Part 1 — Six Empty Chairs
I had imagined my 60th birthday a hundred different ways, but none of them looked like this.
The dining room was glowing with candlelight. Seven plates sat neatly around the table. The roast I had started preparing that morning was cooling in the kitchen, and six empty chairs seemed to stare back at me.
I had been waiting for four hours.
Four long hours.
At first, I hadn’t been worried. My children were adults now. They had jobs, families, traffic, responsibilities. Being twenty minutes late was normal.
Even an hour could be forgiven.
But four?
That silence was harder to explain.
I looked at the clock again.
9:03 p.m.
My birthday dinner had been supposed to begin at five.
I pressed my palms against the edge of the table and tried not to cry.
There had been a time when silence was the one thing I couldn’t find in this house.
When their father and I married, he used to talk endlessly about having children.
“I want a noisy house,” he’d say, laughing. “One where somebody’s always yelling from another room and there’s never enough space at the table.”
He got his wish.
Over ten years, we had six children: Mark, Jason, Caleb, Grant, Sarah, and Eliza.
Four boys and two girls.
Our home had been filled with slammed doors, cartoons blaring from the living room, school projects covering the kitchen counters, shoes abandoned in hallways, and arguments over who had eaten the last cookie.
Back then, I sometimes dreamed about having five peaceful minutes to myself.
Funny how life works.
Years later, I would have given almost anything to hear those footsteps racing through the hallway again.
Their father hadn’t felt the same.
One day, after years of complaining that he felt trapped and restless, he started talking to a woman he’d met online overseas.
Within months, he packed a suitcase.
He told me he needed to “find himself.”
I remember standing in the doorway while six confused children watched their father walk away.
From then on, I became the one who stayed.
I packed lunches.
I attended parent-teacher conferences.
