“I did,” she said. She sounded surprised that he remembered. Then she was quiet a while, just watching him work her yard the way his daddy had worked it.
When Clay went around back to the shed for more bags, I set my rake down and went up on the porch.
I didn’t ask permission. I’m a nurse, and I had watched that woman go up and down those steps for three weeks.
“Vonda,” I said, “how long has that hip been like this? And don’t tell me it’s fine. I watched you on those steps.”
She looked at me the way she has always looked at me, like I was something on the bill she had not ordered.
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Then something gave out in her face, and she looked away at the yard.
“Since before Ray,” she said. “Worse since. A lot worse since.”
“Have you seen anybody about it?”
“Dr. Hale says I need a new one. I told him I’d think about it.”
She picked at the edge of the quilt. “I can’t have a surgery with nobody to drive me and nobody to see about me after. Who’s going to see about me?”
I sat down on the top step at her feet. “I see about people for a living, Vonda. Four days a week. That’s my whole job. I’d see about you. You know I would.”
She didn’t answer that. She looked out at Clay coming back around the corner with the bags, and at Rhett dragging Ray’s rake through the side yard, and at Gracie holding a bag open for him.
“I put it on you,” she said, very quietly. “All of it. I know I did. It was easier than putting it on him. And it was easier than putting it on Ray, for working himself into the ground when nobody asked him to.”
“I know,” I said.
“You don’t have to be nice about it.”
“I’m not being nice,” I said. “I’m telling you I know. I sit with grieving people every week. It lands where it can. It landed on me. And I’m still here.”
She looked at me a long time. Then she reached down and put her hand on my shoulder, and she left it there.
Her hand was cold and thin, and it was the first time in fifteen years she had ever touched me on purpose.
“Christmas dinner’s at two,” she said. “Don’t bring a thing. I mean it. Not even rolls. I’ll know if you do.”
Christmas Day fell on a Friday that year. We went to the early service at our church in town, and the kids opened their presents, and at a quarter till two we pulled into the driveway of that brick house under the bare oaks.
Vonda opened the front door before we got up the steps. She had on a red sweater I had never seen, and lipstick, and she smelled like her kitchen: ham and sweet potatoes and yeast rolls, even though I had been told not to bring any.
The dining room table had the white tablecloth on it, the same one from Thanksgiving. And it was set.
Her plate at the head. And four more. Clay’s, and mine, and two for the kids, with a candy cane laid across each napkin.
I have been to that house for fifteen Christmases. There had always been room for us.
But she had always let me set our places myself, as if to say we were there by permission. This year she had set every one, and mine first.