Chapter 4
CHERYL
Twenty-three people on that thread and nobody ever answers all of it.
What happens every year is that I answer inside of four minutes, because I'm awake, because the phone's on the nightstand, because a decade of dental scheduling trained me to deal with a request the second it enters my field of vision.
Got it! Both pans. Pumpkin or apple?
That's what I'd have sent. I know it because I've sent some version of it every November of my adult life.
I read it twice, put the phone face down on the nightstand, and went and took a shower.
It stayed face down all day. Not answering wasn't hard, which I hadn't expected.
I kept waiting for the tug, that little itch under the sternum that usually gets me moving, and it never came.
What came instead was a flat kind of quiet, like a house after the power goes out, when you find out how much noise the refrigerator was making by way of it stopping.
I went to Target. I put gas in the Rogue. I watched about twenty minutes of a movie about a bakery and shut it off.
Tom found the thread at four in the afternoon and came into the kitchen holding his phone.
"Grandma sent the Christmas list."
"Mm-hm."
"She's got you down for both pans plus a pie."
"She does."
He stood there in his Sunday clothes, which is the same clothes with fewer holes in them. "You see it?"
"This morning."
"You didn't answer."
"No."
He looked at the phone, then at me. I was cutting up a pineapple, which is a thing I do badly and enjoy anyway.
"You want me to answer?"
"You can do whatever you want, Tom."
Which wasn't fair, and I heard it leave my mouth, and I let it stand there and kept cutting.
He put the phone in his pocket, got a beer out, didn't open it, put it back.
"What are we bringing?"
I set the knife down. "Whatever you decide to bring."
"Cheryl."
"I'm not being smart with you." I turned and leaned against the counter, wiping my hands on the towel. "I mean it. I'm not going to tell you what to bring. Bring anything. Bring nothing."
"She asked for the sweet potatoes."
"She asked me."
He rubbed the back of his neck. "So you want me to make them."
"I don't want anything. That's the whole —" I had to stop and come at it again. "For twenty-five years that list has come out and I've handled it. Nobody made me. I noticed it needed handling. This year I'm not handling it. That's it, that's the entire announcement."
He took it. Whatever else, he's never been a man who needs a thing said three times.
"Where's the good tray?"
"Which one?"
"The white one with the — the ridges. For the potatoes."
"Basement. Shelf under the stairs, behind the Christmas dishes. There's a blue Rubbermaid leaning against it."
He waited a beat, I think for me to go down and get it, and when I didn't he went himself. I could hear him moving boxes around down there. He came up with it dusty and put it in the sink.
"The recipe," he said.
"Third drawer. The one with the takeout menus. It's on an index card in my mother's handwriting, so good luck."
He opened the drawer and stood there going through pizza coupons for a solid minute. It took everything I had not to walk over and put my hand in there and come out with it in four seconds.
I didn't hide anything. I didn't lie about where one item was. He asked, I answered, accurately, every time. I just didn't get up.
"Foil," he said, from the pantry.
"Second shelf. Behind the paper towels."
"There's no foil behind the paper towels."
"Then it's in the drawer under the toaster oven."
I could hear him fighting that drawer, which sticks, which you have to lift and pull at the same time.
He got it eventually. He came out with the roll in his hand and found me still at the table with the pineapple and my glass of water, not moving.
His face did something I hadn't seen on it before and couldn't name.
He didn't remark on it. He went back to the counter, found the card, and read it standing up with his arm out straight, because he needs readers now and won't buy them.
"It says a bag of marshmallows. How big's a bag?"
"There are three sizes."
"Which one?"
"I don't know, Tom. I've been doing it by look since 1998."
He set the card down, got a pen off the fridge, and wrote something on the back of a receipt. That's what got past me first, all week. Not a speech. A grown man writing marshmallow??? on the back of a Lowe's receipt.
Denise called at quarter past seven that night. She always calls. She never texts. She's fifty and she believes texting is for confirming times.
"Cheryl. Quick question."
"Go."
"Kayla wants to do a cookie thing with the kids on the twenty-third at Grandma's, and Grandma said fine, and now Kayla's asking me what time, and I don't know what time because I don't know when Grandma does the ham prep, and you always know?—"
"I do always know."
