If the Fates Allow: A Short Story(3)

This wasn’t how she wanted to move up.

God, even if this were a normal Christmas, the only reason there’d be more room at the big table was because Grandma was gone. Would they even have Christmas here anymore? Or would Reagan’s parents take over? Would their extended family split into smaller units, all the aunts and uncles doing their own thing? They were all grandparents now. All matriarchs and patriarchs. Who would get custody of Grandpa on Christmas—would it rotate? Maybe Reagan wouldn’t see her cousins again until the next funeral. The next Zoom funeral.

Motherfuck, this was a bleak line of thinking. This was a bleak time to be alive. And this was definitely a bleak motherfucking table.

She set out the potatoes, the gravy boat, the lasagna pan full of green Jell-O salad, the dinner rolls Grandpa made from a can . . .

Grandpa brought out the turkey. Reagan laughed when she saw it.

“Why are you laughing at my turkey?”

“Because it’s massive.”

He set it down. “It’s eighteen pounds.”

“That’s huge, Grandpa.”

“I only know how to make an eighteen-pound turkey. I didn’t feel like experimenting.”

“I guess you’ll have leftovers for sandwiches,” she said.

“You can take some of it with you.”

She nodded.

Grandpa sat at the head of the table, and Reagan sat next to him. He started carving the turkey with an electric knife that was probably older than she was. “It’s your lucky day,” he said. “You don’t have to fight anybody for a drumstick.”

She laughed. She was glad for his dumb jokes. They’d already run out of things to talk about in the kitchen. There wasn’t much. He was a retired rancher who watched a lot of television. She was an accountant who worked from home. They talked about Covid news and theories. They’d read all the same newspaper stories. Her grandpa watched cable news but didn’t trust it. Reagan had never really had a conversation with her grandfather before. They’d always been part of a larger group—always with her grandmother, usually with her parents. They didn’t really have an existing dynamic. So they talked about the things that had brought them together today: Their worry. Their caution. Their firm belief that most people were idiots.

That was a nice discovery, that her grandpa seemed to dislike people as much as she did. Had he always been that way? Or was he just getting crotchety in old age and loneliness? Reagan had always been that way, and it was only getting worse.

“Your grandmother would want us to say grace,” he said, after they’d piled up their plates.

“Hmm.” Reagan was noncommittal. She’d already taken a bite of turkey.

“But if she wanted me to keep saying grace,” he went on, “she should have outlived me.”

The turkey caught in Reagan’s throat. She looked up at him, to see if he was being bitter or morose—but he just looked matter-of-fact. He was buttering his roll.

Reagan finished swallowing. “She really should have.”

He set the roll on his plate. “I kept telling her . . . that if she wanted me to get into heaven, she’d have to deliver me herself.”

Reagan laughed. There were tears in her eyes. “That woman had no follow-through.”

Her grandpa looked up at her. His eyes were shining, too. “Exactly.”

“Do you think Grandma would have been as careful as you? Through all this?”

“Heck no, I would have had to nail our windows closed.”

Reagan’s grandmother had been a short, wide woman who dyed her hair red and always wore pink lipstick. She was active in her church, active in the community. The type of person who went to all of her grandkids’ recitals and school plays, even after she had twenty of them.

She framed every school photo the grandkids ever gave her, always leaving the old ones inside so that the pictures stacked up and made the backs hard to close. Reagan’s senior picture was sitting on a coffee table in the living room, and if you opened it up, her whole childhood would spring out.

“I can’t even imagine your grandmother wearing a mask,” Grandpa said.

“Maybe she’d get into it,” Reagan said. “It would have given her something to do with her old quilting scraps.”

“Those homemade masks aren’t good for anything . . .”

“Better than nothing,” she said.

“I’ve got some N95s for when I work with insulation. Remind me to give you a couple when you leave.”

“All right.” The potatoes were sticky, but the gravy was good. Reagan’s whole plate was brown and white. The only green thing was her dish of Jell-O—she should have brought a vegetable. “My mom hates wearing a mask because she says they smear her lipstick. So then I say, ‘Don’t wear lipstick,’ and she acts like I said, ‘Don’t wear pants.’”

Her grandpa laughed. But it turned sharp at the end. “I wish she’d be more careful.”

“Me, too,” Reagan said.

“To be honest, sometimes I’m glad your grandma didn’t have to live through this. I think about it sometimes, that she never heard about it. She never worried about it. She never lost anyone to it. She left before she ever had to take on this burden. And I’m glad for that.”