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The Kids Are Gonna Ask
Author: Gretchen Anthony

 

BOOK ONE

   Two months earlier

 

 

One


   Maggie

   If every home has a heart, my family’s beats at our dining room table. Broad, sturdy and claw-footed, it has been the McClair family gathering place for more than a hundred and twenty years.

   My great-grandmother was a baby at that table. She learned to pray there, and keep her hands in her lap, and listen more than she spoke. Later, when my grandmother became a mother, she painted the bland maple wood a vibrant red and, in a quiet act of rebellion, told her daughter, “Growing up, I was taught that men carried the conversation, and women carried the dishes. We’re going to do things differently.”

   Many years after that, when my mother brought the table into our house, she repainted it, but kept the striking color. “Brown would match the cupboards better,” I suggested. My mother shook her head. “We keep it red for a reason,” she told me. “It’s a reminder. That everyone has a voice, and every voice deserves a place at the table.”

   Elizabeth (Bess) McClair

   Excerpt, college entrance essay

   The day her family’s lives would change forever, Maggie McClair passed through the door from the kitchen and glanced at the dining room wall. Wouldn’t you know, Bess’s essay was crooked again. She walked over and ran a finger down the side of the glass-framed paper, nudging its corners to a perfect ninety degrees. There.

   In Maggie’s mind, Bess laughed. Really, Mom? It was only slanted a few degrees. You couldn’t let that be?

   Oh, you hush, Maggie scolded, but she was smiling. She continued on her way to retrieve the mail from the front door mail slot.

   Maggie loved her house and everything in it. A classic example of Italianate architecture on Lake of the Isles Parkway in Minneapolis, the McClair house was a Fitzgeraldesque treasure. A Gatsby among its peers. Windows tiled like dominoes across the front, living room to dining room. The wooden floors creaked. There was a sunroom circled by lead-glass windows and hallways lined with heavy oak doors and brass doorknobs exhibiting the wear of generations. Only the kitchen had changed and that—with its new appliances and upgraded sink—was merely a face-lift on the house’s Roaring Twenties aesthetic.

   The dining room, though, was by far Maggie’s favorite. More than any other place in the house, it’s where her memories lived.

   She thought back to the day, twenty-some years ago, she’d hung Bess’s essay there.

   “I can’t believe you,” Bess had scoffed, Maggie being an infinite source of amusement to her daughter. “It’s not like I’m Harper Lee or something.” She watched her mother ascend their worn stepladder, hammer in hand.

   “You wrote a beautiful testament to our values,” Maggie explained. “And I love it.” She drove a nail into the plaster with a swift one-two.

   George had been there, too. Before he was only a memory, back when his heart was still pumping, and he could stand as he always did with his feet wide and his hands on his hips. “I think it’s terrific,” he’d said. “It’s a reminder about the importance of family. Like I always say—” he thrust a declarative finger in the air “—we McClairs will always have enough—”

   Bess groaned, but chimed in anyway, joining her father for the chorus. “Because we have each other!”

   Maggie descended the last rung of the stepladder and examined her work. The frame tilted a bit to the left and she straightened it. “There. Now it’s perfect.” The three of them stood, shoulder to shoulder, admiring.

   “Neither this essay or the red table are to leave this house until I do,” Maggie had proclaimed. “Which is not to happen until I’m toes up and ass down.”

   “We know, Mom.”

   “Yes, we do,” George said, kissing her cheek and patting her backside. “Nor shall I ever forget how glorious your ass looked up there on that ladder.”

   Maggie smacked him playfully on the chest and gave him a kiss.

   “I can’t wait to move out.” Bess gagged as she fled the room, leaving her parents alone to coo at each other like teenagers.

   Back when they still could.

   Maggie sighed and looked at the red table. After her mother died, Maggie brought the table into her own dining room, vowing never to dull its vibrant presence. By then, Maggie and George had owned their house for nearly a decade. Along the way, they traveled and shopped and filled its rooms with treasure. But Maggie had kept the dining room purposefully empty, knowing that someday her family’s table would take its rightful place there.

   Bess had learned the state capitals by laying flash cards on the table’s red surface. Her Brownie troop had spread Elmer’s glue on Popsicle stick crafts there and debated the individual merits of every Girl Scout cookie type. The table had held Bess’s birthday cakes and her mugs of hot chocolate on days when snowstorms canceled school. It hosted her group of high school friends as they gathered for a final farewell dinner before flying away to new lives. Pepperdine. Dartmouth. Michigan. Northwestern. Minnesota.

   When George died, Maggie and Bess laid the table thick with offerings for his funeral guests. Prime rib and pasta Bolognese and crab-stuffed mushrooms. More and more, until Bess whispered, “That’s enough now, Mom. We have enough.”

   How? Maggie wanted to know. How would she ever have enough without him?

   Maggie snapped to when she heard a car pull into the driveway, followed by two slamming doors. Thomas and Savannah were home from school.

   She had become a grandmother just over a year after George died, and the work of helping Bess with her twins buried Maggie’s sorrow under piles of spit-up-stained laundry and school permission forms and spelling tests. Bess had given Maggie two tiny McClairs to love—a family of four—which meant that even in Maggie’s quiet moments, when life without George didn’t feel like enough, it was at least plenty.

   Until one Thursday afternoon, just after lunch, when Bess died. The accident took her swiftly, when Thomas and Savannah were thirteen. Old enough to have known her, but too young to be without a mother.

   Maggie’s friends stepped in where she could not and filled every inch of the table’s red surface with foods meant to reflect life’s joys, rather than its tragedies. White chocolate rosebuds. Buttercream-frosted tea cakes. Salads dotted with lavender and blue pansies straight from the fresh, spring soil.

   Maggie had stood at her table that day, not eating, her arms around an inconsolable Thomas and Savannah. But she still believed in the table’s power. In its ability to nourish, and foster, and delight. Even when life, as the McClairs knew it, had ended.

   You’re getting maudlin again, Mom, Bess whispered, catapulting Maggie out of her memories into the here and now.

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