The Man I Let Go Before Christmas

Dobbs.

Every woman in this part of the country marks her dishes like that, so they find their way home from the church basement and the funeral lunch. Missy’s say our name, in her writing. Jean Dobbs had taped that dish and written on it a long time ago, expecting to get it back from somewhere.

And Earl had taken it down from her cupboard, and gotten out her recipe card, and stood in his kitchen by himself peeling potatoes for the man who had cost him three hundred dollars a month for the rest of his life.

I sat down on the kitchen floor.

I slid down the front of the stove with my back against the oven door and put my face in the dish towel. I had not cried on the twentieth. I had not cried in the surgery waiting room. I cried on my kitchen linoleum over a strip of masking tape.

Paige sat down next to me. She did not ask. She put her head against my arm and held the jar of quarters in her lap.

After a while she said, “Who was that?”

“A man from work.”

“He’s nice.”

“Yes he is.”

“Is he your friend?”

There it was. Twelve years old.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t been any friend to him.”

“Then why’d he bring us supper?”

“I don’t know, honey.” And then, because I was on the floor anyway, “I think because that’s what he does.”

We baked the potatoes. Three fifty, an hour, foil on till the last ten minutes. They came out bubbling at the edges and brown on top, and the kitchen smelled like somebody lived in it again. Paige plugged in the tree. We ate at the table with the good plates because she said it was Christmas Eve.

They were the best scalloped potatoes I ever put in my mouth, and every bite went down like a stone.

We wrapped half the dish in a towel and took it to the hospital at seven. Missy could only manage two forkfuls, but she shut her eyes over them.

“Who made these?”

“Earl Dobbs,” Paige said, before I could. “He came to the door. He brought quarters too, look. He said there’s a secret hot chocolate button.”

She went down the hall to find it. I could hear the quarters dropping, one at a time.

Missy looked at me.

“Earl Dobbs,” she said.

“He heard at the Legion.”

“And he came to our house.”

“He never said a word about the job, Missy. Not one. I tried to bring it up and he wouldn’t let me.”

“Well,” Missy said. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Yes you do,” she said. “You just don’t like what it costs.”

Paige and I had Christmas morning in that room. Missy’s mother had left a sack of presents with the nurses. Paige drank four hot chocolates off the third button down and bought crackers for an old man in the green chairs whose wife was two doors along. She had watched how it was done.

That night, after I got her to bed, I drove to the plant.

The lines were down until the second of January, but a foreman’s key works every day of the year. I let myself in the side door.

I walked down to line three and stood at Earl’s bench.