The Christmas Dinner I Drove Across Town

Grandma Hilda

At five after one, Kurt’s pickup pulled into the drive behind my Suburban.

Kurt came around the passenger side and helped Grandma Hilda down, and then up the front steps, one at a time, with her cane in one hand and his arm in the other.

She is eighty-six. She took her time, and nobody rushed her.

Grandma Hilda raised five children on a dairy farm near Russellville and buried a husband and a son.

She still lives on her own in a little apartment by the senior center, and she still makes her own noodles, and she does not suffer fools.

The whole house got quiet when she came through the door. Thirty people, and you could hear the furnace kick on.

She stopped in the front hall and leaned on her cane, and she looked around that bare house. The empty living room with the church tables.

The lamp on the floor. The colored lights on the mantel, half of them out. The outlines on the paint.

Then she looked at Renae, and Renae’s face went red all the way to her ears.

“Grandma,” Renae started, “I’m sorry, it’s not, I didn’t have time to…”

And Grandma Hilda laughed. She laughed so loud and so long she had to hold onto Kurt’s arm, a big farm laugh that bounced off the bare walls, and it set off half the room, though nobody quite knew what they were laughing at.

“Renae Ann,” she said, when she could talk, “in 1958 the barn burned and took the house with it, and your grandpa and I had Christmas in the machine shed on milk cans with a stock tank for a table. It was the best Christmas we ever had.”

She patted Renae’s cheek with her cold hand. “This is a palace. Somebody take my coat. I’m sitting at the head of the table, and since it’s your party, honey, you’re on dishes.”

Dinner

So that’s how it went. Grandma Hilda sat at the head of Renae’s mother’s oak table, in the one good chair with arms.

Renae sat at the foot. The rest of us sat on folding chairs and church tables in a living room with no couch.

Kurt carved the ham. He’s good at it. He sliced it thin, the way you’re supposed to with a country ham, and he set the bone aside on a saucer.

The glaze had come out right, dark and sticky, and it tasted like the smokehouse.

The green beans were the real kind. The sweet potatoes had the pecan top. There were four dozen deviled eggs, minus the one Kurt ate, and there was not a single one left by two o’clock.

Aunt Marlene had two helpings of everything and told Renae the house had beautiful bones. Dale’s wife said she’d always wanted to see the inside of this place.

Nobody asked where the couch was. Nobody asked about Jeff.

Somewhere in the middle of the meal, one of the cousins said, “Wait, so Mandy made all of this?”

And somebody else said, “Renae assigned it.” And the table went quiet for just a second.

Renae put her fork down. She looked down the whole length of the table, at thirty people, and she said, “Mandy made every bite of it, and I didn’t ask her right. I didn’t ask her at all. That’s on me.”

That was all she said. But she said it out loud, at her own table, to thirty people.

And I have known Renae for fifteen years, and I had never heard her say anything was on her.

Grandma Hilda reached over and patted her hand. “Good girl,” she said. “Now pass the rolls.”