The Rooms I Booked at the Super 8
The Group Text
I found out we were hosting Christmas for twenty six people the way you find out about weather, from a phone buzzing on the kitchen counter while I was standing at the sink with my hands in warm dishwater.
The phone was Cory’s. He was out in the garage putting air in the truck tires, and the screen lit up, and lit up again, and kept lighting up. A family group text goes off like popcorn once it gets going, and his family’s never knew when to quit.
I was not snooping. I was drying a glass and the thing would not stop, so I leaned over the counter to see if it was something that needed him right that minute, if somebody had wrecked or taken sick.
It was his mother. “Can’t wait, honey. Tell Allyson she’s a saint.” Then his aunt Deb. “What should we bring? How many days are we staying?” Then a cousin I had met exactly twice at a funeral. “Pool at your place or do the kids need to pack suits lol.”
I set the glass down slow. We did not have a pool. We had a three bedroom house on Sycamore Street with one full bath and a half bath downstairs that ran all night if you did not jiggle the handle just so.
I scrolled up, because you do, even when your stomach is already somewhere down around your knees. The baby rolled under my ribs the way she did whenever I went still, like she could feel me stop breathing and wanted to know why.
The first message in the thread was from Cory himself, sent two days before, a Tuesday, while I was across town at my prenatal checkup getting my belly measured and being told I was right on track for a February girl.
“Family. It’s settled. Christmas at our place this year. Come the 22nd, stay through the 27th. Plenty of room. Allyson can’t wait to have everybody.”
Plenty of room. Five days. Everybody. I read it twice to be sure the words meant what they plainly meant, and they did.
I am thirty years old. I have hosted Thanksgiving. I can cook for a crowd and smile doing it. But there is a kind of generous a person is with somebody else’s back, and I was looking at a whole message thread of it, and every bit of the back it was being generous with was mine.