The Christmas Dinner They Gave Away

I cried in the bathroom later with the fan on so they would not hear. I grieved it. You can know a thing is right and still grieve it. I had just told my mother I was done, and some animal part of a daughter’s heart does not care how cruel the mother is, it only knows the word mother, and it howls. I let it howl into a towel and then I washed my face and went and watched a Christmas movie with my kids on the couch under Dale’s old quilt.

I figured that was the end of it. Carol finally walks out, forty years too late, and the family closes over the hole like water. Sharon would be the only daughter now. Mama would tell the story at church about how her poor daughter Carol had always been difficult and now had cut her own children off from their family, bless her heart. I knew the shape of what would happen. I had seen this family handle its exiles before.

I did not count on Opal.

I should tell you more about my grandmother, so you understand what it meant for her to do what she did. Opal was not sweet in the way people mean when they call an old woman sweet, soft and vague and easy to talk over. She was sharp as a tack and twice as quiet. She noticed everything. When I was a girl and would ride my bike the eight blocks to her and Papaw’s house to get away from Pecan Street, she never made a fuss over me, never told me I was special, but she would have a glass of buttermilk and a piece of cornbread waiting on the step like she had known I was coming, and she would sit with me on the porch glider and not say much and let me just be a kid who was wanted. I understood, young, that Opal saw me. In a family where I was invisible, my grandmother saw me, and she did it without a single speech, and I think that quiet seeing is the only reason I grew up able to stand at all.

She saw my children the same way. In the three years since Dale died, the one person in that whole family who ever asked after my kids by name was Opal. She would call my house on a Sunday evening, her voice thin on the line, and she would not ask about me, she would ask, “How is that Ryan doing with his reading? Is Katie still drawing those horses?” She kept track. She knew Ryan was scared of the dark and that Katie wanted to be a veterinarian. Nobody else on Pecan Street could have told you one true thing about my children, but Opal could have filled a page.