The Christmas Dinner I Drove Across Town

The List Grows

I want to be fair and say that I could have fought harder. I could have texted the family group myself and said, “We aren’t hosting.”

Kurt could have. We talked about it every night that week, lying in the dark.

But every way we said it out loud, it came out the same. Thirty people with plans.

An aunt driving two and a half hours from Springfield. Grandma Hilda asking who was picking her up. And us, the ones who canceled Christmas.

So I made a grocery list. I am a list person too, as it turns out.

That is probably why Renae and I have never been able to stand each other for longer than a holiday meal.

I priced hams for thirty. A spiral ham from the grocery store would have done it, honestly, but Renae had written “the good kind,” and in the Schott family the good kind means a country ham from the smokehouse out past California.

A whole bone-in country ham, aged, close to fourteen pounds. It came to three hundred eighty-nine dollars with tax.

I stood at the counter with my debit card and the man said, “Big Christmas this year?” and I said, “Apparently.”

A real country ham isn’t something you just warm up. It has to soak. It’s cured in salt for months, and if you don’t soak it, nobody can eat more than two bites without reaching for the tea.

So it went into the big blue cooler on my back porch on the twenty-second, in cold water, with a brick on the lid so the raccoons wouldn’t get ideas.

I changed the water every morning before work and every night after.

The sides came to another two hundred and thirty dollars, give or take. Four dozen eggs. Ten pounds of sweet potatoes.

A whole case of green beans, because Renae had said the real kind. Three kinds of cheese. Two pounds of pecans.

Kurt wanted to put it on the credit card. I didn’t want to. We put it on the debit card and ate grilled cheese for a week, and that was all right. We’ve eaten grilled cheese for worse reasons.

The Couch

On the twenty-third, at 9:15 at night, I was standing at my sink peeling the eighth pound of potatoes when my phone lit up on the windowsill.

It was Renae. It was not the family group this time. It was just me.

“Hey! Can Kurt move your couch out to the garage tomorrow? We’ll need room for the long tables. I’m borrowing four from the church. Dale will bring them by at noon on Christmas.”

I read it and kept peeling. Then the phone lit up again before I’d finished the potato in my hand.

“Also maybe new towels in the hall bathroom? Aunt Marlene notices things. And a centerpiece, I’ll bring that. Don’t worry about the decorating, that’s my job! Love you!”

I set the peeler down. I dried my hands on the dish towel. I looked at the cooler through the back door window, with the brick on the lid and the ham in it that cost more than our electric bill.

Kurt was asleep in the recliner with the news on. He had worked eleven hours. He had another eleven tomorrow, Christmas Eve, the worst day of the year for a carrier, every last package in Miller County that somebody waited too long to order.

I didn’t wake him. I stood there and thought about it for a long time, maybe twenty minutes, with the potato water going cold in the sink.

And it came to me so plainly I almost laughed. It was Renae’s party. She’d said so herself, to forty-one people.

She was the hostess. She had a seating chart and a centerpiece and four long tables coming from the church.

Everybody knows where you have a party. You have it at the hostess’s house.

I wasn’t going to cancel anybody’s Christmas. I wasn’t going to text anybody that dinner was off.

Every dish on that list was going to get made, and made right. I was only going to move it to the hostess.