“Arrive at two,” my son said.
I had the phone pinched between my ear and my shoulder, and flour up both arms to the elbow. It was the first Sunday night in December and I was rolling lefse at the counter, the way I had every first Sunday in December since Greg was in diapers.
“Leave by four.”
I could hear paper in his hand. Not a phone screen. Paper. Somebody had written this down and handed it to him.
“Bring nothing. She means it, Mom. Not even rolls.”
I set the rolling pin down very gently, the way you set down something that might go off.
“And no gift over twenty dollars. Per kid. That’s the last one.”
Then it was quiet on the line, and I could hear his furnace kick on in Duluth, twenty-six miles down the shore from my kitchen in Two Harbors.
My name is Nancy. I am sixty-four years old. I had hosted Christmas dinner at my house for thirty-one years in a row, and my own son had just read me the rules for attending somebody else’s.
Let me back up one minute, because he had started the call kindly.
“Mom, you got a minute?” he had said. “Amber wants to host Christmas this year.”
And I had said, “That’s fine, honey,” and I had meant most of it. A woman is entitled to cook a Christmas dinner in her own house. I had been a daughter-in-law myself once, and I remembered wanting that.
It was the next thing he said that turned my stomach over.
“There’s a few things she wrote down.”
So now I stood there in my kitchen, with a round of lefse going dry on the board, and I looked at the wall where the calendar from the lumberyard hung.
Greg is thirty-nine, an electrician, the kind of man other men call when something is not working and nobody can say why. He is not a weak man and he is not a foolish one.
But he read me that list like a boy reading a note sent home from school.
He did not write it. I knew it, and he knew that I knew it. I could hear it in how fast he went, and how he said “that’s the last one” like a man coming up for air.
There was an obvious thing to say. I expect you know what it was. Any mother would.
Gregory, I have set a place for you at my table every Christmas of your life, and I will not be handed visiting hours.
I had it right there behind my teeth.
Here is why I did not say it.
One hard sentence from me, and my son would have to hang up that phone and walk into his own living room and pick a side. Either he would carry my hurt in to his wife, or he would carry her list back to me a second time, meaner. There was no third way for him.
On the day Greg got married I stood in the church basement in my good blue dress, holding a paper cup of punch, and I made myself one promise. I would never be the reason my son had to choose.
So I wiped one hand on my apron and I said, “It sounds lovely.”
He let out a breath I could hear all the way up the shore.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Two o’clock. I’ll be there.”
“Thanks, Mom.” Then, lower, “I know it’s different.”
“Different is not a sin,” I said. “Kiss those kids for me.”
I hung up. And I stood in my kitchen a long time.
The house was too quiet. It has been too quiet for three years.
My husband Leonard died in October three years ago. His heart, in the garage, with the radio on. He had worked thirty-four years on the railroad that hauls the taconite down from the Range to the ore docks, and he had been a volunteer fireman in this town for twenty-six of them. The pager sat on our nightstand our whole married life. I have slept through thunderstorms that rattled the windows, and I never once slept through that pager.
Leonard would have known what to say that night. Not to Greg. To me.
I finished the lefse, because you do not waste a batch over hurt feelings.
Then I got out the gravy boat.
I do not know why. It lives in the top cupboard, and I got up on the step stool and took it down and set it on the table. It was Leonard’s mother’s. It has a chip in the foot. Thirty-one years it had gone around my table, and I sat down in front of it at ten o’clock at night like it was company.
I had a little cry. And what I was thinking, once I got past the sting, was an uncomfortable thing.
Bring nothing.
Eleven years Greg and Amber had been married. Every single one of those years, some time around Thanksgiving, Amber had called me and asked, “What can I bring for Christmas?”
And every single one of those years, I had said, “Oh, just bring yourselves.”
I had thought I was being generous. I was the hostess. I had it handled. I had two ovens going and a card table for the pies.
But I sat there looking at that gravy boat and I heard my own voice saying it eleven times. Just bring yourselves. Bring nothing.
One year she brought a salad anyway. Something with pears and blue cheese and candied nuts. I thanked her and I set it on the far end of the counter behind the bread basket, and nobody found it until we were clearing up.
I had forgotten that entirely until that night.
Now, that did not make the list right. Two hours on a clock is a cold way to have your husband’s mother to Christmas, and making him read it out loud was colder. I am not going to tell you I talked myself out of being hurt.
But I talked myself out of being innocent, and that is a different thing, and it is worth doing before you make a move.
So I asked myself what Leonard would have asked.
