what a Thursday means to someone who lives alone.
The next Thursday, at noon, I didn’t go out to my car.
I made two sandwiches. Chicken salad, with grapes and walnuts, from a recipe a very stubborn
woman gave me. I put them on real plates. I found two cloth napkins in the back of his drawer and folded them into triangles.
I knocked on the door of his den, where he was watching a baseball game with Biscuit asleep on
his feet.
“Mr. Dean,” I said. “Would you like to have lunch with me? In the kitchen?”
He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were watery and blue.
“My wife always set the table like that,” he said, looking past me at the plates. “Real napkins. Every day. Even when it was just us.”
“Then let’s eat like that,” I said.
We ate at his kitchen table. He told me about his wife, whose name was Ellen. He told me they met at a roller rink in 1961 and she knocked him flat on his back on the very first lap. He laughed telling it. He said it was the first time he’d laughed in months.
