Five Plates and a Folding Chair

“Holidays are for family, Bailey.” Lorna said it the way you would read a sign out loud, flat and finished, like the matter had been settled somewhere I was not invited.

I was on my lunch break at Metro Communications, sitting at my console with a sleeve of saltines and a can of ginger ale.

The board was quiet for once. A Sunday in late November in Sioux Falls, and the worst thing on the screen was a fender bender on Louise.

I had called her because Dad told me to. “Run it by Lorna,” he had said on Friday, when I asked him first. “She’s doing the cooking. It’s her kitchen.” He said it kindly. He always says things kindly.

So I ran it by Lorna. I asked if my three friends from college could come to Thanksgiving. Kat, Jess and Mo.

I told her I would bring two pies and a pan of stuffing and that they would help with dishes.

“Who are these girls again?” she asked, and I could hear the oven door open and shut behind her, and the radio she keeps on the windowsill playing something with a steel guitar.

“My roommates from USD. You met Kat at my graduation. Jess was the tall one. Mo is the one who sent Dad the card when he had his surgery.”

I waited. “They don’t have anywhere to go this year.”

That was true for all three of them, in three different ways.

I had been carrying it around for two weeks, ever since our group text went from jokes to quiet when somebody asked who was going home.

Kat is a nurse at Sanford, on a med surg floor, and she drew the Friday after Thanksgiving. Her family is in Oregon.

You cannot fly to Medford on Wednesday and be back for a seven o’clock shift on Friday unless you are rich or crazy.

Jess’s mom sold the house in Mitchell last spring and moved to Arizona with a man named Ron who Jess does not like.

Her dad has been gone since she was nine. She said she was going to watch the parade in her pajamas and eat a frozen pot pie.

And Mo buried her grandma in August. Her grandma raised her from the time she was six.

There was no one else, not really, just some cousins in Iowa who sent flowers to the funeral and nothing since.

“They’re like family to me,” I told Lorna. “They’d be no trouble. I promise you that.”

“Like family isn’t family,” she said. There was a pause, and the steel guitar kept going. “I’ve got a roast in. I need to baste. We’ll see you Thursday at two.”

And then she was gone, and I was sitting there with a cracker in my hand and my headset around my neck, and a call came in about a dog loose on the interstate, and I took it, because that is the job.

I did not cry at work. I have taken calls from people on the worst day of their lives. I can hold my face still.

But I sat in my car in the parking lot after shift for a long while with the heater running.

Here is why it hurt as much as it did. It was not about one dinner.