I could hear him plain as day.
Nan, who else is sitting home that day?
The fire hall in Two Harbors sits a few blocks up from the lake. If you are from a place like this you know the building without my describing it. Truck bays in front. A kitchen in back with a six-burner range that has cooked a thousand pancake breakfasts. A long room with a tile floor, stacks of folding tables, and a coffee urn that is older than my son.
I drove down Monday morning at nine. It was eleven below, and the lake was steaming the way it does when the air is that much colder than the water.
Chief Dale was in the bay with a clipboard, checking air packs. He has been chief nine years. He has a gray mustache he has worn since high school, and he carried one corner of my husband’s casket.
“Nancy,” he said. “Everything all right?”
“I want to rent the hall.”
“Sure. When?”
“Christmas Day.”
He put the clipboard down on the bumper of the engine.
“What do you want with the hall on Christmas?”
“I want to cook.”
“For who?”
“For whoever doesn’t have a table.”
I said it flat and pleasant. I did not say one word more, and I want that understood. I did not stand in that fire hall and run down my daughter-in-law to a man who would see her at the Fourth of July parade.
Dale is nobody’s fool, though. He nodded slowly.
“So you’ve got a turkey and nobody to eat it.”
“I’ve got two turkeys in the chest freezer and a ham on order at the Super One. I bought them in November, before I knew.”
“Well,” he said. “Can’t have that.”
He walked me back to the little office and pulled out the rental book.
“Hall rents for a hundred and fifty,” he said. “Not to you. Leonard’s name is on that wall out there. You’re not paying to cook in Leonard’s kitchen.”
“I am not asking for a favor, Dale.”
“I know you’re not.”
“Then let me rent it like anybody else.”
I wrote out the check for a hundred and fifty dollars. He would not take it from my hand. So on my way out I folded it in half and dropped it into the old rubber fire boot that sits by the door for donations, and he watched me do it and shook his head.
Then he got out a yellow legal pad, and we sat at one of the folding tables with two cups of that terrible coffee, and we made a list of our own.
A fire chief in a small town knows who is alone. He knows which houses he has been called to, and which porch light does not come on anymore.
“Kowalski,” Dale said first. “Dorothy passed in April. Fifty-three years. He’s got a daughter in Arizona and she can’t fly up till New Year’s.”
I wrote it down. Mr. Kowalski sits in the pew behind me at church. I had sent a hot dish in April and a card in May, and then, God forgive me, I had let him turn back into the nice man in the pew behind me.
“The night nurses at the hospital,” Dale said. “Day shift too, they can’t leave, but we could run plates over. The dispatcher. Whoever’s driving plow for the county that day.”
“The deputies.”
“Two on. And my crew that’s on call. They’ll be here anyway, they may as well eat.”
By the time I left we had twenty-two names. I put a card up on the bulletin board at church and another by the carts at the Super One. It said, in my own handwriting: Christmas Dinner, Fire Hall, 5:30. No charge. Come if you would be eating alone. Come if you are working. Come if you just want to. Nancy.
I cooked for three weeks. Nine dozen rounds of lefse, frozen flat. Rosettes and krumkake. Wild rice stuffing from the rice Leonard’s cousin harvests up by Nett Lake.
My friend Joanne came over twice to peel. Joanne has been my friend since we were room mothers together. She runs the fire auxiliary, and she has a tongue on her.
“Two hours,” she said, over a sink full of potatoes. “Like a dentist appointment.”
“Joanne.”
“I’m just saying what you won’t.”
“That’s why I won’t. They are my grandchildren’s mother and father, and I am going to be at that door at two o’clock for the next twenty years if I am spared. I would like it to be a door that opens.”
She peeled a while.
“And the fire hall? That’s not about Amber?”
I am trying to tell you this straight, so here is what I told her.
“Sunday night it was about Amber. By Monday noon it was about Mr. Kowalski. I can’t explain it better than that.”
Joanne snorted. But she put it to the auxiliary that Thursday, and eight women signed up to cook and serve.
The gifts gave me the most trouble. Twenty dollars.
I am ashamed to say my first feeling was insult. Then I made myself sit down again with that gravy boat, so to speak, and remember last Christmas.
Last Christmas I gave Ella and Sam bicycles. Real ones, from the hardware store, assembled. Leonard and I never had much, and there was life insurance money sitting there, and I wanted to see their faces. I wheeled them out from behind the tree with bows on the handlebars.
And I remember now what I did not let myself see then. Greg and Amber had given the children new sleds. Good plastic ones. They were leaning by the door, and nobody looked at them the rest of the day.
