The Christmas Dinner They Gave Away

My mother gave my children’s Christmas dinner away so her own mother finally left her table

I want to start with the plates, because that is where it finally broke open for me, though the truth is it had been breaking for forty years and I just kept gluing it back.

It was Christmas Day in Carmichael, the little wheat-and-cattle town in western Oklahoma where I was born and where my mother, Eloise, still lives in the brick house on Pecan Street. The house smelled the way it always smelled on Christmas: ham and clove, cornbread dressing, the burnt-sugar edge of pecan pie, and underneath all of it the lemon oil Mama rubbed into the dining table every single year like the table was the thing that mattered.

My two kids were with me. Katie was twelve that year, tall and shy, already taller than I am. Ryan was nine, gap-toothed, the kind of boy who says thank you to everybody because he means it. Their daddy, my Dale, had been gone three years by then. A heart thing, fast, in the cab of his truck out on the county road by the Aldis place. So it was the three of us, the way it had been the three of us for every holiday since.

I am Carol. I am fifty-two. I am a certified nurse aide at the Prairie View home out on Highway 9, which means I spend my days turning and bathing and feeding people the world mostly forgot, and I am telling you that so you understand I know exactly what it looks like when someone decides a person does not deserve to be fed well. I have seen it done gently, by accident, by tired hands. What I saw at my mother’s table that Christmas was not an accident.

We sat down at two o’clock. My sister Sharon was there with her husband Randy, who owns the Chevrolet lot over in Elk City and never lets you forget it, and their two children, Madison and Brayson, fifteen and thirteen. Great-Grandma Opal was at the head of the table in her chair, the way she had been at the head of every table in that family since before I was born. Opal is my mother’s mother. She was eighty-eight that Christmas. She had lived with Mama since Papaw died, in the back bedroom with the quilt frame and the window that looks at the bird feeder.

Mama carried the ham out on the good platter, the white one with the gold rim that only comes down from the top shelf on Christmas and Easter. She set it in front of Randy to carve, because Randy likes to carve, likes the knife and the little performance of it. And then she started making the plates.