The Slap At Christmas Dinner
The dining room at my parents’ house always smells like cinnamon and pine at Christmas, and that smell is the reason I can still taste that night when I think about it too hard. Turkey, cider, the candle Janet lights every December that says Balsam and Berries on the label. Under all of it, if you were standing close enough, you could smell the diaper cream on my daughter’s skin, because I had just changed her in the guest bathroom fifteen minutes earlier and she was finally calm, finally full, finally the kind of sleepy and content that makes a mother relax her shoulders for the first time all day.
Grace was ten months old. She had four teeth and a laugh like a hiccup and she had just learned to pull herself up on furniture, which meant she spent most of that dinner standing at my knee with her fists closed around my sleeve, babbling at the candles like they were the most interesting thing she had ever seen.
My sister Courtney was across the table, three chairs down, next to our mother. She had been quiet in a way that wasn’t like her. Courtney is loud by nature, the kind of loud that fills a room before she’s said anything, and that night she had barely spoken since we sat down. I noticed it. I didn’t think anything of it. I have spent thirty three years not thinking anything of the ways Courtney goes quiet before she does something.
My husband, Nate, was at the end of the table, the seat my father always gives him now, the seat closest to the head, out of some old fashioned respect for the uniform even when Nate is in civilian clothes, which he was that night, a gray sweater and jeans, nothing that said Army about him at all except the posture, the way he sits like a man who’s used to being watched. Nate is a Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army, and at the time he commanded an engineer battalion at Fort Leonard Wood, which is why we lived forty minutes from that dinner table instead of on the other side of the country, and why my parents got to see their granddaughter every month instead of twice a year like some Army families manage.
Grace reached for the bread basket. Her hand didn’t make it. Instead it landed on my plate, in the little smear of cranberry sauce, and she laughed at the mess she’d made of her own fingers, delighted with herself the way babies are delighted by nothing at all.
“She’s going to ruin that sweater,” Courtney said, not to me, to the table, the way she talks about me when I’m sitting right there. “You let her get away with everything.”
“She’s ten months old, Courtney.”
“I’m just saying. Somebody has to say something eventually.”