The Christmas Dinner I Drove Across Town

The text came on the ninth of December, at twenty to one on a Wednesday, while I had both hands in a patient’s mouth and my phone buzzing in my scrub pocket like a trapped bee.

I didn’t read it until lunch. I sat in my car behind the dental office in Eldon with a turkey sandwich and the heater running, and I read it twice before I understood what I was looking at.

“Christmas at Kurt and Mandy’s this year! 1:00. Thirty of us so far. Mandy, you’re on the ham and the sides, list below. I’ll handle decorating and seating. Love you all!”

It had gone out in the family group text, the one with forty-one people in it, the one that mostly carries birthday wishes and pictures of crappie from the lake.

My sister-in-law had sent it to every Schott in three counties before she sent a word to me.

Under it was the list. Renae had numbered it. Ham, bone in, the good kind, enough for thirty.

Then the sides, one through eleven, with little notes in parentheses, like I was a caterer she had hired and wasn’t sure she could trust.

Green bean casserole, the real kind and not the can soup. Sweet potatoes with the pecan top. Scalloped potatoes.

Mashed potatoes. Corn casserole. Deviled eggs, four dozen. Seven layer salad. Cranberry relish. Baked macaroni and cheese. Broccoli salad. Yeast rolls, homemade if possible.

Below the list were three red hearts. Below the hearts, Kurt’s cousin Dale had already answered with a thumbs up and “Can’t wait, Mandy!”

By the time I finished my sandwich, eleven more people had hearted it.

Nobody had asked me. Nobody had asked Kurt. We had never once said a word about hosting Christmas. Our house is a three bedroom ranch on a quarter acre off Highway 52, and on a good day it seats eight if two of them are little.

I put the phone face down on the passenger seat and went back in and cleaned teeth for four more hours.

I am a dental assistant. I have been one for sixteen years. I know how to keep my face pleasant while something hurts.

Kurt Calls His Sister

Kurt got home at ten after seven that night, gray in the face the way all the carriers are in December.

His route runs out past the county line, and that time of year the parcels are stacked to the roof.

I handed him my phone before he got his boots off. He read it standing on the rug by the door, snow melting off his laces, then read it again with the reading glasses he hates to admit he needs.

“She didn’t say one word to you first?” he asked. I shook my head. He sat down on the bench by the door and called his sister right there in his coat, with the phone on speaker so I could hear.

Renae answered on the fifth ring, bright as a new penny. “Kurtie! Did you see? Everybody is so excited. Aunt Marlene is driving up from Springfield. She hasn’t come to Christmas in four years.”

“Renae, you can’t just put Christmas at somebody’s house,” Kurt said. “Mandy works. I’m working six days a week till the twenty-fourth. We never said we’d host. We don’t even have the room.”

There was a little pause, and when her voice came back it was softer, the way it gets when she wants something.

“Your house is central. Everybody knows where it is. And mine’s not an option this year. You know it’s being shown.”

“Then have it at the church hall,” Kurt said. “Or at Dale’s. Dale has that big heated shop. He’d set up tables in a heartbeat if you asked him like a person.”

“It’s done, Kurt. Thirty people already said yes. Do you want me to text everybody back and tell Grandma Hilda that Christmas is canceled? She already asked me who’s picking her up.”

That was the end of it, really. Kurt looked at me over the top of the phone, and I looked back at him, and neither one of us was going to be the person who told an eighty-six-year-old woman that Christmas was off.

“We’ll talk about it,” Kurt said, which is what Schott men say when a conversation is over and they lost it.

Renae said she loved us and hung up before he could say anything else.

He sat there a while with his boots still on. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Mandy. I’ll call her again Sunday.”

And he did call her again on Sunday, and she didn’t pick up, and she didn’t pick up Monday either.