“I heard you.”
“We still want to see you.”
“Coffee and gifts on the twenty-third.”
“Right.”
“All right.”
“Mom.”
“Yes?”
“You’re okay?”
There are questions people ask because they want the truth, and questions they ask because they want permission to stop feeling uncomfortable.
I loved my son enough to know the difference.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
After we hung up, I stayed at the table.
The cardinal disappeared.
The radio kept playing for another minute before I reached over and switched it off.
I didn’t cry.
Instead I sat looking at the wreath and remembered school plays in overheated gymnasiums. Soccer practices forty minutes from home. Fevers at two in the morning. College applications spread across this same kitchen table.
Parents don’t keep score when their children are young.
At least they shouldn’t.
But one careless sentence can make old memories arrive all at once.
I wasn’t thinking, Look what you owe me.
I was thinking, How did everything I gave you become something you were embarrassed by?
I made tea.
I sat in the darkened living room and looked at the empty corner where the Christmas tree would go.
For the first time in years, I wondered whether I should bother putting it up.
That thought lasted maybe ten minutes.
Then I got irritated with myself.
I was sixty-three years old.
I had been making Christmas since I was a child.
Daniel could choose where to spend December 25. He could eat food prepared by a private chef in a mountain house if that made him happy.
But he did not get to decide whether Christmas still happened in my home.
That was mine to decide.
There were several things I did not do that night.
I did not call my sister in Phoenix, because she had disliked Natalie since the wedding and would have turned one thoughtless phone call into proof of everything she had ever believed.
I did not call Daniel back while I was angry.
And I did not cancel Christmas.
The next morning, I called Ruth.
Ruth lived across the street and two houses down. She was seventy-four, sharp-eyed, practical, and completely unimpressed by most forms of nonsense.
We had been friends for eleven years.
After my knee replacement, she had brought me soup every other evening for two weeks. When her husband went through chemotherapy, I sat with her in waiting rooms and drove her home on days when she was too tired to trust herself behind the wheel.
He had died the previous spring.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“If you’re calling before nine, somebody better be sick or there better be coffee.”
“I have coffee.”
“That’s not the same as bringing me coffee.”
“I’ll make you some when you get here.”
There was a pause.
“All right. What’s wrong?”
Twenty minutes later, Ruth was sitting in my kitchen with both hands around a mug.
I told her what Daniel had said.
She listened without interrupting.
When I finished, she looked at the half-completed wreath in the center of the table.
“So he’s going to Asheville.”
“Yes.”
“Private chef.”
“Apparently.”
“Federal judge.”
“Yes, Ruth.”
“And your cooking has become socially inappropriate.”
“He didn’t use those words.”
“He didn’t have to.”
I gave her a look.
She sipped her coffee.
Then she said, “So we’ll have Christmas here.”
I thought I had misunderstood.
“What?”
“We’ll have Christmas here.”
“I always have Christmas here.”
“No. I mean we’ll really have Christmas here.”
She leaned forward.
“You cook what you always cook. Put up everything you always put up. Then invite people who actually want to sit at your table.”
I laughed.
It came out before I could stop it.
It was the first time since Daniel’s call that something in me loosened.
“Ruth, Christmas is six weeks away.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s not much time.”
“It’s a dinner, Gwendolyn, not the Normandy invasion.”
“How many people are you suggesting?”
She shrugged.
“Start calling. We’ll find out.”
I looked at her.
She looked back.
And just like that, the idea stopped sounding ridiculous.
I called Carol first.
She and I had taught at the same elementary school for eighteen years before I retired. Her husband had died in August, and she’d already told me she wasn’t looking forward to December.
I didn’t tell her I was inviting her because I felt sorry for her.
Nobody wants to be invited somewhere out of pity.
I simply said, “I’m having Christmas dinner at my house. Come.”
She went quiet.
Then she said, “Are you serious?”
“Completely.”
“I thought Daniel always came.”