The Biscuits I Made in His Kitchen

How We Set The Limit

We had agreed on that limit three weeks before, on a Sunday, sitting in Daddy’s own kitchen. Reva had agreed to it louder than anybody at the table.

His name was Clyde, though Mama had been about the only soul alive who ever used it. To the rest of us he was just Daddy, and after April there was nobody left to call him anything else.

Mama had passed in April. It was fast at the end, faster than the doctors down in Paducah had led us to believe it would be.

One month she was canning and the next she was in a hospital bed in the front room, and the first Christmas without her was coming at us like weather off the river.

Nobody wanted to shop. Nobody wanted to stand in a store and pretend the year was ordinary. I was the one who said maybe we keep it small.

Just something small each, I said, because the thing was not the thing. Daddy had looked grateful when I said it. Grateful for the mercy of a small day.

So we made a rule. Twenty-five dollars a gift for Daddy and no more. The point was not what was under the tree.

The point was that we all show up. That we sit in his house. That we do not leave him alone in it on the worst day of a bad year.

Reva said yes. She said, “That is smart, Dana, we are all stretched thin this year.” She drives a lease that costs more a month than my mortgage, but she said it.

And I believed her. That is the part I keep coming back to, lying awake.

I believed my own sister when she looked me dead in the eye over Daddy’s kitchen table and agreed to a small and gentle Christmas for a grieving old man.

Our brother Wade was overseas that year on a contract job and could not get home. So it was down to the two of us to carry Daddy through the day.

I thought we would carry him together. That was my mistake. I thought the two of us were pulling the same direction.

Mama used to say Reva and I were two hands on the same body. One hand always knew where the other one was.

That had not been true for a long time, and I had quit admitting it out loud, even to Jeff.