Amber had gone into my kitchen and done dishes for forty-five minutes.
So. Twenty dollars.
I went to the hardware store and stood in the aisle a long time. For Sam, who is six and afraid of his closet, I bought a flashlight. A good metal one, the kind you can drop. It was $13.99 and the batteries came in it.
For Ella, who is nine and has started hanging around my elbow when I cook, I did not buy anything at all. I took a recipe card out of my box. Not a copy. The card. It is in my mother’s handwriting, with a butter stain on the corner, and it is for the lefse. I bought a little wooden frame at the dollar store for $1.25 and put the card in it.
I figured that came in under the limit.
The family with children turned up on the twenty-third.
Dale called me at seven in the morning. “There’s a couple out on the county road, name of Peterson. Three little ones. Their furnace quit last night. He called us about the smell and we went out. Cracked heat exchanger. It’s red-tagged, they can’t run it.”
“Where are they?”
“Motel up on the highway. The part’s coming from the Cities and nobody’s installing anything till the twenty-seventh. He’s a proud kid. Works at the siding plant. He about bit my head off when I said the word dinner.”
“Give me the room number.”
“Nancy, I don’t know that he’ll…”
“I’m not going to ask him. I’m going to ask her.”
I drove up with a pan of caramel rolls. A young woman answered the door with a baby on her hip.
I did not say we would like to help. People hate that word, and they are right to.
I said, “I’m Nancy. I’m cooking at the fire hall Christmas night and I have forty pounds of potatoes and nobody to mash them. Is your husband any good with a masher?”
“He’s real good with a masher,” she said, and her chin went.
That is how you do it. You do not offer a proud man a plate. You hand him a job.
On Christmas Eve, after the candlelight service, Mr. Kowalski caught me in the coatroom.
He is eighty-one, tall and stooped, with the big square hands of a man who worked the docks. He had his overcoat buttoned wrong, off by one, the way a man’s coat gets buttoned when nobody looks him over before he leaves the house.
“Nancy. I saw your card.”
“I hoped you would. Will you come?”
“I don’t eat much anymore.”
“Then you can come and not eat much with sixty other people.”
He almost smiled. Then he held out a paper grocery sack, folded over at the top.
“I wondered,” he said. “If it isn’t a bother.”
Inside was a tablecloth. White, with red poinsettias cross-stitched all the way around the border, every stitch by hand. It had been ironed, and not well. You could see where he had gone back over the creases and pressed new ones in.
“Dorothy made it the winter we were married,” he said. “It has been on our table fifty-three Christmases. I got it out this morning and I spread it on the table, and then I sat there. There is only me to sit at it.”
He stopped and worked his mouth a moment.
“I can’t leave it in the drawer. I can’t. Would you put it on a table? Any table. In the back is fine.”
I could not speak right off. I rebuttoned his coat for him instead, top to bottom, the way Dorothy would have, and he stood still and let me.
“It is going on the head table,” I said. “And you are sitting at it.”
The auxiliary women and I cooked all the day before in the hall kitchen: the potatoes peeled, the stuffing made, the pies baked, the hams sliced. Christmas morning I was back at five. Dale let me in. One turkey had gone into my oven at home at four, and the second went into the hall oven at half past five. The hams went into the roasters. By noon that building smelled the way a building ought to smell on Christmas.
At one o’clock I took off my apron.
“You’re not really going,” Joanne said.
“I am invited from two to four.”
“Nancy, there are sixty people coming here.”
“At five thirty, and you have eight women and a serving line. Baste the birds at two and at three. I said I’d be there, so I’m going to be there.”
I drove down the shore with nothing on the seat beside me but two small packages. I have not walked into a house empty-handed since I was a child. My hands did not know what to do on the steering wheel.
I sat in the car until the clock on the dash said two. Then I went up and rang the bell.
Amber answered. She is a slim, careful woman of thirty-six, a dental hygienist, and she had on a cream sweater and her hair pulled back so tight it looked like it hurt.
“Nancy. Merry Christmas. You’re right on time.”
“Merry Christmas, Amber. Your house looks beautiful.”
It did. I want to be fair to her. It was a beautiful, quiet house. The tree had white lights and silver balls, all matching. There was a table with little sandwiches, a cheese board, cut fruit and a pitcher of cider, all on white dishes. No big dinner. Soft piano carols playing somewhere. Not a single thing out of its place.
The children came at me in their good clothes, and I got my arms around both of them, and that part was the same as ever.
