The Form My Son Filled Out

The Christmas Table

The ham was still warm on the platter when my daughter-in-law said it, and I had the serving fork in my hand.

“We think it’s time to look at daycare in the new year,” Brianne said. She was cutting Cody’s meat into little squares, not looking up. “Phyllis, honestly, you’re sweet, but you’re getting too old to be useful with two of them. Last week you let the baby cry for twenty minutes before you heard her.”

I set the fork down on the edge of the platter. The baby, Ella, was asleep against my shoulder right then, her fist curled into my cardigan. I had not let her cry. The monitor had died and nobody had charged it, but I did not say that.

Drew was across the table pouring himself more tea. My son. Thirty-two years old and still ducking his head the way he did at nine when he knew a thing was wrong and did not want to be the one to fix it.

“Mom, it’s not a big deal,” he said. “You’ve done a lot. We just think the kids need, you know, a real setting. Structure. People trained for it.”

I had been trained for it. I raised him. I raised his brother. I had been keeping his children five days a week for three years, and before that I kept half the children on our road while their mothers worked the second shift at the seat plant. But I understood what he meant. He meant young. He meant a tile floor and a laminated schedule and a girl of twenty-two who did not have gray coming in at the part.

“Too old to be useful,” I said. I said it plain, the way you test a word to see if it is really the one somebody used.

Brianne finally looked up. “I didn’t mean it ugly.”

“I know, honey,” I said, and I did not say the rest.

The rest was this. I had gotten up at five that morning to put a ham in so my son and his family would have Christmas dinner. I had bought the children’s presents on my own money because Drew was behind on the truck payment again. I had a plate of deviled eggs in the refrigerator that I had made the way his daddy, Roy, liked them, which is to say with too much mustard, and Roy was out in the truck right then, keeping the engine running against the cold because the heater in the house was set low to save on the propane.

I rocked a little in my chair with the baby. Across from me my son studied his tea like it was going to tell him something.

“Well,” I said. “The new year, then.”