The Christmas Dinner No One Came To

The turkey came out of the oven at four o’clock, golden and perfect, and I stood in my kitchen in Cedar Falls and let myself believe, one last time, that my children were coming home.

I had set the table for seventeen. I want you to picture that number, because I did the counting myself, more than once, at the kitchen table with a pencil and the back of an old church bulletin. Paula and her husband. Mark and his wife. My eight grandchildren, from the twins who were barely walking to the granddaughter who was nearly grown. A cousin down from Waterloo who I had not seen in years but who said, on the phone, that he would try. And me. Seventeen chairs, seventeen plates, seventeen little name cards written in my own hand at the desk in the hallway where Tom used to pay the bills.

The house smelled the way a house is supposed to smell on Christmas Eve. Roasted turkey. The honey ham I had scored and studded with cloves. Cinnamon cider warming on the back burner so the whole downstairs went sweet with it. And the pecan bread, Tom’s recipe, the one he used to make every December until the morning his heart stopped in our bathroom while he was knotting his tie. I had not made that bread in years. I made it that day. I stood at the counter kneading it and crying a little and telling myself it was going to be a good night.

Outside, the windows had gone black and cold. In Iowa in late December the dark comes early and it comes all the way down, and by five o’clock you cannot see the road from the front window, only your own kitchen light thrown back at you off the glass. I turned on every lamp in the house so that when the headlights came up the gravel, the place would look full and warm, the way it looked when the kids were small and the whole clan came in stamping snow off their boots.

The clock above the stove ticked. It is an old clock. Tom hung it there the year we moved in, and I have never once thought about the sound it makes. That night I heard every second of it.