The Christmas Dinner They Gave Away

I watched her do it. She fixed Madison’s plate first, two thick center slices of ham, the crispy edge pieces that everybody fights over, a mound of dressing, the deviled eggs with the paprika still bright on them. Then Brayson’s, the same, heaped. Then Randy. Then Sharon.

Then she looked at my Katie and my Ryan, who were sitting up straight with their hands in their laps the way I raised them, and she said, “You two can have what’s left when the big folks are done.”

I thought I had heard her wrong. I said, “Mama.”

She did not even look at me. She was scraping the last of the dressing onto her own plate. She said, “There’s plenty of bread and there’s the green beans. They’re not going to starve, Carol. Don’t make a thing of it.”

The platter went around. By the time it reached my children there were two end slices left, the dry gray ones with the gristle, and the heel of the ham that nobody eats. The deviled eggs were gone. The dressing bowl had been scraped to the glaze. My boy looked at the platter and then he looked up at me, and he did the thing that broke me. He smiled, a little, like he was trying to make it okay for me. He said, real quiet, “I like the ends, Mama. They’re crunchy.”

Nine years old, and already learning to make himself small at that table so the grown woman at the head of it would not feel bad about what she had done to him.

Katie did not say anything. She just put her napkin in her lap and looked at the wall, and I knew that look, because it is my look, it is the look I wore at that same table when I was twelve and my mother did the same arithmetic with me that she was now doing with my daughter. Sharon gets the whole slices. Carol gets what is left.

I need you to understand this was not the first time. This is the part that is hard to say out loud, because people hear it and they think you must be exaggerating, no mother does that. Mine did. For as long as I can remember, there were two kinds of grandchildren at that table and two kinds of children before them, and I was always the second kind.

Let me tell you how far back it goes.

When Sharon and I were girls, Mama kept a shoebox in her closet where she put money for school clothes. Every August she took Sharon to the Oklahoma City mall, a whole day of it, lunch at the food court, a new everything. She took me to the Dollar General on Main and the church rummage sale in the fellowship hall. She told me I was the practical one. She said it like it was a gift she was giving me, the gift of not needing things. I wore Sharon’s grown-out clothes until I was sixteen. I learned to say I liked them.