Greg hugged me longer than he usually does. “Hi, Mom,” he said into my hair.
We sat. I held a plate on my knee. I asked Amber about her work, and she told me. I asked about her mother, and her face closed up a little, and she said, “We’re not seeing her this year,” and passed me the fruit.
At a quarter to three we did gifts. Sam turned that flashlight on and off forty times and then crawled under the dining table with it. Ella unwrapped the frame and read the card through, moving her lips.
“This is Great-Grandma’s writing,” she said.
“It is. That’s the one we use. You’re old enough to have it.”
“That is not a twenty dollar gift,” Greg said quietly.
“A dollar twenty-five,” I said. “I have the receipt.”
Amber looked at the card a long time. She did not say anything. But she got up and moved a silver candlestick on the mantel and stood the frame there, where it could be seen.
At ten to four I caught Amber watching the clock, and what I saw in her face surprised me. It was not impatience. It was dread. She looked like a woman waiting for something to break.
At four o’clock I stood up.
“Well,” I said. “This was just lovely. Thank you for having me.”
Greg stood too. “Mom, you don’t have to run right…”
“Four o’clock,” I said, and I smiled at him so he would know I meant no dig by it. “I’m a guest. I mind the hostess.”
I got my coat. Ella followed me to the door. Sam came behind her, shining his flashlight on my boots.
“Grandma,” Ella said. “When is the real Christmas?”
Amber was standing right behind her. I saw the words land.
“This one was real, sweetheart,” I said. “Your mama made it nice.”
“No, but the one with the turkey. And the lefse. And the long table with the leaf in. Is it tomorrow?”
“There isn’t one at my house this year.”
“Then where are you going?”
I will not lie to a child. I did not see why I should start on Christmas.
“I’m going back up to Two Harbors. I’m cooking supper at the fire hall for some folks who didn’t have a table to go to tonight.”
“What folks?”
“Mr. Kowalski from church. Some nurses. The men who drive the plows. A family whose furnace broke.”
Greg had gone very still. “You rented the fire hall,” he said.
“I had two turkeys, honey.”
“Mom, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it would have sounded like I was throwing a party across town from your wife’s,” I said. “I’m not. This was Christmas. That is just supper.” I looked past him at Amber. “Anybody is welcome at it. That’s the whole idea of the thing. But you’ve had your day, and it was a good one, and I’m not asking.”
Amber’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.
I kissed both children on the top of the head and went down the steps to my car.
I walked into that hall at four thirty-five and Joanne threw an apron at me.
“How was it?”
“Clean.”
“Nancy.”
“It was fine. It was kind. She’s scared of something and I don’t know what.” I tied the apron. “How many?”
“Dale says sixty-one if the plow boys both make it.”
They came in out of the dark stamping their boots. The Peterson family came first, at five sharp, the young father with his jaw set and his hands in his pockets. I handed him a masher and pointed at three stockpots, and within ten minutes he had his sleeves rolled and was arguing with Dale about how much butter. His wife sat down with the baby and somebody put a cup of coffee in front of her, and she closed her eyes.
Two nurses came on their supper break with their badges still on. Joanne loaded a cardboard flat with fourteen covered plates and a deputy ran it over to the hospital in his squad. An old bachelor farmer came in his barn coat and would not take it off.
And Mr. Kowalski, at the head table, in a necktie, with Dorothy’s poinsettias spread out in front of him.
He kept one hand flat on that cloth the whole time. Just resting there. Like a man holding somebody’s hand under a table.
Dale said grace, because I asked him to. It was short. He thanked the Lord for the food, and for the hands, and for the ones who were not at the table this year. Then he said “Amen, eat,” and they did.
I did not sit. I was at the stove with the second batch of gravy at six o’clock when the side door opened, and the cold came across the floor.
“Grandma!”
Sam hit me around the knees so hard I nearly lost the whisk.
Ella was right behind him, with her coat open and her good shoes on in the snow. And behind her was Greg, with snow on his shoulders and his truck keys still in his hand.
“They would not let it go,” he said. “Either one of them. Ella said it didn’t smell like Christmas at our house. Sam put his boots on by himself and stood at the door.” He looked around the hall, at the tables, at the nurses, at the old farmer in his barn coat. His voice went rough. “Mom. Look at this.”
“Did you eat?”
“Mom.”
“Did you eat, Gregory?”
“Little sandwiches.”
“Get a plate.”
But I was not looking at him anymore. I was looking past him.
Amber stood in the doorway.
