The Year We Stopped Setting a Place for Him

There is a year, and then there is the year after, and somewhere between them a hand stops reaching for the extra plate without anyone deciding it should. Nobody announced it. My mother simply set the table for five instead of six, and none of us said the number out loud, because saying it would have made the empty chair a subject instead of a fact. I used to think faith meant believing he was somewhere. Now I think it means setting five places and trusting that the missing one still counts, somehow, in a ledger none of us can read.