I Couldn’t Stop Looking at the Empty Chairs

The funeral director turned his computer screen toward me and asked how many chairs the church should prepare.

I stared at the little box where he had typed 12.

Twelve was generous.

My husband, Thomas Whitmore, had lived ninety-eight years. He had been my husband for seventy-two of them. He had repaired cars for people who couldn’t pay him, driven neighbors to medical appointments, shoveled snow from porches that weren’t his, and once spent most of Christmas Eve underneath a young mother’s broken-down station wagon because she needed it running before morning.

And now I couldn’t think of twelve people who would come to his funeral.

“Mrs. Whitmore?”

I looked up.

The funeral director, Mr. Harris, was waiting with both hands folded over a yellow legal pad.

“Would you like me to leave it at twelve?”

I looked past him toward the small chapel visible through the open office door. There were rows of padded wooden chairs, probably sixty or seventy of them.

Empty.

That was the part I couldn’t stand.

“Make it twenty,” I said.

He hesitated.

“Of course.”

We both knew twenty chairs wouldn’t make twenty people appear.

Thomas and I had outlived nearly everybody.

That is one of the things nobody tells you about getting very old. People congratulate you for it. They tell you you’re lucky. They ask what you eat, whether you drink coffee, whether longevity runs in the family.

Nobody asks what it’s like to open your address book and find more dead people than living ones.

Thomas died on a Tuesday morning in our house outside Helena, Montana. There was no dramatic goodbye. I was sitting beside him, holding the same hand I’d held since I was twenty-five years old.

After seventy-two years, I knew every mark on that hand.

The pale scar across his thumb came from rebuilding an engine in 1968. The crooked little finger came from dropping a transmission part when Catherine was a baby. His wedding band hadn’t come off in decades.

A little after six, his breathing changed.

Then it stopped.

I stayed there until the nurse arrived.

Three days later, I was sitting in a funeral home trying to decide how many empty chairs I could tolerate looking at while we buried him.

Our daughter, Catherine, lived in Oregon. She was seventy herself and had problems with one knee. When I called her, she cried so hard I could barely understand her.

Then she said the sentence she’d been trying not to say.

“Mom, I’m trying to find a flight.”

I waited.

“But?”

“There aren’t many options. And with my knee, I don’t know if I can make those connections alone.”

I looked at Thomas’s coffee mug sitting beside the sink.

I hadn’t moved it.

“You do what you can,” I told her.

“Mom—”

“Your father would say the same thing.”

That was true.

It didn’t make it easier.

After we hung up, I wrote names on a piece of paper.

Catherine.

Our neighbor Susan.

Pastor Reynolds.

Mr. Harris from the funeral home, although technically he would be working.

I added two people from Thomas’s old repair shop before remembering one had moved to Arizona and the other had died three years earlier.

I crossed both names out.

Then I folded the paper and put it beneath Thomas’s coffee mug.

I didn’t want to look at it anymore.

The Men at Harper’s Roadhouse

The next afternoon, I drove into town because I needed milk, stamps, and something to occupy my hands.

I never bought the milk.

On the highway outside Helena, I passed Harper’s Roadhouse and saw motorcycles lined along the side of the building. There must have been fifteen of them, maybe twenty.

Thomas loved motorcycles.

He never owned one because I refused to ride on the back, and he claimed there was no point having one if his wife wouldn’t come with him.

But he could fix them.

Cars, motorcycles, tractors, lawn equipment—if it had an engine, Thomas believed it was personally insulting him until he figured out what was wrong with it.

I drove another quarter mile before pulling into a gas station.

Then I sat there.

I still don’t know exactly where the idea came from.

Maybe grief makes sensible people do strange things.

Maybe ninety-seven years teaches you that embarrassment doesn’t actually kill you.

I turned the Buick around.

Harper’s was louder inside than I expected. Country music was playing, somebody was laughing near the pool table, and several men in leather vests were gathered around two tables pushed together.

I nearly left.

Then a tall man with gray hair looked at me.

He had a beard, heavy boots, and a leather vest covered in patches. He stood immediately.

“Ma’am, you all right?”

Every head at the table turned toward me.

I tightened my fingers around my purse.

“I’m looking for someone who rides motorcycles.”

A few men smiled.

The gray-haired man glanced toward the parking lot.

“You found a few.”

That made me laugh despite myself.

He pulled out a chair.

“I’m Jack Callahan.”

“Eleanor Whitmore.”

“Nice to meet you, Eleanor.”

I didn’t sit.

For some reason, sitting would have made what I was about to ask feel even stranger.

“My husband died Tuesday.”

Jack’s expression changed.

“I’m sorry.”

“His name was Thomas.”

I opened my purse and took out a photograph.

It wasn’t a particularly good photograph. Thomas was eighty-six in it, standing beside our old Ford with grease on his shirt and one hand raised because he’d been telling me not to take his picture.

Jack took it carefully.

“He worked on cars?”

“Most of his life.”

One of the other men leaned over.

“Whitmore?”

I looked at him.

“Yes.”

He shook his head.

“Don’t know him. Name sounded familiar.”

That should have discouraged me.

Instead, I started talking.

I told them about the time Thomas fixed a stranger’s alternator in a grocery-store parking lot and wouldn’t take the forty dollars the man offered him. I told them about our neighbor Frank, whose driveway Thomas cleared every winter after Frank’s stroke. I told them Thomas had a habit of keeping used parts that were still good because somebody might need them and not be able to afford new ones.

Jack listened without interrupting.

Finally, he handed the photograph back.

“When’s the service?”

I hadn’t asked yet.

I swallowed.

“Saturday. Ten in the morning.”

“Where?”

I told him.

He nodded.

I put the photograph into my purse but kept my hand inside because suddenly I felt foolish.

“Mr. Callahan, I know this is strange.”

“Jack.”

“Jack. I don’t need anything elaborate.”

He waited.

I looked toward the windows, where sunlight reflected off the motorcycles outside.

“I just need someone at my funeral.”

He frowned slightly.

“Your husband’s funeral.”

“Yes.”

My face grew hot.

“I mean someone besides me. I don’t want Thomas carried into a church with nobody there. He wouldn’t have cared. I know that. But I do.”

Nobody at the table laughed.

Nobody looked away.

Jack leaned forward with his forearms on the table.

“How many people are you expecting?”

“Maybe six.”

He was quiet.

“Our daughter is trying to come.”

Jack nodded once.

“Thomas won’t have an empty church.”

I shook my head.

“Please don’t make trouble for yourself. Five people would be wonderful. Even two or three.”

“What time did you say?”

“Ten.”

“We’ll be there before ten.”

That was enough for me.

I reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

“Thank you.”

I drove home believing I’d solved my problem.

I pictured five motorcycles outside the church.

Maybe eight.

I never knew that before I’d even reached my driveway, Jack had already taken a photograph of the funeral information I’d written down for him and sent it to riders across Montana.