The Christmas Dinner They Gave Away

My grandmother lived with us for two years and seven months, in the back room with the quilt frame, which we moved over in Deb’s husband’s truck. They were the best years. My kids got to fall asleep to her stories about the dugout and the dust and the time a tumbleweed the size of a hay bale blew clean through town. Ryan learned to play dominoes from her and got good enough to beat her, almost. Katie learned to quilt. Opal sat at the head of our little plastic-covered table every single night and she said grace and she ate until she was full and she made sure, every night, every single night, that my children got the first and best of everything that came out of my kitchen. “The little ones eat first in this house,” she would say. “That’s the rule. That’s always been the rule where I come from. I just forgot it for a while over on Pecan Street.”

And here is what happened to the family, because you will want to know.

It did not close over the hole like water. It could not, because the hole was where the heart used to be. When Opal left my mother’s table, the family followed the heart. Aunt Faye started coming to Sunday dinner at my house within the month, bringing her peach cobbler. Then Deb and her husband and their kids. Then the Clinton cousins. By the next summer my little rent house could not hold everybody, and we were setting up card tables in the carport and eating off paper plates in the Oklahoma heat, thirty of us, and it was the loudest happiest crowded mess you ever saw, and my children were never once told to wait for the scraps.

My mother spent those Sundays alone in the brick house on Pecan Street with the lemon-oiled table and the gold-rim platter, and Sharon, who found out fast that being the favorite is not worth much when there is nobody left to be favored in front of. Randy and his car lot and his boat could not fill a house. I heard, through Deb, that Mama told people I had stolen her mother. I heard she said Opal had gone senile, which anybody who played dominoes with Opal knew was a lie. I heard a lot of things. I did not go to the brick house again.