The Rooms I Booked at the Super 8
Christmas Dinner
Here is the part I never planned, the part that ended up worth a good deal more than two thousand six hundred dollars.
On Christmas Day, Cory cooked. Not helped. Cooked.
He was up at six, while his whole family was still asleep in motel beds with the little coffee makers gurgling, and he had the turkey rubbed and in the oven by eight. He fought that crooked oven all morning long, rotating the pan a quarter turn every twenty minutes because the left side ran hot and scorched, muttering to himself, learning in one single frantic morning the exact thing I had been managing in silence since October without a word of thanks.
His family came over at noon, and they came different than they would have. They came rested. Showered in their own motel bathrooms, swum out, fed a hot breakfast not one of them had to cook or clean up after. They came through my front door loose and easy instead of frazzled and cramped, and that one thing changes a whole house. Nobody was elbowing for the bathroom. Nobody had slept on my floor with a crick in his neck. They came to visit for an afternoon, and then they would go back to their pool, and visiting is a thing I can do beautifully with my feet up on a chair.
Cory made the mashed potatoes and the green beans with the bacon the way his mother does, and he burned the first pan of rolls black and made a whole second batch without complaining, and he carved the turkey standing up at the counter while I sat. When Linda rose halfway out of her chair to take over the gravy whisk, the way she has taken over every gravy in that family for fifty years, Cory said, “No, Mom. Sit. I’ve got it.” And she sat back down. And she looked at her son at the stove, and then she looked over at me in my chair with my feet up, and something moved across her face that I do believe was the front edge of understanding.
I did not lift a single thing. I set the table, sitting the whole time, folding the napkins in my lap and handing them up. That was my entire job, and my husband made good and sure it stayed my entire job, hovering over me, refilling my water glass before it was half down, telling me twice to get my swollen feet up on the second chair where he could see them.
The kids ate at the counter and dripped cranberry everywhere. Marge sat at my right hand, because I had asked Phil at the desk that she be brought over first and I had saved her the good chair, and through the whole blessing she held my wrist in her dry papery hand and did not turn it loose until the amen, and even then only partway.