The Christmas Dinner I Drove Across Town

The Tree

Kurt and I drove home at a quarter to seven, with my empty casserole dishes clinking in the back of the Suburban. I didn’t say anything for a while. He didn’t either.

When we pulled into our drive, the lights on our little tree were showing through the front window.

It’s a four foot tree. It sits on a table in the den because that’s the only place it fits. My mother gave us the ornaments.

I sat there in the car looking at it. Then I said, “Kurt, she doesn’t have a tree.” And he said, “No, she doesn’t.”

And he got out, and he went in the house, and he came back out carrying our tree, lights and ornaments and all, with the cord dragging in the snow.

We set it in the back seat, wedged with the towels. We drove back up the hill.

Renae answered the door in a sweatshirt with her hair down, with the dish towel still over her shoulder.

Kurt carried the tree into her living room and set it on the floor next to the lamp, where the couch had been, and plugged it in.

It isn’t much of a tree. But it filled that corner up with light.

Renae stood there looking at it with both hands over her mouth. Then she sat down on the floor in front of it, right there, like a little girl, and Kurt sat down next to his sister, and after a minute so did I.

We sat there on the bare floor, the three of us, and nobody said anything. Then Renae put her head on Kurt’s shoulder, and she said, “I’ll pay you back for the ham, Kurtie.” And he said, “No, you won’t.”

After

The house sold in March, to a young couple from Jefferson City with three kids and a dog.

Renae moved into a two bedroom duplex over by the elementary school. It’s small. It’s full of furniture now, most of it from the Schott family.

Dale brought her a couch from his basement. Aunt Marlene sent a rocker up from Springfield in the back of her son’s truck.

Grandma Hilda gave her a quilt she’d made in 1971 that nobody else was allowed to touch.

Renae made the soup, the week after Christmas, with the ham bone and white beans and a little onion, the way their mother used to.

She took a quart of it to Grandma Hilda’s apartment, and she brought a quart to us, still warm, in my own trifle bowl.

This year, Christmas is at Renae’s duplex. She asked me in October, in person, at my kitchen table, and she said please.

I’m bringing the ham. She’s making all eleven sides. She numbered them, of course. She wouldn’t be Renae if she didn’t.

And Grandma Hilda, who is eighty-seven now, has already told everybody that she will be sitting at the head of the table, and that the hostess will be doing the dishes.

I think about that Christmas more than I think about most of them. Not the list, or the couch, or the towels.

Not even the look on Renae’s face when she opened that front door.

I think about those boys coming up the basement stairs with folding chairs in both hands. The colored lights on a bare mantel, half of them burned out.

And at the end of the night, thirty plates in Renae’s sink and one ham bone for soup.