“Dad, who’s at the door?”
My son didn’t even turn all the way around. He kept one hand on the doorknob and one foot on the porch, blocking the gap with his body like I was a salesman or a stray dog.
“Wrong house,” he called back over his shoulder.
Then he looked at me. His own mother. Standing in the snow on Christmas Eve with a covered dish of roasted turkey in one arm and a red gift bag in the other.
“Please leave, Mom,” he said quietly. “Don’t make this embarrassing.”
And he closed the door.
I stood on that porch for almost a full minute. I could hear the music start up again inside. Somebody laughed. The snow kept falling, soft and slow, landing on the foil over the turkey and melting there.
Wrong house.
That was how my son described me to his children.
What Daniel had forgotten, standing there in his warm doorway with his champagne glass waiting for him inside, was that for fourteen years, I had been paying for a great deal of that house.
By the next morning, he would remember. He would call me twenty five times.
But that night, I didn’t know any of that yet. That night, I just walked back down the icy steps very carefully, so I wouldn’t fall, because there was nobody coming out to help me if I did.
My name is Margaret Whitmore. I’m sixty eight years old. I was a school nurse for thirty one years at Jefferson Elementary in Livingston, and I was married to Richard Whitmore for thirty four years, until a heart attack took him in the parking lot of his hardware store on a Tuesday in April.
I tell you that so you understand who I am. I’m not a wealthy woman. I’m not a dramatic woman. I’m the kind of person who keeps receipts in a shoebox and cuts coupons and wraps leftover gift paper around a paper towel tube so it doesn’t wrinkle.
I’m also the kind of person who has always, always loved Christmas.
Not the shopping part. Not the decorations, though I like those well enough. What I loved was the table. Everyone squeezed around it, elbows bumping, somebody’s coffee getting cold because they’re laughing too hard to drink it. Children under the tree. The smell of turkey in the hallway. That feeling, just for one night, that everyone you love is in one room and nothing bad can get in.
Richard used to carve. I used to make the gravy. Daniel, when he was small, used to steal the crispy skin off the turkey when he thought nobody was looking, and Richard always pretended not to see.
That’s what I was thinking about that Christmas Eve, driving the twenty minutes from my little ranch house in West Orange to Daniel’s big colonial in Maplewood. I had the turkey on the passenger seat, belted in like a person, because I’d once lost a whole pan of stuffing on a sharp turn and I’d never forgotten it.
I hadn’t been invited. Not exactly. But I hadn’t been uninvited either.
Every year since Richard died, I’d spent Christmas Eve at Daniel’s. It wasn’t something we discussed. It was just what happened. Claire would make her fancy appetizers, and I’d bring the turkey, because Daniel always said nobody made turkey like his mother. The grandchildren would open one present each before bed. Then I’d drive home late and come back in the morning for stockings.
This year, Daniel hadn’t mentioned it. He’d been short on the phone for weeks. Busy, he said. Work stuff. When I asked what time I should come Christmas Eve, he said, “I’ll let you know, Mom,” and then he never let me know.
I assumed he forgot. Men forget. Richard used to forget our anniversary three years out of five and then show up with flowers from the grocery store, guilty as a dog.
So I made the turkey. I wrapped a blue sweater for Owen, who was six and had told me on the phone in November that blue was “the best color, the only real color.” I bought a little glass snow globe for Sophie, who was nine and collected them. I wrapped everything in red tissue paper. I put on my good gray wool coat.
And I drove to my son’s house.