She had not come all the way in. Her coat was buttoned to the chin and she had her purse held in front of her with both hands. She looked at the long tables, and the paper tablecloths, and the sixty-some people talking with their mouths full. A child shrieked. Somebody dropped a serving spoon. One of the plow drivers laughed so loud the windows hummed.
I watched her flinch. A real flinch, shoulders up, like a dog that has been hit.
Then she looked at me, and I understood she was waiting for it. She had driven twenty-six miles in the dark to stand in that door and take whatever I had saved up for her.
Joanne, at my elbow, said very low, “Well. Here’s your moment.”
“Hush,” I said.
I wiped my hands. I took the spare apron off the hook by the cooler. And I walked across that tile floor, and I held it out.
“The gravy needs somebody who won’t walk off from it,” I said. “Dale keeps walking off from it.”
She stared at the apron.
“I didn’t bring anything,” she said. It came out small.
“You brought my grandchildren up the shore in the dark,” I said. “That’ll do. Whisk is on the stove.”
She unbuttoned her coat. Her fingers were shaking. She put the apron on over that cream sweater, and I tied it behind her, and she went and stood at my stove and stirred my gravy. She did not walk off from it.
It was Ella who found Mr. Kowalski.
I had not introduced them. I looked up from cutting pie and there she was at the head table, standing beside his chair, tracing a poinsettia with one finger.
“Did somebody make this?”
“My wife did,” he said. “A long time before you were born. Before your father was born.”
“All of it? By hand?”
“Every stitch. It took her from October to Easter. She missed Christmas with it altogether the first year. She cried, and then she laughed, and we used it in April.”
Ella thought that over.
“Where is she?”
I started across the room. I did not get there in time, and I am glad of it now.
“She died, honey,” Mr. Kowalski said. “In the spring.”
Ella did not say she was sorry, the way a grown person would. She looked at the empty folding chair next to him. Then she pulled it out and sat down in it.
“I’ll sit here, then,” she said. “So it’s not empty.”
That old man put his big square hand over his eyes.
Sam came and climbed up on the other side, because wherever Ella goes, Sam goes. He set his flashlight on Dorothy’s tablecloth and asked Mr. Kowalski if he wanted to see it work. And Mr. Kowalski took his hand down and said that he would, very much.
I looked back at the kitchen pass-through. Amber was standing there with the whisk in her hand, watching her children. Her face was wet.
Greg was behind her. He had found a dish towel. My son, who an hour before had been sitting on a white couch eating little sandwiches, was drying roasting pans beside the fire chief and the young father from the motel. Three men at a sink, not saying much, the way men visit.
I heard Dale tell him, “Your dad stood right where you’re standing. Twenty-six years of pancake breakfasts.”
“I know it,” Greg said. “I used to sleep under that table.”
Amber and I did the last of the dishes ourselves. It was past eight. The hall had mostly cleared. The Petersons had gone back to the motel with a foil pan of ham and both leftover pies. Mr. Kowalski was in his overcoat, buttoned right this time, folding his tablecloth. Ella was holding the other end.
Amber washed. I dried. For a while there was only the water.
“You didn’t say anything,” she said finally. “At the door. I thought you would.”
“What would I have said?”
“That I was awful. That it was a list. That you can’t hand a person a list.”
“Well,” I said. “It was a list.”
She laughed, one breath of it, and then her eyes filled again.
“I made Greg call. I couldn’t do it. I wrote it out and I made him read it, and I stood in the hallway and listened to him do it, and I hated myself the whole time.”
“That part was not right, Amber,” I said. I said it gently, but I said it. “Not the hosting. The hosting was your due. Having him read it to me. That hurt him and it hurt me.”
“I know.”
“All right, then. That’s said.”
She scrubbed a pot that was already clean.
“Can I tell you why? It’s not an excuse.”
“I would like to know why.”
She told me, there at the fire hall sink, with her sleeves wet to the elbow.
Christmas at her mother’s house started at noon and it did not end. There was no end to it. People came and they stayed and they drank, and by four in the afternoon the voices changed. She said she could always tell the hour by the voices. By six somebody was crying in the bathroom. By eight her stepfather had usually said the thing he had been saving all year.
One Christmas the tree went over. She was seven. She remembered the sound of the glass balls more than anything.
“And everybody brought things,” she said. “My aunts. Dishes and dishes. And then all night it was whose was better, and who hadn’t touched whose, and my mother keeping count.”
She set the pot in the rack.
