The Christmas Dinner No One Came To

The winter I fell in the garage and cracked my wrist on the concrete, I called Paula from the emergency room, and she said she would come by after work to help me get set up at home, and I sat in my kitchen that whole evening with my arm in a fresh cast, waiting, and she never came and never called to say she was not coming.

And the spring the doctor found a lump, and I spent four days waiting on the scan, four days with my throat closed up and fear sitting on my chest like a cat, I did not call a single one of them. Not because I was brave. I want to be very clear about that, because people always want to make it into bravery. It was not brave. It was that I sat there with the phone in my hand and went down the list of my own children and understood that there was no one on it worth calling. The hospital form asked for an emergency contact and I wrote their names down out of habit, and I looked at those names on that paper and felt nothing, because the paper meant more than the people did by then.

The lump was nothing. Benign. I drove myself home and folded the report and put it in the kitchen drawer with the old appliance warranties and Tom’s insurance papers and the birthday cards my children used to send back when they still sent them. Paper can be colder than an empty house, I have decided. At least an empty house never pretended it loved you.

One more try, and then the truth

So you would think I had learned. You would think that a woman who had been left in a gas station parking lot with a chocolate cake would not set a table for seventeen. But that is not how it works when they are your own. Hope in a mother is the most stubborn thing God ever made. It will not die on schedule.

That Christmas, I decided to try one more time. One last time, I told myself, and I meant it as a test even though I would not have used that word out loud.

I called them all in early December, weeks ahead, so there could be no excuse about short notice. I told each of them the same thing. I did not want gifts. I did not need one single thing. I only wanted an evening. One dinner, all of us at the table, the way it used to be when their father was alive and the grandbabies ran the hallway in their socks. One night. That was the whole of what I asked for.

Paula said, “We’ll see, Mom.” Mark said, “I’ll try to make it work.” I even called Katie directly, and she said, “That sounds nice, Grandma,” in the voice you use for a stranger you are being polite to at the feed store.

And because I was their mother, I took “we’ll see” and “I’ll try” and “that sounds nice” and I built promises out of them. I hung my whole heart on three phrases that any honest person could hear were doors closing softly.