The Christmas Dinner I Drove Across Town

The Empty Rooms

I’d like to tell you I felt good right then. I didn’t. Renae read the first few replies with her lips pressed together, and then she looked up, past me, at the Suburban with its hatch up in her driveway.

Then she looked back over her own shoulder, into the house. And that is when I saw it, over her shoulder, through the front hall and into the living room.

There was no couch. There was no rug. There was no tree. There was one lamp sitting on the floor in the corner, plugged into the wall, and the outlines on the paint where pictures used to hang.

I have been a dental assistant for sixteen years. I know what it looks like when somebody has been hiding pain for a long time and you finally put the light on it. Renae had that look.

“Please take it back,” she said, very quietly. “Please, Mandy. Take it back to your house. I’ll text everybody. I’ll say it was a mix up. Please.”

I didn’t move. My arms were starting to shake from the weight of the pan. “Renae,” I said, “where’s your furniture?”

She didn’t answer me. She stepped back from the door, and I took that as an invitation, and I carried the ham past her into her house.

The dining room was through an archway off the front hall, and it was the only room in the house that looked like anyone still lived there.

The long oak table was still there. I knew that table. It had been her mother’s.

It sat twelve, and it had six chairs around it. The other six were gone. The china cabinet was gone.

The sideboard was gone. On the table there was a single folded tablecloth, a green one, sitting there like she had been about to put it on.

I set the ham down in the middle of that table, on top of the folded cloth. Then I turned around.

Renae was standing in the archway with her arms crossed tight over her black dress, and she was crying without making a sound.

What She Said in the Kitchen

I am not going to pretend I knew right then what to do. I wanted to put my arms around her, and I wanted to shake her, both at once.

So I did the thing I know how to do. I went and got the rest of the food.

It took me six trips. Renae didn’t help and she didn’t stop me. On the fourth trip she had gone into the kitchen.

On the fifth she had put the green tablecloth on the table, under the ham, lifting the pan herself to do it.

On the sixth trip I came in with the rolls, and she was standing at her kitchen counter with both hands flat on it, looking at her phone, which was still lighting up every few seconds.

“Aunt Marlene says she’s thrilled to finally see the house,” Renae said, without looking up. “Dale says he’ll bring the church tables here instead. Twenty-two thumbs up. Grandma Hilda’s not on the text, but Kurt will tell her.”

“Kurt’s picking her up at noon,” I said.

She laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. “I sold the couch in May, Mandy. And the bedroom set. And Mom’s china cabinet, to a dealer in Jefferson City, for less than it was worth. I’ve been making the payment on this house by myself since March.”

I set the rolls down very carefully. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Say what? That Jeff took half and the bank wants the other half? That nobody’s even looked at the house since October?”

She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “I just wanted one nice Christmas where I was the one who did it.”

“At my house,” I said. I didn’t say it mean. I just said it.

“At your house.” She nodded. “I know. I know how it sounds. I thought if I did the decorating and the seating chart, then I’d be the hostess, and nobody would have to come up here and see this.”

I stood there in her empty kitchen, which was spotless, with a calendar on the refrigerator and nothing else, and I thought about the numbered list, and the hearts, and the towels. I had been so angry for two weeks.

Some of that anger was still in me. I’ll be honest. But it was standing in a room with a woman who’d been eating supper alone at a table for twelve since March, and it was getting harder to hold onto.

“Well,” I said finally, “they’re all coming here now. So where do you want the deviled eggs?”