My in-laws have arrived.Thirty minutes early.
I swing the door open, sporting a practiced smile, before they can knock again, as prepared as I’ll ever be to play the consummate host. “Merry Christmas.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hargrave look up at me. They are a barrage of bags and bottles and a poinsettia so huge that I don’t know where we’re going to put it in our house’s tiny rooms. They scurry past me with hurried cheek kisses, leaving behind Patrick’s ninety-year-old grandmother, who is wearing a crewneck with a Christmas tree embroidered on it and a light-up necklace.
“Nothing gets people quite as frenzied as Christmas,” Nan Hargrave says, adjusting her large, circular glasses. Patrick gets his poor eyesight from his dad’s side of the family.
“Tell me about it. Come on in.” I help her with her walker over the lip of the door.
“I won this at bingo,” says Nan, toying with her necklace, which is meant to look like a string of lights. The colors chase each other around and around. There’s a clunky battery pack at the back of her neck.
“I like it,” I say.
“Glad one of us does,” she huffs.
I tilt my head at her. “If you don’t like it, why are you wearing it?”
“Why areyouhosting Christmas dinner?”
I nod in understanding.Mrs. Hargrave. She’s the reason I’m hosting Christmas dinner. Patrick was only her proxy. Making him think it was his idea all along was her goal. I know her well enough to know that.
“She insisted, and you know what she’s like when she insists,” Nan says. “Sat through mass this morning looking like it was Mardi Gras.”
“Can’t you turn it off?” I ask, trying not to laugh at the sight of this short, elderly woman with tufts of thin white hair wearing a light-up necklace through the homily. At least Christmas isn’t one of the sad Christian holidays.
“Like everything else in old age, it’s not working properly. The button is stuck.” She sighs.
“Well, why don’t you let me hang your coat, and I’ll take a look at the button in a little bit.”
I’m not even through hanging up Nan’s coat when I hear, “Oh, my God, Bill!” Then, there is a crash.
Patrick’s family has been here for two whole minutes. There can’t already be a crisis.
Then, a panic shimmies through my chest. Did Hobart leave something behind last night? Are there glowing, glittering, golden orbs of magic floating in the air? I won’t be able to explain that away.
When I arrive in the dining room, I don’t see anything except my in-laws standing in the center of a bunch of fallen folding chairs.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“The house.” Mrs. Hargrave has a hand pressed to the center of her chest right beneath her own, non-light-up, necklace. They’re pearls, of course.Realpearls. “It looks…wonderfulin here. Did you do all of this?”
“I did,” I say, because the alternative is telling her that a bunchof elves did it for us as her son and I went for a joyride in Santa’s sleigh last night, which I don’t think would go over particularly well even if she did take it as a joke.
“I’m amazed,” she says. “Bill, take the chairs back to the car and don’t bother with the other boxes.”
“You got it, hun.” Mr. Hargrave dutifully picks up the chairs.
Mrs. Hargrave says, “Quinn, I had no idea you had budded into such a homemaker. I came early thinking I’d give the place a facelift before the others arrived, but clearly you had that all taken care of.” She pats me on the back as if she’s proud of me before wandering over to the Christmas tree to admire it, leaving me to stew in my perceived shortcomings. I wish I could do this whole day on fast-forward.
I back out of the dining room in search of a bottle of wine and find that Nan Hargrave already has a lovely red uncorked and flowing into glasses.
“If I’m going to look this fun,” she says, flicking the cheapy necklace again as I sidle up beside her, “I should feel this fun, too, right?”
“Right.” I accept the second wineglass from her.
She clinks our glasses together. “Bottoms up, buttercup.”
Only three hours until dinner, four hours until Mom calls and I can politely excuse myself to talk to her, eight hours until everyone leaves, and ten hours until Patrick and I have to make a major life-altering decision that precludes next year’s Christmas from being canceled.
