I was standing in the produce aisle at the Kroger on Princeton Road on December 21, holding two packages of fresh thyme and trying to decide which one looked less wilted, when my daughter-in-law said it.
I’d called my son’s cell phone. It was the middle of a Saturday afternoon, and Adam usually picked up on the second ring. But this time a woman’s voice answered.
“Hi, Joanne.”
“Oh. Renee. Hi, honey. Is Adam there? I just wanted to ask whether I should bring wine on Wednesday. Red or white. I couldn’t remember what you were serving.”
There was a short pause.
“Adam’s in the shower,” Renee said. “But actually, Joanne, I’m glad you called. We’re spending the holidays with my family this year. You don’t need to come.”
I stood very still in the produce aisle.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought dinner was still at your house.”
“It is. My mother’s coming over to cook.”
“Does Adam know?”
“Of course he knows.” Her voice had an edge to it. “We’ve talked about it.”
Behind me, a woman with a full cart asked whether I was finished with the herbs.
I put both packages of thyme back on the display. I moved my cart.
“All right,” I said into the phone.
“Okay. Great. Merry Christmas, Joanne.”
“Merry Christmas, Renee.”
She hung up.
I stood in front of the bananas for a long time.
On Thanksgiving weekend, sitting in my kitchen after the pie, Adam had told me, “Same plan for Christmas, Mom. Come around noon.” I’d written it on the calendar beside my refrigerator, the one from Walter’s insurance agent with a different covered bridge every month. Under December 25, in my handwriting: Noon. Adam’s.
I looked down into my cart.
Whole-berry cranberry sauce, two cans, because Adam has hated the jellied kind since he was six and once said it looked like something a doctor would take out of you. Clementines, a whole box, for Lily, who is ten and eats them like candy and leaves the peels in little spirals on the coffee table. A big squeeze bottle of yellow mustard, because Noah, who is seven, puts mustard on practically everything, including, once, a pancake. Underneath all of it, two bags of pecans and two refrigerated pie crusts, because I make the pecan pie every Christmas and have for thirty-six years.
I was sixty-two. Walter had been gone for two years. This would be my third Christmas without him.
I’d been looking forward to it. That’s the embarrassing part. I’d been looking forward to sitting on Adam’s couch in the middle of the afternoon with a cup of coffee, listening to Lily and Noah argue over whose turn it was to hand out the presents. Walter always handed out the presents. He wore a ridiculous red Santa hat he got at a Walgreens in 1994 and called out every name in a big booming voice like he was announcing hockey players at a game. “And now, from Grandma, number twelve, the right winger, NOAH JAMES KESSLER!” The kids would scream.
After he died, Lily and Noah fought about who got to do it. Last year Lily won. She wore the hat. It came down over her eyes.
I finished my shopping. I don’t know why. I suppose because I was already there, and the cart was already full, and walking away from a full cart in the middle of a grocery store is the kind of thing that makes people stare.
I paid. Eighty-seven dollars and forty cents.
Outside, a cold wind was pushing loose receipts across the parking lot in little circles. The sky over Hamilton was the color of dishwater. I loaded the bags into the trunk of my Buick, and I sat behind the wheel with the engine running and the heater blowing, and I took out my phone.
I typed a message to Adam.
Renee says Christmas plans have changed. Please call when you have a minute.
I read it four times before I sent it. I took out a sentence that said I’m hurt. I took out another one that said You could have told me yourself. I left it plain.
Then I put the phone face down on the passenger seat. And instead of driving home, I drove across town to the Westdale Community Resource Center.
Walter volunteered at Westdale for the last six years of his life.
It’s a low brick building on the west side of Hamilton that used to be a Kresge’s back in the sixties. Now it’s a food pantry and a clothing closet and a place where people can get help with rent and utilities and finding a job. They serve a hot lunch three days a week in what used to be the store’s stockroom. On the front window, somebody painted a sun with a smiling face years ago, and nobody has ever had the heart to scrape it off.
Walter started going there after he retired from the post office. He’d been a mail carrier for thirty-four years, the same route on the north end of town for most of them. He knew every dog and every porch and every widow who’d wave at him from her window at eleven fifteen. After he retired, he said he didn’t know what to do with his hands.
So he went to Westdale. He delivered groceries to people who couldn’t get out. He drove older neighbors to their doctor’s appointments in his Buick. He repaired anything Clare, the director, put in front of him. A broken shelf. A wobbly table. A freezer that made a noise. The door on the supply cabinet that wouldn’t close right.
He came home every Tuesday and Thursday tired and happy, smelling like coffee and cardboard boxes, with stories about the people he’d met. A man named Gus who’d been a welder and had lost three fingers. A young mother with four kids who’d never once missed a single week. An old woman who’d taught him to say thank you in Polish.
I went with him sometimes. Not often. I’m not the volunteer type, I used to say. I’m the home-and-hearth type. I’d send cookies with him instead.
After he died, I didn’t go back for almost a year.
Clare looked up when I walked in that Saturday afternoon. She was behind the front counter in a red Westdale sweatshirt with reading glasses pushed up on her head, sorting through a box of donated canned goods. She’s about fifty-five, with short gray hair and a voice that sounds like she’s been shouting across warehouses for thirty years, because she has.
“Joanne,” she said. “Hi there. Dropping something off?”
“A few groceries,” I said. “My dinner plans changed.”
Clare took her glasses off her head and looked at me.
She didn’t ask what happened. She just glanced at my face for about two seconds.
Then she reached for her coat.
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” she said.
We went out to my car together in the wind. She looked in my trunk. She held up the cans of whole-berry cranberry sauce, the box of clementines, the pie crusts, the bags of pecans, the squeeze bottle of yellow mustard.
“We can take the sealed pantry items and the fruit,” she said. “Not the refrigerated stuff. Health department rules. I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine.”