“And my uncle gave big presents. A stereo, one year. A television. And then for twelve months he’d bring it up. After all I did for you people.” She shook her head. “I told myself, when I had my own house, it would be two hours. Nobody would bring a thing. Nobody would give anything that could be held over anybody. And at four o’clock it would stop while it was still nice.”
“Before the voices changed,” I said.
She looked at me. “Yes.”
“That’s what you were watching the clock for.”
“You saw that?”
“I saw you looked scared. I didn’t know of what.”
She put both hands on the edge of the sink.
“I walked in that door tonight and it was so loud,” she said. “I almost turned around. And then I stood there, and I kept waiting for it to turn. And it didn’t. It’s been two hours and it didn’t turn.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t, here.”
“How do you know it won’t?”
I thought about how to answer that honestly.
“I don’t, always. One year Leonard dropped the turkey in the driveway and Greg’s uncle said a word in front of the pastor. One year I cried in the pantry over a pie. Things go wrong, Amber. But nobody at my table was ever keeping count. That’s the difference. It isn’t the hours.”
She nodded, and wiped her face with her wrist.
Then I did the hard thing, because she had done hers.
“I owe you something too,” I said. “Eleven years you asked me what you could bring. Eleven years I told you to just bring yourselves.”
She went still.
“I thought I was being nice. I sat in my kitchen three weeks ago and heard myself, and I’ll tell you what I heard. I heard a woman telling you there was no room for you at her stove.” I folded the dish towel. “You made a pear salad once.”
“You remember that?”
“I remembered it this month. I put it behind the bread basket. I’m sorry for that. And I’m sorry for the bicycles. Those sleds were a good present, and I rolled right over them.”
Amber put her wet hand over her mouth. Then she turned around and put her arms around me, apron and all, and I held on to my son’s wife in the kitchen of the fire hall while the coffee urn ticked and cooled.
Greg came to the pass-through with a stack of plates. He saw us and he stopped.
“I should have said it, Mom,” he said. “On the phone. I should have told Amber first that I wasn’t going to read my mother a list, and then I should have called you like a man and just talked. I knew it was wrong while I was doing it.”
“You were trying to keep the peace in your own house,” I said. “Your father did the same once. He told me later he wished he’d spoken up sooner.”
“I wish I had.”
“Then you’ve learned it at thirty-nine instead of fifty. Put those plates down before you drop them.”
We made next year’s plan before they left. Amber made it, to tell the truth. She found a pen in her purse and turned over one of the paper placemats, and she started writing, and for the first time all day I saw her shoulders come down.
It turns out a woman who is good at lists is exactly what a dinner for sixty needs.
Christmas morning at her house. Just the four of them and me, cinnamon rolls, stockings, quiet. Two hours if she wants it to be two hours, and I will not say a word about the clock, because now I know what the clock is for.
Then all of us up the shore to the fire hall by one.
She wrote: sign-up sheet at church by Thanksgiving. Ask the hospital for a head count. Plates for delivery, labeled. A kids’ table with crayons. Someone to sit with anybody who comes alone.
She put Ella’s name beside that last one.
At the bottom she wrote something and turned the placemat around so I could read it.
Amber: pear salad. Enough for 60.
“Seventy,” I said. “Word gets around.”
She crossed it out and wrote seventy.
Mr. Kowalski came by on his way out with the grocery sack under his arm. He stopped in front of Ella and held it out to her.
“You keep this for me till next year,” he said. “It ought to be in a house with children in it. You bring it back and you help me spread it. That is the arrangement.”
Ella looked at her mother.
Amber crouched down beside her daughter. “You say thank you,” she said, “and you tell Mr. Kowalski we will take very good care of it. And you ask him if he likes cinnamon rolls, because he is coming to our house on Christmas morning.”
He did not put his hand over his eyes that time. He just stood there and let them run.
I locked up with Dale at half past nine. Sixty-one plates, he told me, and fourteen more that went to the hospital. He was sweeping. I was counting what was left of the lefse, which was none.
On my way out I stopped at the wall by the door, where the brass plaques are. Leonard’s is third from the left. Twenty-six years of service. I put two fingers on it the way I do.
“Well, Leonard,” I said. “You asked.”
I drove home along the lake with the gravy boat belted into the seat beside me. I had brought it to the hall after all. It had gone around a table one more Christmas, a longer table than it had ever seen, and it had come back with the same chip in its foot.
The house was quiet when I got in. It was not too quiet. I could tell the difference.
I set the gravy boat back in the top cupboard, and I left the leaf out of the table.
I won’t be needing it there next year. We will need a good many more tables than that.
