“He’s going out of town this year.”
Another pause.
“Then yes,” she said. “Yes, please.”
That was one.
Ruth made two.
A young couple named Marcus and Priya had moved into a house on our street in August. They were both in their early thirties and had moved for Marcus’s job. I’d brought them an apple pie the week they arrived because my mother believed nobody should spend their first night in a new home without something homemade in the kitchen.
One afternoon in October, Priya had mentioned that they wouldn’t be traveling over Christmas.
Her parents were in India, Marcus’s family was scattered, and airfare that week was more than they wanted to spend.
I walked over and invited them.
Priya stared at me.
“Christmas dinner?”
“Christmas dinner.”
“At your house?”
“Unless you know another Gwendolyn on the block.”
Marcus laughed.
Priya said, “We don’t want to impose.”
“There is no such thing as imposing when somebody asks you.”
She still looked uncertain.
So I said, “I need people who will eat potatoes.”
That did it.
“We can eat potatoes.”
“Good. Then you’re qualified.”
At the community college literacy program where I volunteered on Tuesday mornings, I knew a student named Jerome.
He was twenty, from Atlanta, and working toward an associate degree while holding down a job in the evenings. His family was more than seven hundred miles away, and he hadn’t been home for Christmas in several years because of work and travel costs.
I asked the program coordinator to give him my number.
He called that afternoon.
“Miss Gwendolyn?”
“Yes?”
“This is Jerome.”
“Hello, Jerome.”
“Ms. Henderson said you wanted to ask me something.”
“I want to know if you have somewhere to eat on Christmas.”
There was a long silence.
Then he said, “Not really.”
“You do now.”
Another silence.
“I haven’t had a real Christmas dinner in three years.”
“Then you are overdue.”
My former colleague Patricia and her wife, Lynn, came next.
Patricia asked whether she could bring her mother, Dolores.
“How old is she now?”
“Ninety-one.”
“Of course she can come.”
“She’s going to bring sherry.”
“Then she’s definitely invited.”
Beverly from church had a daughter in Seattle and had been pretending she was perfectly happy about spending Christmas alone.
She wasn’t.
I knew because every time anybody mentioned the holiday, she suddenly found something interesting to do with her hands.
When I invited her, she tried to turn me down.
“I don’t want to intrude on your family Christmas.”
“Beverly, there is currently no family Christmas to intrude on.”
She frowned.
“What happened?”
“Nothing I want to discuss until after dessert.”
That made her laugh.
She said yes.
By the end of the first week, twelve people were coming.
Then twelve became fourteen.
Fourteen became seventeen.
Ruth came over one evening with a bottle of wine and a legal pad.
“We need a menu.”
“We already have a menu.”
“Put it on paper anyway. Important things deserve paper.”
So we sat at my kitchen table and wrote down everything I had made for years.
Glazed ham with brown sugar, cloves, and dried cherries I had put up in July.
Scalloped potatoes with Gruyère and just enough nutmeg to make people wonder why they tasted different.
Green beans with almonds, roasted until the edges browned.
Homemade cranberry sauce with orange zest and a small splash of bourbon.
Corn pudding.
Pfeffernüsse.
Brown sugar shortbread pressed into stars.
And the centerpiece of our Christmas table, lemon-rosemary roast chicken.
We had never served turkey at Christmas.
The first year my husband and I were married, a turkey cost more than we wanted to spend, so I roasted two chickens instead.
I brined them with salt, lemon, garlic, and rosemary, and the smell filled our little rental house.
My husband took one bite and said, “Why would we ever need a turkey?”
So we never did.
Over the years, the chicken became ours.
When Daniel was seven, he once woke me at six on Christmas morning and, before asking about presents, asked whether the chicken was already in the oven.
That was the boy I remembered when I heard the forty-one-year-old man call my cooking unsophisticated.
I tried not to hold one version of him against the other.
That is one of the strange things about adult children.
You remember the boy while talking to the man.
Ruth tapped the menu.
“This is too much food for seventeen people.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Gwendolyn.”
“I send leftovers.”
“To whom?”
“Everyone.”
She laughed.
“Of course you do.”