Page 69 of Payback On The Ice

Thursday is team dinner.

I go to the Lantern early. Before everybody. Marcy's setting up the back room, laying out silverware, and the card table's already in its corner by the kitchen door with the SIN BIN sign against the ketchup bottle.

"Marcy."

She looks up. She's got reading glasses on the chain around her neck and a stack of napkins in her hand.

"Can you take that down?"

She looks at the card table. She looks at me over her glasses.

"You sure, hon?"

"I'm sure."

She puts down the napkins. She goes over and folds up the sign and tucks it under her arm. She starts to fold up the card table.

"Leave the table," I say. "I'll do it."

She shrugs. "Suit yourself."

I fold up the chair. I'm about to fold up the table when the door opens, and the guys start coming in, loud, stamping snow off their boots. I leave it. I'll get it after.

Theo comes in near the end.

He stops in the doorway. He looks at the long table. He looks at the corner, at the card table, with no sign and no chair.

And then he goes and gets a chair from the stack against the wall, and unfolds it, and sets it at the card table, and sits down.

"Theo," I say.

"It's fine." He picks up the menu. He doesn't look at me. "It's my table."

The long table's filling up. Guys are pulling out chairs, ordering pitchers of pop. Gunnar's telling a story. Nobody's looking at the corner. Nobody's looking at me.

I stand there.

I can't go sit with him. If I do, the whole room sees. Every question Gunnar asked on Monday gets an answer, and Theo said I care about Cole and Mikey. And I can't make him get up and come to the long table, because he won't, and because it's his, and I made it his.

I go sit at the long table.

I sit in my usual seat, at the end closest to the corner. Marcy brings water. I can see him over the rim of my glass. He's reading the menu like he hasn't read it every Thursday for four months.

Wes Abernathy stands up.

Without a word, he picks up his water glass and his silverware and his napkin. He goes to the wall, gets a folding chair off the stack, carries it across the room, unfolds it at the card table across from Theo, and sits down.

The long table goes quiet.

Theo's staring at him.

"What," Wes says. He picks up the menu. "I like the walleye."

"Wes—"

"What's good here besides the walleye?"

Theo stares at him. Then his mouth twitches. "The bread baskets. Marcy gives you two if you're nice to her."