The Chair Grandma Pulled Out for Me

Thirty One Plates

There were thirty-one of them for Christmas dinner that year. I know the number because Lorene made me count.

She stood at my shoulder in the kitchen and had me lay out the good plates, the ones with a thin gold ring worn almost clean off the edge.

“Thirty-one,” she said, counting each one down out loud with me, as if I could not be trusted to reach that number on my own.

“You’ll carry them out two at a time,” she said. “Oldest first. Then the men. Then the children. Then the wives. You eat last, in here. You know the order now.”

The ham was a spiral-cut, twenty-two pounds, honey-glazed. Her husband had been bragging on the size of it since we pulled in that morning.

There was a turkey besides the ham, and two deep pans of cornbread dressing, and green beans that had been cooking down with bacon grease since before sunup.

The smell of all of it filled that whole house. I was hungry in a way that felt less like a want and more like being hollowed out from the inside.

I had been up since three that morning with the pies, and I had not eaten a thing but a slice of dry toast in the dark before we left. I kept swallowing and telling my stomach to hush.

There was a radio on low in the front room, carols turned down under the talk, and through the window I could see the men’s breath hanging white over by the chicken houses. It was pretty, if I let myself see it. I did not let myself much.

I tied the apron tighter and I picked up a stack of plates. I did not say one word about any of it.

Somewhere between the pecan pie and the ham, I had made up my mind. I was not going to give Lorene the fight she had set her table for.

Because that was the real thing, under all of it. She wanted me to refuse.

She wanted me to cry, or to run out to the truck, or to call down the hall for Brett to come save me. She wanted a story.

She wanted a story she could tell for the next forty Christmases, about the little girl from the motel town who thought she was too good to serve and could not take a family joke.

I was not going to be that story. So I picked up the first two plates and I carried them out to the table.