"Right, so?—"
I stood there with the phone against my ear, looking at the pineapple I'd butchered.
"Denise. Call and ask her."
The pause on the line ran about two and a half seconds.
"She won't answer the phone after five."
"Then call her tomorrow at ten."
"Cheryl."
"I'm not being funny with you. I don't have it this year." I said it light, because I'm constitutionally incapable of saying anything the other way. "You've got her number."
"Are you okay?"
First person in that family to ask me that since Thanksgiving. I stood there with my hand flat on the counter and wanted it more than I'd have guessed.
"I'm tired," I said. "It's a long month."
"It is a long month." She took it the way I'd handed it to her, which is what I'd counted on. "You know what it is? It's the dark. It gets dark at four-forty-five and I'm done."
"That's what it is."
"Bob's the same way."
Then she told me about her furnace for eleven minutes and hung up.
She called Alma the next morning at ten. Alma said one-thirty. It took four minutes. That's a thing I'd been doing for other people for twenty-five years, and it took four minutes.
Monday I went back to work, which is where I remember what I'm actually like.
Dr. Feldman's practice — four operatories, two hygienists, a front desk, and me.
I've run that office eleven years. Monday morning a pipe let go in the ceiling of op three at 7:40.
By 8:15 I had a plumber coming, three patients rescheduled without one of them being unhappy about it, a hygienist moved into op four, and a tarp.
By ten I'd talked a claims adjuster into giving me a case number over the phone, which anybody in insurance will tell you is roughly the difficulty of a moon landing.
"You're a machine," Bridget said, eating yogurt in the break room.
"I'm a woman with a laminated phone list. It's not a personality."
"It's a little bit a personality."
"Feldman said if you leave, he's closing."
"Feldman says that so he doesn't have to give me a raise."
"He gave you a raise in March."
"He did," I said. "He did give me a raise in March."
Then Bridget wanted to talk about her sister, thirty-eight, moved back in with their mother for the second time, and whether that's a person having a hard year or a person with a pattern.
I said I didn't know. She said she didn't either.
We were probably both wrong in different directions, and it never got settled; she brought it up again in March and it still wasn't settled then.
Then the plumber called back, and I spent eleven minutes on hold with a claims line listening to a saxophone.
It wasn't a dramatic season. I went to work, I ran the schedule, a four-year-old bit Dr. Feldman on the thumb on the eighth of December and he talked about it for a week like a war wound.
What was different was small and constant.
At that scuffed four-chair practice off Route 30 I have a job description with my name typed at the top of it.
When Feldman needs something outside of it, he comes to my desk and says, "Cheryl, do you have the bandwidth.
" It's a phrase he picked up off a podcast, and I mock him for it. It's nonetheless a question.
Nobody out at that house has ever asked. They write my name down. And I was glad about it every single time, which is what I kept turning over on Route 30 with the wipers going.
I got home Monday and found Tom at the kitchen table with a legal pad, phone open to the group text, index card beside it, a list going in that blocky all-caps he uses on material orders.
SWT POTATOES x2 PIE — ?? WHAT KIND TRAY (HAVE) FOIL
"Four things," he said, without looking up. "That's it? That can't be it."
"What do you mean?"
"That's the whole ask. Two pans and a pie." He tapped the pad with the pen. "You leave this house at eight in the morning on Christmas."
"I do."
"Every year. Eight-fifteen, eight-thirty. Dinner's at two." He finally looked up. "That's not a six-hour job, Cheryl."
I hung my coat on the back of the chair. "No. It isn't."
"So what's the rest of it?"
I could have told him right there. Straight through, top to bottom. And God, it would have felt good to say out loud to another human being after twenty-five years.
I got a glass down instead and filled it at the sink. "You'll find out."
"That's not—" He caught himself and started over. "Okay. Fair."
"I'm not being cute. If I hand it to you, then it's mine and you're helping me with it, and that's what it's been my whole marriage." I drank half the water. "Go find out what Christmas costs."
He studied the pad a while. Then he added FOIL to the bottom of it, which was already on it, and never noticed.
I went upstairs to change.