The Christmas Dinner They Gave Away

Opal said, “I understand fine. I am going to go live with Carol and those children. Carol takes care of old people for a living and she is good at it, everybody in this county knows she is good at it, and she will be good to me, and I would rather eat chicken off a plastic tablecloth with people who have room in their hearts than ham off the gold-rim platter with people who do not. I have made up my mind. Somebody get my coat and my pill box.”

And then, Deb said, the thing that nobody expected, the thing that turned the whole family inside out in one afternoon. Opal looked around that table full of aunts and cousins, the whole family that orbits around her, that drives in from three counties to sit near her on her birthday, that calls her the heart of this family, and she said:

“Any of you that wants to come have Sunday dinner with a family that acts right, you know where Carol lives. The rest of you can stay here with Eloise and figure out why the one person who has been watching all of you your whole lives would rather leave.”

Then she picked up her little purse, and she walked to the door, and my aunt Faye, crying, got her coat for her, and my cousin Deb drove her across town to my rent house on Second Street, where I was not even home yet, so they sat in the driveway in Deb’s car with the heater on and waited for me.

I pulled in at a quarter to four. There was my grandmother in the passenger seat of my cousin’s Buick, tiny in her good blue coat, a grocery sack of her pills and her Bible and her reading glasses in her lap. She rolled the window down. She said, “Carol, honey, I hope you’ve got that back room clear. I’ve come to stay a while if you’ll have me.”

I got her inside and I sat her at my table and I made coffee because I did not know what else to do with my hands, and she told me the whole thing, and I cried, and she took my face in both her little cold hands the way she used to when I was small and she said, “You did right walking out that door. I should have walked out of that house forty years ago and taken you with me. I am sorry it took me this long. I was scared, same as you. But I am not scared anymore. I am eighty-nine. What’s she going to do, cut me out of the family? I am the family.”