Chapter 9
JOELLE
Ipull it off.
The diner is full. Every table, the regular ones and the folding ones I will never, as long as I live, admit out loud were necessary, has a candle on it. The cheap kind, vanilla, bags of twenty from the Dollar Store, already pooling in their tin holders.
The turkey is good. Not restaurant good, not magazine good, but good in the way that counts: hot, tender, enough for seconds.
The potatoes, most of them peeled yesterday by a man with the technique of someone disarming a bomb, are mashed and buttered and steaming in three trays along the counter. The whole room smells like sage and gravy and burning vanilla.
A hundred and four people. I counted at the door, because fire regulations, and also because the part of me that organizes things wants to know whether the math held.
It held. Marie has the kitchen. Carla came in to serve.
Father Pete is moving between the tables in the voice he uses for everything, weddings, funerals, Sunday potlucks, the same steady warmth no matter the occasion.
Rosie is in a high chair at the end of the counter, eating mashed potatoes with both hands.
She has potatoes in her hair, on her eyebrows, one streak down the side of her nose that makes her look like a very small football player.
She scoops up a fistful and holds it out toward Old Hank, who is on the stool beside her, eating his own plate with a fork like a person.
"No thank you, Rosie," Hank says.
Rosie smashes the potatoes onto the tray with both palms, delighted. She is wearing considerably more food than she has eaten. Her pigtails are listing, one held by a rubber band and the other by pure optimism, and a green bean is stuck to her ribs.
I wipe her face with a napkin. She grabs the napkin and throws it on the floor. I pick it up. She throws it again.
"She gets this from you," Hank says, not looking up from his plate.
"She gets it from herself, Hank."
"Uh-huh."
I straighten up and look out at the room.
It's happening. It's loud and it's warm and the candles are lit and the folding tables wobble and people are eating off paper plates.
We don't have a hundred and four real ones, and none of that matters, because the food is hot and the room is full and I built this.
At the table by the kitchen somebody's telling Rick about a chimney fire up on the ridge, the whole crew out at midnight.
At the counter, Donna's asking Marie whether she's tried the maple syrup from the woman at the Christmas market.
It's the sound a full room makes when nobody in it is alone.
And then I see him.
Colt. Standing just inside the door, where the whole room can see him.
Not in a booth. Not in the back. Not in the parking lot where there's a truck to put between himself and a conversation.
At the door. In front of all of them, Hank, and Marie at the register, and Carla, who was at my baby shower, and Father Pete, who baptized Rosie, and the woman from the hardware store who's known me since I was pregnant and bussing tables and pretending I had a plan.
He is standing in front of every person who knows my whole story, in a clean shirt, in the middle of the town, and he is not pretending to be here for the meatloaf.
For a man who has spent two years saying everything he means from inside a booth, with his head down, where no one could catch him at it, I understand exactly what it costs him to stand in a lit doorway and be seen wanting something.
I have spent my whole life making sure no one caught me at it either. I know the price down to the penny.
"Your timber guy's at the door," Hank announces, loudly enough for the timber guy to hear.
Marie, wiping the counter: “We have eyes, Hank."
"Only making sure."
I stand in the kitchen doorway with a towel over my shoulder and I look at the room and I let myself do the thing I have refused to do since October. I let it be true.
It is for the town. I have said that to myself every single day, and it was never a lie, exactly, it just wasn't the whole sentence.
The whole sentence is that it is also for the girl who ate a gas station hot dog alone one Christmas and swore that no kid in her reach would ever do it on her watch.
It is for the town and it is for her and it is for me, all at once, and the strange thing, the thing I didn't expect, is that letting it be for me too doesn't make it smaller.
It makes it the first Christmas in my life that's actually mine.
Colt saw that before I'd let myself look at it. He said it out loud in the worst possible moment, in the worst possible way, and I threw him out for it. He wasn't wrong. He was just early.
I pick up a serving tray. I load it, turkey, potatoes, a slab of pie, and I balance it on my forearm to push through the kitchen door into the noise and the candlelight and the crowd of people.
Colt sees me come out, and he follows.