Chapter 8 - The Call From The Kitchen
I was at my own kitchen counter on Christmas Eve morning when my phone lit up with his name. It was just after nine. I'd been sitting there in my gray cardigan with coffee going cold, watching snow spit against the window. For the first time in years I hadn't been up since five basting anything.
I let it ring twice before I picked up. "Hey," I said.
"Thank God," my brother said. He was breathing like he'd been carrying something. Behind him I could hear clattering and a smoke alarm giving one short beep, then stopping. "Okay, I need you to walk me through this. The turkey—"
I didn't answer right away. I wrapped both hands around my mug.
He kept talking. "Linda got a twenty-two pounder. The thing's still half frozen in the middle and people are supposed to eat at three. Tell me what to do. High heat? Foil? What did you always do?"
In the background, someone yelled, "Don't open the oven again!" And Linda's voice, sharp, "I told you the potatoes go in at eleven!"
I stared at the wood grain on my counter. "I don't remember offhand," I said.
"You don't remember?" He gave a short laugh. "Come on. You've done this every year."
I heard a crash, not glass, maybe a sheet pan hitting tile. A kid started crying somewhere far from the phone.
"Please," he said, quieter. "Just the timing. If turkey's late, when do the sides go in? And Linda's trying to seat nine people with that leaf thing and she says the chairs don't match. Where'd you put the extra folding chairs last year?"
I stood up and walked to my sink with the phone pressed to my ear. My kitchen was clean. No celery strings in the drain. No grease on the stove. It felt strange to hear his kitchen falling apart through the speaker while mine stayed quiet.
"I was told to rest," I said. "To stay home and let you all handle it."
There was a pause. The smoke beep started again, three beeps this time. Someone coughed.
"That's not—" He cut himself off. I heard him move, a door closing, the noise dulling like he'd stepped into a pantry. "Listen, Linda's in over her head. The gravy broke or something. It's all oil. Jess is trying to fix the wreath thing on the door and her mom keeps asking where the pies are. Nobody knows where anything is."
I rinsed my mug. The water was loud in my ears. "Sounds like a lot."
"It is a lot. That's why I'm calling." His voice dropped. "You can't just pull everything and leave us hanging on Christmas Eve. Tell me the turkey temp. That's all. Thirty seconds."
I turned the faucet off. My hand was shaking a little, so I set the mug down.
"If I tell you the temp, then it's the timing," I said. "Then it's the chairs. Then it's the gravy. Then I'm hosting from my kitchen by phone."
He exhaled hard through his nose. "So this is punishment."
"No," I said. "This is what you asked for. You said I ruined it by making it tense. You said to skip it."
In the background behind his pantry door, Linda shouted his name twice. "Mark! Mark, come here!"
"I gotta go," he said, but he didn't hang up. I could hear him breathing. Then the muffled sound of Linda again, closer now, "Who are you talking to? Is that her? Put her on speaker—"
"No," he said away from the phone.
I closed my eyes. Ten days ago I'd been at that little round table folding a white napkin in my lap while they ate and looked at me. I could still feel the cloth going smooth under my thumbs.
"Mark," I said. "I can't rescue this one."
His voice changed. It got flat and hard, the way it had at that lunch. "You're really going to do this. You're going to let Mom's Christmas fall apart because your feelings got hurt over a table."
I didn't correct him about whose Christmas it was. I didn't list the receipts or the hours.
"I'm going to stay home like I was told to," I said.
He laughed once, no humor in it. "Fine. When everyone's sitting around eating dry turkey at eight o'clock, that's on you. You withheld help we asked for. That's you ruining Christmas, not us."
The pantry door opened. The kitchen noise rushed back in — the alarm, Linda arguing with someone about butter, water running.
"I hear you," I said.
May you like
"Good," he said, and hung up.
I set the phone face-down on the counter. For a long minute I just stood there in the quiet, my coffee cold, the snow still spitting outside. My hands were empty. Nobody was waiting for me to fix anything in the next room. I didn't pick the phone back up.
