His son's car is in the driveway. A gray Toyota, a car seat in the back. Marlon looks at it from the sidewalk. Sixteen years ago there was no car seat. Sixteen years ago there was no son with a car: there was a sixteen-year-old boy sulking at him because his father wouldn't take him fishing.

Now the boy is thirty-two and opens the door with a dish towel over his shoulder.

Pa'.

That's all he says. Pa'. Then he steps aside.

Inside it smells of fried chicken and cornbread. It smells of somebody else's house that is your house. Marlon steps in slow. He walks the way a man walks who for sixteen years walked where he was told to walk. He keeps his hands at his sides. He touches nothing.

In the kitchen is his son's wife, whom he has never known free, he has only seen her through the glass, on visits, her voice in the receiver. And there are two children. A boy and a girl. The boy is six maybe, the girl younger. They look at this big thin man with the gray beard and they don't know who he is. To them he's a mister. Grandpa is a mister who comes to dinner. On the fridge there's a photo held up with a magnet. It's old, from a birthday, and at the edge, cut almost in half by the border, there's a young man laughing with a little candle in his hand. That man is him. Nobody took it down and nobody looks at it. It's been there sixteen years, half inside and half outside the magnet.

Sixteen years. Marlon counted them another way, in there. He counted them by Christmases, which are the days the phone rings the most and costs the most. He counted them by his son's shoes in the photos, which kept changing size. Now he counts them here, in the kitchen, and they are all these new people, this bread, this car seat, this woman who dries her hand on her apron before she gives it to him. She tells him her name, soft, the way you say a thing you've tried to say many times into a receiver. Marlon squeezes soft. He has big hands and in sixteen years he has learned to squeeze soft.

The table is set for five. But the places are six.

There's the chair at the head of the table. It's pulled back, a little, like for someone who has yet to arrive. Nobody set a plate in front of it. No: the plate is there. There's the plate, and there's the glass, and there's the fork on the right the way you set it. Only the chair is empty, and it sits there, pulled back, open.

Marlon looks at it. He looks at his son.

The son says nothing. He takes the pan out of the oven with the dish towel, carries it to the table, burns himself and doesn't say so. He puts the chicken in the middle. He tells the children to sit. The children sit. The wife sits. The son sits to the side, where he has always sat even as a boy, to the right of the head of the table.

Five stay seated and one chair stands. The father's chair.

You'd expect the words. You'd expect the son to say sit down, Pa', this is your place, we waited for you, it was always yours. But in this house you don't say things like that. In this house things get put on the table and you wait. The son put the chair. The chair is the sentence. Now it's his turn.

Marlon stays standing a moment too long. A moment in which he could take a regular chair, off to the side, make himself small, eat on the edge the way he ate for sixteen years with the tray hooked to the wall. It would be easier. Off to the side nobody looks at you. Off to the side you're there and you're not there. Off to the side you eat, you say thanks, and you go back to your bunk. Sixteen years is being off to the side.

Then he pulls out the chair at the head of the table and sits down.

The wood creaks under him. It's a real chair, the kind that holds. It's not bolted to the floor. It's not the mess-hall bench. It's a chair that moves, that creaks, that becomes yours the moment you put your weight on it. The little girl looks up at him from below. The boy looks at his father to see if it's all right. The father is pouring the water and doesn't raise his eyes, and that's exactly how you know it's all right.

Nobody says thank God. Nobody says finally. The son takes the father's plate, the one in front of the big chair, and puts a thigh and a wing and the bread on it, and passes it to him.

Eat, Pa'.

Marlon takes the plate. His hands shake a little and nobody says so.

Eat, Pa', the son says again, even though the father already has the plate, he says it the way you say a thing twice when the first time was for the father and the second is for himself.

And Marlon eats.