The Christmas Dinner No One Came To

The letter, and the last laugh

They came looking for me by summer.

Not because they missed me. I know that the way I know the difference between a phone that rings and a phone that gets rejected. They came looking because Paula, who had power of attorney over exactly nothing, called the bank about “Mom’s accounts” for some reason of her own and was told, politely, that she had no standing to be told anything. Because the county recorder’s office is public, and somebody looked up the deed to the house and saw a new name on it. Because the lake, which they had already divided up in their heads, three ways, with the good bedroom going to whoever asked loudest, was no longer sitting there waiting to be divided.

Paula called first, breathless and furious, and left a message. “Mom, where are you? Call me back right now. What is going on?”

Mark called seven minutes after her. I know it was seven minutes because I saved them. “Mom. What have you done? Call me.”

And then, that afternoon at 3:42, a message from Katie’s mother, from Paula, again, and this one started out almost soft, almost like the daughter who used to bring me funeral potatoes, right up until the last sentence, when it turned and showed its face. “Mom, you can’t just make decisions like this without talking to us first. This affects all of us.”

Without talking to us first. That is the one that made me laugh. I was standing in my little kitchen in my little apartment when I heard it, with Tom’s picture propped on the counter and a cup of tea going cold in my hand, and I laughed out loud, one short surprised laugh, because I had been talking to them for ten years. I had been talking with casseroles and cakes and five hundred dollars in an envelope and a table set for seventeen. They were the ones who had decided not to listen. And now that the accounts told them something they did not want to hear, all at once they were very interested in a conversation.

The lawyer in Waterloo handled the rest. When the three of them finally sat down in her office, together, because she would only do it with all of them present, she gave each of them the envelope I had left. Paula told me later, in the one real conversation we would eventually have, that the room went so quiet you could hear the clock, and that she opened hers expecting a will and found instead a letter, one page, in my own handwriting.

I will not print the whole letter here. Some things stay between a mother and her children. But I will tell you how it began, because that first line is the truest thing I have ever written down, and it is the whole story in a single sentence.

“I set a table for seventeen and learned that I was the only one who ever came.”