Chapter 16 - THE SECOND TABLE
Two years later, Common Table House expanded.
We did not open an office in a financial district.
We bought an abandoned textile mill in a small town three hours west—the town where Patricia had been born eighty years earlier.
Her father had been a loom operator who died in debt.
Her mother had cleaned houses for the mill owners.
When I walked through the empty brick building, I finally understood Patricia’s terror.
She had spent her entire life fleeing the damp, cold rooms of her childhood.
She had built her empire of cruelty because she believed that if she was not holding the whip, she would be standing under it.
She thought power was a zero-sum game.
Eat or be eaten.
Sit at the head or starve on the floor.
David brought four apprentices from his workshop to the mill.
They spent three weeks sanding the ancient pine floorboards.
From the beams of the old loom room, David built a second oak table.
It was thirty feet long.
It sat two inches lower than standard dining tables so children in wheelchairs could pull up without assistance.
On the day of the opening, three hundred people from the valley came through the heavy wooden doors.
Retirees.
Unemployed factory workers.
Single mothers with toddlers.
We served stew, fresh bread, and apples from the local orchards.
A woman in her seventies sat near the center of the long table.
She looked at the smooth, polished wood.
“My grandmother worked at Loom Fourteen right where this table sits,” she told me. “She was fired in 1952 because she took twenty minutes to feed her baby in the alley.”
I sat beside her.
I handed her a bowl.
“No one is counting your minutes here,” I said.
She ate until she was full.
Then she took a second bowl home for her neighbor.
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No one checked her ID.
No one asked for a corporate name.
