The Christmas Dinner They Gave Away

When I made the honor roll, Mama said that was nice and asked if I had taken the trash out. When Sharon made the cheer squad, Mama put the picture from the Carmichael Courier on the refrigerator and left it there four years, until it was sun-faded and curled at the corners, and she still would not take it down.

When I married Dale, a wheat farmer’s son with dirt under his nails and the kindest eyes in three counties, Mama wore black to the wedding. She told the whole reception, loud, by the punch bowl, that she had hoped I would do better. When Sharon married Randy with his car lot and his boat, Mama cried happy tears for a month and paid for a band.

I could go on. I could tell you about the Christmas when I was seventeen and every gift under the tree had Sharon’s name on it and there was one envelope for me with a note that said Mama had decided I was too old for presents now. I could tell you how, after Dale died and I was raising two kids on a nurse aide’s pay and burying my husband all at the same time, my mother’s contribution was to tell me that she had always worried I married beneath me and now look.

So no. The plates were not new. The plates were just the clearest I had ever seen it, because this time it was not me taking the ends of the ham. It was my babies.

And something about watching my son make himself small, watching him do the exact thing I had spent forty years doing, something in me that had been bent so long it had forgotten it was bent, it stood up.

I did not yell. I want you to know that, because later Sharon told everybody I made a scene, and I did not. Cold is worse than loud, my daddy used to say, and he was right.

I stood up from my chair. I said, “Katie. Ryan. Get your coats.”

My kids looked at me. Mama finally looked at me too.

Mama said, “Oh, sit down, Carol. Good Lord. It’s Christmas.”

I said, “It is. And my children are not going to eat the parts you throw away on Christmas or any other day. We’re going home.”

Sharon laughed, that little puff of air through the nose she does. Randy kept carving like nothing was happening. Mama’s face went hard and flat, the way it does, and she said the thing she always says, the thing that had worked on me my whole life.