At seventy-eight years old, I’d learned that loneliness has a particular weight—not heavy like grief, but persistent like a low-grade fever that never quite breaks. It had been two years since Margaret died, and in that time, the house we’d filled with forty-three years of marriage had grown so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming from the bedroom, could track the settling of old floorboards like a language only I understood. But today was going to be different. Today, I was going to bring my family back together.
I woke before dawn, which wasn’t unusual. Sleep had become elusive since Margaret passed, my body operating on some outdated schedule that still expected her warm presence beside me. I sat on the edge of our bed—my bed now, I kept having to remind myself—and placed my hand on the framed photograph on the nightstand.
“Big day today, Maggie,” I said to her smiling face, the one captured at our fortieth anniversary party. “I’m going to get them all here. Sarah, Michael, the grandkids. Just like you used to do. I’ve been practicing.”
The silence that answered felt heavier than usual.
I shuffled to the kitchen in my slippers, the morning light just beginning to filter through the curtains Margaret had sewn herself. Everything in this house still carried her fingerprints—the carefully organized spice rack, the ceramic rooster she’d insisted on buying at that antique shop in Vermont, the small collection of cookbooks with her notes scribbled in the margins.
I pulled out her favorite, the one with the worn spine and grease-stained pages, and opened it to the holiday section. Taped to the inside cover was her master list, written in her careful cursive: “Patterson Family Holiday Dinner – Battle Plan.” She’d always called it that, approaching these gatherings with the strategic intensity of a general marshaling troops.
Reading her handwriting made my throat tight, but I pushed through the emotion. This was what she would have wanted—the family together, the house alive with voices and laughter, the table groaning under the weight of too much food.
I started with the potatoes. Margaret’s famous garlic mashed potatoes that Sarah and Michael used to fight over as children, each claiming the other got a bigger serving. I must have peeled twenty pounds of russets, my arthritic hands moving slowly but steadily, remembering the rhythm of this work from decades of holidays.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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