Five O’Clock
Part One: The List
At twelve minutes past five on Christmas evening, my thirty-eight-year-old son stood in my kitchen staring at a debit card cut neatly in half. Beside the two pieces lay a folded sheet of my blue stationery. There was no turkey in the oven and no ham glazing on the counter. There was no table set for thirty, no rolls rising under a towel, no pies cooling on the windowsill.
And I wasn’t there.
When Brandon finally unfolded the note and read it, his face went the color of the dishwater I hadn’t run that day. Then he turned toward his wife and screamed.
But the evening really began nine hours earlier, at seven minutes past eight that morning, when my son walked into my kitchen with a grocery list and an ultimatum.
“Thirty people, Mom,” Brandon said. “Dinner at five. Turkey, ham, six sides, three desserts. And please, for once, don’t embarrass me.”
He dropped a sheet of paper on the counter beside my coffee cup. I hadn’t taken a sip yet. I’d been standing at the window in my robe, watching the snow come down over the backyard, thinking about how Richard used to shovel a path to the bird feeder before anybody else was awake on Christmas morning.
I picked up the list and read it twice, sure I’d misunderstood.
“Thirty people?” I said. “Brandon, it’s Christmas. I thought we were going to spend the day together. The three of us.”
He laughed, as if I’d said something charming and slightly simple.
“We are,” he said. “You’re cooking.”
He was wearing the charcoal cashmere sweater I’d bought him and left under the tree the night before, the one with the tag I’d carefully cut off so he wouldn’t see what it cost. He hadn’t given me so much as a card. At thirty-eight, my son had perfected the art of making every demand sound like a favor he was doing me.
Part Two: Vanessa
His wife, Vanessa, appeared in the kitchen doorway. Thirty-six, with honey-blond hair blown out in smooth waves, expensive makeup, and pale pink nails as perfect as a magazine ad. She looked around my kitchen the way a restaurant inspector looks around a kitchen before a surprise visit.
“And wear something decent,” she said. “Not that old blue dress. Some of tonight’s guests are very important clients.”
I looked down at myself. Flannel robe. Faded navy cardigan over a nightgown. Slippers Richard bought me at a Hy-Vee in 2014.
“Vanessa,” I said. “I didn’t know we were having guests.”
“Well,” she said, “now you do.”
I looked back at the list. Turkey, twenty-two pounds. Spiral ham. Mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, sweet potato soufflé, cornbread dressing, cranberry relish, Parker House rolls. Pecan pie, pumpkin pie, and something called a “bûche de Noël,” which I’d never made in my life.
I was supposed to buy all of it on Christmas morning, when half the stores in Omaha were closed. Cook all of it. Clean the house for thirty strangers. And have it on the table, hot, in under nine hours. I’m sixty-eight years old. I have arthritis in both knees and a heart that skips sometimes when I’m tired.
“I haven’t even been to the store,” I said quietly.
Brandon sighed, the long-suffering sigh of a man who has to explain everything twice. He pulled out his wallet and slapped a debit card on the counter.
“Use this,” he said. “There should still be money on it.”
My stomach tightened. I knew that card. Blue, from First National Bank of Omaha, with Brandon’s name embossed on the front.
It was attached to a checking account I had been funding for six years.
Part Three: The Emergency Account
When my husband, Richard, died seven years ago, Brandon was thirty-one. He’d just lost his job at an insurance agency downtown, and he told me he was struggling. Behind on his rent. Drowning in credit card debt. He was embarrassed to ask, he said, but could I help, just for a little while, just until he got back on his feet?
So I opened an account. I put it in my name, with Brandon as an authorized user on a debit card, the way my banker suggested. I called it his emergency account. Every month, on the fifth, I transferred eight hundred dollars into it from Richard’s life insurance and my teacher’s pension.
That was six years and seventy-two transfers ago. Fifty-seven thousand, six hundred dollars.
I learned eventually, the way mothers learn things, that the emergencies had a way of happening at steakhouses in the Old Market. At spas in Lincoln. At a resort in Cabo San Lucas, where Brandon and Vanessa went for their anniversary three years running. At boutiques where Vanessa bought handbags that cost more than my monthly pension check.
I told myself I was helping my son get back on his feet. Apparently, he’d never intended to stand up on his own.
“Brandon,” I said. “I don’t think I can do all of this. Not by five o’clock. Not by myself.”
His face changed. The patient smile disappeared, the way a light goes off when you flip a switch.
“Then maybe,” he said quietly, “you ought to start thinking about finding somewhere else to live.”
Part Four: Somewhere Else
For a moment, I couldn’t speak. I just stood there at my own kitchen counter in my robe.
Somewhere else to live. In my own house.
The two-story brick colonial on a quiet street in the Dundee neighborhood that Richard and I bought in 1987 with a down payment we’d saved for nine years. The house we’d spent thirty-one years paying off, one check at a time. The house where I’d brought Brandon home from the hospital in a blue knit cap. The house where Richard took his last breath, in a hospital bed in the living room by the front window, seven years ago this coming March, with my hand on his chest.
“Are you threatening to throw me out?” I whispered.
Brandon shrugged. “I’m asking you to contribute,” he said. “That’s not unreasonable.”
Vanessa glanced at her phone. “We’re going to be late, babe,” she said. “Brunch is at nine.”
Brandon picked up his car keys from the bowl by the door. He pointed down the hallway with them.
“And clean the guest bathroom,” he said. “Five o’clock, Mom. Don’t make this difficult.”
Then they left. The front door slammed so hard behind them that a glass ornament on the Christmas tree in the front room trembled on its branch, an old blown-glass bird with a white feather tail that had belonged to my mother.
I stood at the counter. For several minutes, the only sound in the house was the refrigerator humming.
On the refrigerator door, held up by magnets from every vacation we’d ever taken, were the family photographs. Brandon at six, grinning, missing both front teeth. Brandon at seventeen in his cap and gown, holding his diploma from Central High. And Brandon standing beside his father on our front porch at our last Christmas together, eight years ago, both of them in matching ugly reindeer sweaters I’d bought as a joke, both of them laughing.
I touched that last picture with one finger.
“You wouldn’t recognize him anymore, Rich,” I whispered. 