Chapter 11
TOM
Christmas morning I was awake at four-fifty, lying there doing what I do before a big pour — walking the whole day through in my head, start to finish, looking for where it goes wrong.
I carried the sweet potatoes, both pans. Cheryl had the pie and the bag of containers, and she left her tote in the trunk, which I noticed and said nothing about.
"Tommy!" Marlene, at the door, already holding a drink. "Where's your mother's — oh. Cheryl, honey, you look tired."
"Merry Christmas, Marlene," Cheryl said.
Inside it was ninety degrees and loud. Denise had the ham going. Mitch had the game on with the sound off. Somebody's toddler was under the coffee table.
Mitch and Kayla were in the middle of something — you could tell from across the room by the way she said his name with the whole first syllable in it.
It's about his mother's house in Kittanning, empty since March, which one of them wants to sell and the other wants to rent, and which they've been not-quite-fighting about at family functions since spring.
They took it out to the porch for eight minutes and came back in separately.
Nobody asked. There are probably four of those running in that house at any given time, and everybody knows, and nobody says a word, and then it gets settled two years later on a phone call nobody hears.
Denise wanted to know if I'd looked at her furnace.
"I'm an electrician, Denise."
"You looked at it in 2019."
"I looked at the thermostat in 2019."
"Well, it's doing the thing again."
"What thing."
"The thing where it doesn't." She turned the ham. "Come by."
I said I'd come by. I did come by eventually, in February, and it was the blower motor, which I didn't fix because I don't do that, so she had to call a guy anyway.
I put my pans on the sideboard. Denise looked at them, then at me, then across the room at Cheryl, then back at the pans.
"Did you make those?"
"I did."
"Tom Whitaker made a sweet potato casserole."
"Two of them."
"Did you do the syrup thing?"
"There's a syrup thing?"
"There's a syrup thing," she said, and went back to her ham.
"Denise. What's the syrup thing."
"Ask your wife."
"I'm asking you."
"I don't know it, Tom, I just know there is one." She pointed the fork at me. "Hers come out orange. Yours are brown."
I did what I knew to do. Extra butter into the fridge behind the milk, where nobody would grab it for something stupid.
Brownies out on the sideboard with no label on them, down at the end near the napkins, where a fifteen-year-old could take one without making it a production.
The chair in from the truck and set by the window before Pauline came up the walk.
Nobody watched me do any of it. Nobody thanked me for any of it.
Then at ten of two, Denise came out of the kitchen with the lace tablecloth over her arm and said, "Somebody put this on wrong.
" She turned it a quarter and got the burn down under where the ham goes, apparently the way it's been done for years.
I stood there holding a stack of napkins with nine days of finding out what I didn't know behind me, nowhere near the end of it.
I had the pieces I'd tripped over. Cheryl had the room.
At quarter of two, Grandma came out with the place cards.
Four days I'd been picturing a confrontation.
A moment where I said something and the room went quiet.
What actually came out of that kitchen was a ninety-seven-year-old woman in a red cardigan with a stack of little cream cards, moving slow because her knees are gone, setting them down the walnut table one at a time.
That's the thing. It doesn't look like a hierarchy. It looks like an old woman with good handwriting.
I stood in the archway and watched her go. Head of the table, Alma. Then my dad. Then Denise, her husband, Mitch, Kayla. Pauline on the near side by the window where the light is. Marlene.
Then, window side, third from the head, blue ballpoint on cream card stock: Tom.
I watched my own name go down. She squared it against the water glass with two fingers, the way she does, so it stands up on its own and faces out.
"Move that chair in for me," she said.
I moved the chair in.
She kept going, through the archway, four cards left in her hand.
The green table takes six but she only ever sets four, because the last two go to whoever's left standing when the food comes out.
She put them on the vinyl one at a time, pressing each one open with her thumb — Denise's boys, Marlene's grandson Colton, and one more at the corner by the shimmed leg.
Cheryl.
Cheryl was in the kitchen with Denise and hadn't seen it. For sixty, ninety seconds I was the only person in that house who knew what was coming.
And standing there in the archway, the reflex came up in me like water in a basement.
I'd made up my mind in the truck three days before. I'd made it up again in bed that morning at four-fifty. And still, in my grandmother's house on Christmas Day with twenty-two people and a ham, it came up so hard my hands went cold.
Don't make a scene. Not today. Not on Christmas. She's ninety-seven. Get through today, deal with it after. Talk to her in January.
It's such a reasonable voice. It never sounds like cowardice. It sounds like being the calm one.
I had my hands shoved in my jacket pockets, which is something I do outside in February and had no business doing in that house at ninety degrees. Somebody went by me with the beans. I took them out and rubbed them together once, hard, the way you do coming in off a roof.
"Tom, move," Denise said, with the ham.
I moved.
Cheryl came out of the kitchen once in that stretch carrying the beans, close enough going by that her sleeve touched my arm.
She didn't look at the table. She's walked into that dining room a hundred and some times in her life, and every single time, whether she knew it or not, she's checked the walnut table first — a quick one, half a second, the way you check a scoreboard.
She didn't do it. She set the beans down at the end nearest the archway and went back to the kitchen.
I stood there with cold hands, working out that she'd stopped hoping somewhere in the last four weeks, and that I hadn't been present for whatever afternoon that happened on.
They put the food out and twenty-two people started the shuffle, the part where everybody's up at once and nobody knows where to go. Grandma worked herself to the head of the table and put her hand on the back of her chair.
"Everybody find your card," she said.
The room sorted itself. Mitch's wife found hers and laughed at something.
My father sat down heavy at the far end.
Pauline got lowered into the padded chair I'd carried in that morning, with the cushion on it too, and said, "Oh, that's better," to nobody.
My chest went tight. Cheryl put that cushion in a closet in our house eleven years ago.
Cheryl came out of the kitchen drying her hands.
Grandma pointed with two fingers, exactly the way she had at Thanksgiving, exactly the way she has since 1999.
"Cheryl, you're in there."
And here's what my wife did. Nothing. She didn't argue.
She didn't look for me. She didn't make the joke, which is what I noticed most, and I'd put money on being the only one in that room who did.
There was a beat, maybe half a second, where twenty-five years of habit had still haven't graduated right there in her mouth, and she didn't say it.
She walked through the archway to the green card table and put her hand on the back of the folding chair at the corner by the shimmed leg.
I looked at the walnut table. My card was on it. Third from the head, window side, where my father sat before me and his father sat before him. The good chair, the one with arms, next to the light. Fifty-six years of Sundays.
Then I looked at the archway. Twelve feet.
I picked up my plate.