The Innkeeper's Second Chair

There was an inn at a crossroads whose owner kept, at every table, one more chair than the number of travellers currently seated. If a couple arrived, she set three chairs. If a family of four came for supper, she set five. She did this quietly, without explanation, for the forty-one years she ran the place. Travellers noticed. Some found it strange. Most, after a meal or two, forgot about it.

A young man staying at the inn on his way to a new job — the kind of young man who asks questions in order to hear himself ask them — cornered her one evening and demanded to know the reason. She was patient with him. She had, over four decades, been asked the same question by a version of the same young man perhaps two hundred times.

'The chair,' she said, 'is for whoever is not here.' The young man asked what she meant. She wiped down a table before answering. 'When a widow eats here, the chair is for her husband. When a father eats here alone, the chair is for his son who is far away. When a friend comes in after a fight, the chair is for the friend she is fighting with. It costs me nothing to put out a chair. And it reminds the person at the table that they are not, actually, alone in their life, even if they are alone at their supper.'

The young man, who had come in feeling clever, ate the rest of his meal in unusual quiet. When he left the next morning he tipped her more than the meal was worth, and he did not, in the years that followed, quite forget the chair. When his father died, he set an extra plate at his own kitchen table for the first month, and did not tell anyone why.

The practice is very old. Some cultures set an empty chair for the ancestors. Some for the prophet. Some for the guest who has not yet arrived. The particular framing matters less than the underlying grammar. It is a small, deliberate act of remembering that the visible people in the room are not the only relevant people, and that a life lived as if only the present company mattered is a life lived with insufficient chairs.

You cannot fit an extra chair at every table you sit at, and you should not become the kind of person who explains, at every dinner party, whom the empty chair is for. But you can, once in a while, in your own house, on a night that does not otherwise seem to require it, set out one more plate than you technically need. See who sits down, in your mind, when you do. That is the guest the whole rest of the day has probably been trying to remind you of.