The Christmas Dinner No One Came To

The chairs stayed empty

At six o’clock I lit the candles. I had bought good ones, the tall white tapers, not the cheap ones from the dollar store, and I set them down the middle of the table between the red napkins folded like little tents. I put on the green velvet dress. I am sixty-six years old and I do not have many occasions to wear a dress like that anymore, but Tom always said green was my color, and I wanted to look like a woman whose family was proud to come home to her. I touched the pearls he gave me for our thirtieth anniversary, the ones I keep in the top drawer wrapped in a handkerchief, and I fastened them at my throat and looked at myself in the hall mirror and thought, there she is.

At six-thirty I put the rolls in to warm.

At seven I took them out.

By seven-thirty the gravy had started to think about setting up, so I stirred a little cream into it and turned the burner to low and told myself people run late on holidays. There is weather. There is traffic on Highway 20. Children fall asleep in car seats and have to be settled. I have raised babies. I know how a family runs behind.

At eight o’clock I called Paula.

It rang once and went to voicemail, which is not the same as being missed. When a phone rings a full four or five times before the recording starts, that phone is sitting in a purse somewhere, unheard. When it rings once and cuts off, a thumb has pressed a button. I have learned the difference the way you learn the difference between rain and someone running a hose. I called Mark. Straight to voicemail, no ring at all, the phone turned off or set to silence me. I called Paula again. This time it did not ring at all either.

I set the phone face down on the linen so I would stop looking at it.

Nine o’clock passed. I sat down at the head of the table, at my own place, and I folded my hands and I looked at all those chairs. Sixteen empty chairs and me in my green dress in the candlelight, like a woman who had been hired to decorate her own funeral and then made to sit through it. The furnace kicked on around then and one of the chairs at the far end gave a small creak as the warm air moved it, and for half a second, God help me, my heart came up into my throat because I thought somebody had walked in. Nobody had. It was just the house, settling, the way houses do when they are as empty as they are old.

By ten o’clock the cider had gone cold and stopped smelling like anything.

By eleven the candles were guttering in their own wax and the turkey, that beautiful turkey, had gone the gray color meat goes when it sits too long, and a skin had formed across the gravy that no amount of stirring was going to fix.

At a quarter past midnight I stood up. The stockings I had hung on the mantel for the grandchildren were still hanging there, fat with the little things I had bought, the candy canes and the wind-up toys and the two-dollar bills I always slid into the toes because that was what my own mother did. Eight stockings, and not one child in the house to reach into them.

I want to tell you that I broke down. That would be the honest thing to say, if it were true. But it is not what happened. What happened was quieter and it scared me more than crying would have. Something in me went still. Not broken. Not even angry, not yet. Clear, the way the air goes clear after a storm has finally passed through and there is nothing left in the sky. I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room and I looked at all of it, the food and the candles and the empty chairs, and I understood something I had spent ten years refusing to understand.

I blew out the candles one at a time. And I made the first honest decision I had made in a very long while.