance he turned back and asked me to put the little table somewhere safe. He had forgotten to write his name under it.
I returned to find Paul standing beside the telephone, holding Dad's address book. The sight annoyed me. It had taken a disappearance to make Paul learn the names of the people Dad called his friends.
“We should check the old house,” he said.
Dad's bungalow on Larch Street had been empty since he broke his wrist the previous summer. Its front steps tilted, and the gutters overflowed with oak leaves. We'd spent months saying we ought to arrange repairs. During that time, the grass had grown high enough to hide the flowerbed Mom had planted.
I let myself in with the brass key Dad had kept on a faded red ribbon. The house smelled of shut windows and the furniture polish my mother had always used. Two chipped mugs stood upside down on the draining board, just where I'd left them after packing Dad's last box.
“Dad?” I called.
The rooms answered in the way empty houses do. Nothing moved, and yet everything seemed to have been disturbed by our presence.
I found his workshop behind the garage. The door was locked from outside. Through the dusty window I could see clamps hanging above the bench, rolls of sandpaper, and an unfinished birdhouse. I pressed my forehead against the pane. Somebody had taken the small red toolbox from its usual shelf.
Paul tried the back gate. “Maybe he went to the senior center.”
“He hasn't been there in years.”
“He went last month.”
I turned. “How would you know?”
Paul shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. “He asked me for a ride.”
It was another small fact that belonged to my father's life and not mine.
We visited the center, then two churches, then St. Anne's Hospital. By noon I'd made enough calls to wear a sore place behind my ear. No one had seen him that morning. A volunteer at the senior center remembered his visit, though. Arthur Bennett had attended a woodworking demonstration three Thursdays earlier. He'd stayed late to help a man repair a stool.
“Very patient with the young ones,” she said. “Doesn't much care for being told what his hands can't do.”
Outside, Paul rested against the car door. “We can call the police if we need to.”
“If we need to? He's seventy-nine.”
“He's not helpless, Margaret.”
I heard the edge in his voice. My father was helpless when it justified a plastic bowl, a chair in the kitchen, and letting Paul handle his errands. He became independent the instant his disappearance threatened to expose something.
On the way home I dialed my sister, Claire, for the third time in two years.
She answered immediately. “Is Dad hurt?”
“I don't know where he is.”
A pause. Then, “Is Daniel all right?”
“Yes. What has that got to do with anything?”
“Nothing. I was worried he might have been there when Dad left.”
Something in her tone made my hands tighten around the steering wheel. “Claire. Do you know where he is?”
“I know he's safe.”
Paul stared through the windshield.
“Where?” I asked.
“He asked me not to say until he'd had some time to think.”
“I'm his daughter.”
“So am I, Margaret.”
Claire lived an hour away, worked in the records department of a county hospital, and had a talent for saying one sentence that made me feel twelve years old again. We'd spent most of our adult lives keeping our disagreements civil by rarely meeting.
“You took him without telling me?”
“I picked him up. He called yesterday afternoon. That's a difference worth understanding.”
“Dad needs his medication.”
“He brought it. I checked the bottles myself.”
Paul shut his eyes.
“You're enjoying this,” I said, though even as I spoke I recognized the cruelty of it.
“No,” Claire replied. “I wish I could say I were.”
I asked if I could speak to Dad. She said he was resting. I demanded to know whether he was in her house. She wouldn't answer. Finally she offered to meet me at the Birch Street Diner at five, without Paul.
After I hung up, I turned toward my husband. “You knew Claire was involved.”
“I thought he might call her.”
“You never told me he'd gone to the senior center. What else haven't you told me?”
Paul tapped a finger against the steering wheel, a nervous little habit I'd seen when he was calculating how far a lie could carry him.
“Tuesday,” he said, “I asked about a room at Rosewood Commons.”
Rosewood was a residential care facility twenty minutes from our house. I had passed it hundreds of times, always noticing the clean windows and the pots of red geraniums near the entrance.
“Why?”
“Because we're struggling. Because your father needs more help than we can always give him. Because you keep saying you're exhausted.”
All of it was true. I wanted to shake him anyway.
“Did you tell Dad?”
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“I left the brochure on his dresser.”
I thought of Dad lying awake with the brochure beside his bed, wondering whether the room we'd cleared for him had become too expensive to keep.
At five minutes to five, Claire was waiting outside the diner in a navy raincoat, her hair threaded with gray. She looked older than when I'd last seen her, and much more like our mother.
She didn't hug me. She opened the diner door and said, “Before you ask me to bring him home, there's something you need to read.”
From her handbag she took a small notebook with a green cloth cover. I recognized it at once. It was the book Dad used to record wood measurements, grocery totals, and reminders to himself.
Claire opened to a page marked with a grocery receipt. Beside the date September 19, in his neat, unsteady handwriting, my father had written: Asked to join supper. Meg said not tonight. Under that was another date, and another.
May you like
There were twelve entries.
Then Claire turned the page, and I saw the first note written in a different hand: Assessment requested by Paul Ellis. Primary concern: resident's behavior at family meals.
