The Christmas Dinner I Drove Across Town

The Sink

After pie, Renae got up and started clearing.

Aunt Marlene got up to help, and Grandma Hilda said, “Sit down, Marlene. It’s Renae’s party.”

Then she looked down the table at me and winked, so I knew she knew exactly what had happened.

Renae didn’t argue. Her dishwasher had been broken since summer, it turned out, which was one more thing she hadn’t told anybody.

So she filled the sink with hot water and soap, rolled up the sleeves of her black dress, and washed every dish.

Thirty plates. Thirty forks, thirty knives, thirty glasses. My eleven casserole dishes, one at a time, including the corn casserole, which sticks.

Kurt’s mother’s trifle bowl, which she washed so carefully I thought she might cry again.

It took her two hours. Her face was red the whole time, from the hot water and from everything else.

The cousins went home in ones and twos, and every one of them stopped at the kitchen door to say thank you to her.

At first she couldn’t look at them. By the end she was saying, “Thank you for coming,” and meaning it.

I dried. I hadn’t planned to, but I picked up a towel at some point, and she didn’t tell me to stop.

We stood there side by side at her sink as the sky outside the window over it went from gray to dark blue.

What She Told Me

Around six, when it was just the two of us and Kurt asleep on a folding chair with Grandma Hilda’s coat over his knees, Renae turned off the water and told me the rest of it.

Jeff hadn’t just left. He had left for a woman he worked with, in Columbia, and he had taken the savings to do it.

The house was in both their names, and the payment was more than Renae made at the title company in a month.

She’d sold the furniture a room at a time. First the guest room. Then the den. Then the couch.

She’d lie on the living room floor at night, she said, under a quilt, watching the television on her laptop, because she couldn’t stand to go upstairs.

“I walk through this house every night and turn on every light,” she said, “so it looks like somebody lives here when people drive by. I didn’t want anybody to see it. I didn’t want Grandma to see it. I didn’t want you to see it, especially.”

“Why me especially?” I asked.

She folded the dish towel in half and then in half again. “Because you and Kurt have it so nice. That little house. You two laughing in the kitchen. Every time I’m over there, I feel like I’m standing outside a window.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I had spent two weeks thinking she thought she was better than me.

It had never once crossed my mind that she might be lonely in my kitchen.

“You could have just asked,” I said finally. “If you’d asked me, I’d have said yes. I’d have cooked it all. I’d have done it at our house, and I’d have let you do the seating chart, and I would never have said one word.”

“I know,” Renae said. “That’s the worst part. I know you would have. I just couldn’t stand to ask.”

She took out her checkbook then, from a drawer by the sink, and she wrote me a check for six hundred and twenty dollars and held it out.

I looked at it, and I thought about the payment on that house, and I didn’t take it.

“Keep it,” I said. “Make the soup next week and bring some to Grandma’s. That’s what I want. Take the ham bone.”

She looked at me a long time. Then she put the check back in the drawer.