The Christmas Dinner I Drove Across Town

Who Renae Is

I should tell you about Renae, because I don’t want you to think she’s a monster.

She isn’t. She’s forty-five, four years older than Kurt, and she has been the one who organized the Schotts since she was a teenager.

When their mother passed four years ago, it was Renae who planned the funeral lunch in the basement of the Methodist church, down to the number of ham salad sandwiches.

She made the slideshow. She called every cousin. She did it well.

She loves to host. She loves a party the way some women love a garden. She loves the planning and the lists and the moment when everybody walks in and says how nice it all looks. But she does it at other people’s houses.

Baby showers at the church. Easter at Aunt Marlene’s when Aunt Marlene still lived close. Graduation parties at the shelter house in the city park.

In the eleven years she was married to Jeff, I had been inside her house on the hill maybe three times.

It’s a tan split-level on the north side of town, with brown shutters and a brick front.

Jeff liked a quiet house, she always said. Jeff didn’t like people tracking through. So we went to the park.

Jeff left in March. That much the whole family knew. Renae told us at Easter, at the shelter house, with her sunglasses on, in one sentence, and then she asked who wanted more potato salad. Nobody ever heard the rest of it.

By August, the house was listed. She said she was downsizing. She said it like it was a choice she had been wanting to make, and she said it with a smile, and so we all let her have it.

I am telling you this because I knew all of it in December, and I still didn’t put it together.

I was too busy being mad about a numbered list. I am not proud of that part.