The Christmas I Rented The Fire Hall

She unbuttoned her coat. Her fingers were shaking. She put the apron on over that cream sweater, and I tied it behind her, and she went and stood at my stove and stirred my gravy. She did not walk off from it.

---

It was Ella who found Mr. Kowalski.

I had not introduced them. I looked up from cutting pie and there she was at the head table, standing beside his chair, tracing a poinsettia with one finger.

“Did somebody make this?”

“My wife did,” he said. “A long time before you were born. Before your father was born.”

“All of it? By hand?”

“Every stitch. It took her from October to Easter. She missed Christmas with it altogether the first year. She cried, and then she laughed, and we used it in April.”

Ella thought that over.

“Where is she?”

I started across the room. I did not get there in time, and I am glad of it now.

“She died, honey,” Mr. Kowalski said. “In the spring.”

Ella did not say she was sorry, the way a grown person would. She looked at the empty folding chair next to him. Then she pulled it out and sat down in it.

“I’ll sit here, then,” she said. “So it’s not empty.”

That old man put his big square hand over his eyes.

Sam came and climbed up on the other side, because wherever Ella goes, Sam goes. He set his flashlight on Dorothy’s tablecloth and asked Mr. Kowalski if he wanted to see it work. And Mr. Kowalski took his hand down and said that he would, very much.

I looked back at the kitchen pass-through. Amber was standing there with the whisk in her hand, watching her children. Her face was wet.

Greg was behind her. He had found a dish towel. My son, who an hour before had been sitting on a white couch eating little sandwiches, was drying roasting pans beside the fire chief and the young father from the motel. Three men at a sink, not saying much, the way men visit.

I heard Dale tell him, “Your dad stood right where you’re standing. Twenty-six years of pancake breakfasts.”

“I know it,” Greg said. “I used to sleep under that table.”

---

Amber and I did the last of the dishes ourselves. It was past eight. The hall had mostly cleared. The Petersons had gone back to the motel with a foil pan of ham and both leftover pies. Mr. Kowalski was in his overcoat, buttoned right this time, folding his tablecloth. Ella was holding the other end.

Amber washed. I dried. For a while there was only the water.

“You didn’t say anything,” she said finally. “At the door. I thought you would.”

“What would I have said?”

“That I was awful. That it was a list. That you can’t hand a person a list.”

“Well,” I said. “It was a list.”

She laughed, one breath of it, and then her eyes filled again.

“I made Greg call. I couldn’t do it. I wrote it out and I made him read it, and I stood in the hallway and listened to him do it, and I hated myself the whole time.”

“That part was not right, Amber,” I said. I said it gently, but I said it. “Not the hosting. The hosting was your due. Having him read it to me. That hurt him and it hurt me.”

“I know.”

“All right, then. That’s said.”

She scrubbed a pot that was already clean.