It is Sunday evening, one year after the court case closed.
The table in my parents’ kitchen is crowded. There’s Margot and her new partner. There’s Nurse Patricia. There’s Elise, sitting in a high chair, smashing a piece of my mother’s legendary fried chicken into her face.
The overhead light still buzzes. The wallpaper in the hallway is still peeling. But as I look around this room, I realize that seating charts are for people who are afraid of being forgotten.
My father reaches over and wipes a smudge of grease from my forehead with a napkin. His hands are rough, his knuckles swollen with arthritis, but his grip is the steadiest thing I have ever known.
“Good chicken, Linda,” he says.
“It’s better than salmon,” I reply, and the whole table erupts into laughter.
I am Fonda Marshall. I am a nurse, a mother, and the daughter of a plumber. I live in a world where the chairs don’t match, the floors creak, and the doors are always open. I have never been wealthier. And I have never, not for one single second, sat at a table where I didn’t belong.
This is my life. It isn’t a gala. It isn’t a strategy. It’s a home. And in this house, every seat is Table One.
