The Christmas Dinner They Gave Away

So when she sat at that Christmas table and watched my mother hand the good meat to Madison and Brayson and tell my babies to wait for the scraps, she was not watching strangers get slighted. She was watching the two children she asked about every Sunday get told, to their faces, on Christmas, that they were worth less. And she was watching me, the granddaughter she had fed buttermilk to on the porch, finally stand up and refuse it. I did not know any of that was landing on her as it happened. She sat so still. She always sat so still. I have learned since that still water can be very deep and very cold and can be deciding things you cannot see.

Those three days between Christmas and her birthday were long ones in my house. I kept my phone face-down. I half expected my mother to call and I was braced for it to be cruel, and I was more afraid it would not come at all, which is its own kind of cruel. It did not come. What came instead, on the twenty-eighth, was a call from Opal. I almost did not recognize her number because she so rarely called from Mama’s landline on her own. She asked how the kids were. She asked if we had eaten well on Christmas, and I told her the truth, that we had gone home and had a chicken and the kids ate until they were full, and there was a long quiet on the line, and then she said, “Good. That’s good, honey. Children ought to eat until they’re full.” I did not think anything of it at the time. I thought it was just Opal being Opal. I know now it was my grandmother making up her mind.

Three days after Christmas, on the thirtieth, it was Great-Grandma Opal’s eighty-ninth birthday. The family does it every year at Mama’s, a lunch, a store cake with Opal’s name in gel icing, the aunts and the cousins driving in from Weatherford and Clinton and Sayre. It is the one day the whole family is in one room. Opal at the head of the table, blown out of the way by everybody, the little bird they all claim to adore.

I was not invited, of course. I had walked out. I was out. I spent that morning at Prairie View, working a shift, turning Mr. Hildreth and feeding Miss Nadine her applesauce one careful spoon at a time, and I was not thinking about my family at all, or I was trying hard not to.

My phone started going off around one o’clock. My cousin Deb first, then my aunt Faye, then Deb again. I was mid-shift so I did not pick up. When I got to my car at three there were eleven missed calls and a voicemail from Deb that was just her breathing and saying, “Carol. Carol, call me, you are not going to believe. Call me.”