PART 2: Sixty Pounds of Potatoes
“Yes,” I said.
Clare nodded slowly. She didn’t say anything.
Before I left, I asked whether they needed another volunteer on Christmas Day.
Clare looked up at me. Then she opened a battered green binder on her desk and ran a finger down a page.
“We serve a hot Christmas dinner,” she said. “Eleven to three. We usually get about two hundred people. We’re short in the kitchen.” She peered at me over her glasses. “It’s not glamorous. It’s peeling potatoes and washing pots.”
“I’ve been peeling potatoes for forty years,” I said. “Put me down.”
She wrote my name in the binder in pencil.
Adam finally called that evening at eight fifteen.
I was at my kitchen table with a cup of tea and a crossword I wasn’t doing.
“Hey, Mom.” He sounded tired. “Sorry. It’s been a crazy day. I got your text.”
“Hi, Adam.”
“So, yeah. About Christmas.” He let out a long breath. “Renee’s mom’s had a rough year. You know her dad left in the spring. And she lost her job at the plant in September. She’s been having a hard time. We just thought we’d keep it to her side this time. Give her something to look forward to.”
“You could have told me.”
“I thought she had.”
“She did,” I said. “This afternoon. When I called to ask about the wine. Three weeks after you told me to come at noon.”
Adam sighed. The long, heavy sigh he’s been doing since he was fourteen, when I asked him to take out the trash.
“Can we please not make this a thing, Mom?”
I looked at the calendar on the wall beside my refrigerator. The covered bridge. December 25. Noon. Adam’s.
“It’s not a thing,” I said. “It’s fine, Adam. Enjoy your Christmas. Give the kids a hug from me.”
“Okay.” He sounded relieved. “Thanks, Mom. We’ll do something with you next weekend. Promise.”
“Okay.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
After we hung up, I rose from the table and dug a pen out of the junk drawer.
I crossed out Noon. Adam’s.
Beneath it, in small careful letters, I wrote: Westdale. 10 a.m.
Then I went to bed.
The next morning I was in my robe, halfway through my coffee at the kitchen table, when the pounding began.
Not knocking. Pounding. A fist on my front door, hard enough that I heard the glass in the storm door rattle.
“Mom! Mom, open up!”
The kitchen clock read 7:15.
I set down my coffee. I pulled my robe tighter. I walked down the hall to the front door and fastened the security chain before opening it, because at sixty-two, living alone, you fasten the chain even when you know the voice.
I opened the door a few inches.
Adam stood on my porch in his gray fleece jacket and sweatpants, as though he’d leapt out of bed and driven straight over. His hair stuck up on one side. His breath puffed out in white clouds in the cold. He hadn’t shaved.
He was holding his phone.
He raised it toward the gap in the doorway.
On the screen was Westdale’s Facebook page. A photo of Clare in her red sweatshirt, holding up an oversized novelty check the way people do for the newspapers. And beneath it, in big cheerful letters:
A HOLIDAY MIRACLE! Westdale is overwhelmed with gratitude to JOANNE KESSLER, who has donated $31,000 in memory of her late husband, WALTER KESSLER, one of our most beloved volunteers. Walt gave six years of his life to this community. This gift will provide winter meals and housing assistance to dozens of families this season. Thank you, Joanne. Walt would be so proud. ❤️
Two hundred and forty-one likes. Sixty comments.
“Thirty-one thousand dollars, Mom?” Adam said. His voice was cracking. “You gave away thirty-one thousand dollars? To a food pantry? Yesterday?”
I regarded him through the gap in the door.
“Good morning, Adam,” I said.
“Renee saw it at six o’clock this morning,” he said. “She was scrolling in bed. She sat straight up and showed it to me. She’s crying, Mom. She’s in the bathroom crying.”
“I’m sorry she’s upset.”
“Upset?” He laughed. Not a real laugh. “Mom. That was supposed to help us. That was our down payment.”
“Was it?”
He stared at me.
“Nobody asked me, Adam,” I said. “Not once. You said it would make a decent down payment. In October. I said it would. That was the whole conversation. You never asked. Renee never asked. Nobody ever said, Mom, could you help us? Could we talk about it?”
“We were going to,” he said. “After Christmas. We were going to sit down with you.”
“After Christmas,” I said. “After the Christmas I wasn’t invited to.”
His face flushed red.
“Is that what this is?” he said. “Is this because of Christmas? You’re punishing us? You found out we weren’t having you over, and you went and gave away Dad’s money out of spite?”
I didn’t answer right away.
Because I’ll be honest with you. I’d asked myself that same question at three o’clock that morning, lying awake in the dark. And I didn’t love the answer.
“I decided to give money to Westdale in the summer,” I said slowly. “I told Clare in July. I didn’t know how much. I decided the amount yesterday.” I looked at him. “Was I hurt when I decided it? Yes. Was it the reason? No. Did it make it easier? Probably.” I took a breath. “But it was your father’s money, Adam. From your father’s collection. And your father would have wanted it there.”
“How do you know what Dad would have wanted?”
“Because I was married to him for thirty-six years,” I said. “And because you didn’t come to the auction house when they were cataloging it, and you didn’t come to look through the binders, and you didn’t ask for a single thing out of that basement. Not one program. Not one stick. Nothing.”
Adam flinched as if I’d slapped him.
“That’s not fair,” he said quietly.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
He remained on my porch. He looked down at his phone. At the oversized novelty check. At the smiling photo of Clare.
“Renee’s mom is about to lose her apartment,” he said.
I went very still.
“What?”
“Her landlord filed an eviction. In November. She’s three months behind. She’s got until January fifth.” Adam’s voice was barely above a whisper. “That’s why Renee wanted her at our house for Christmas. That’s why she didn’t want you there. She didn’t want you to see. Her mom’s ashamed. She didn’t want anybody to know.” He swallowed. “We were going to ask you for the money, Mom. Not all of it. Just some. Not for us. For the house. We found one. A ranch in Fairfield with a finished basement. With a bedroom and a bathroom down there. We wanted to buy it so Pat could move in with us.”
I stood there, my hand on the door chain.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered.
“Because Renee didn’t want you to know,” Adam said. “Because she thinks you look down on her family. Because her dad left and her mom works at a factory and your house is paid off and Dad had a collection worth thirty-one thousand dollars.” He looked up at me. His eyes were wet. “And because I’m a coward, Mom. I didn’t know how to ask. I’ve never known how to ask you for anything.”
I had no words.
He turned and went down my porch steps.
“Adam,” I called after him.
He stopped at the bottom. He didn’t turn around.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t,” he said. “Nobody told you. That’s on us.” He started toward his car. “But it’s still gone, Mom. It’s still gone.”
He got in and drove away.
I stood in my doorway in my robe with the chain still on the door, watching his taillights disappear around the corner, and I didn’t shut it for a long time.
The next two days were the longest of my life.
I heard nothing from Adam. Nothing from Renee. On Monday, the twenty-third, I called Clare and asked, very quietly, if there was any way to take back part of the gift. She was silent on the line for a long time.
“Joanne,” she said finally. “Most of it’s already been allocated. The board met yesterday afternoon. We approved eighteen housing applications. The checks went out this morning.” She paused. “Eighteen families who were going to lose their homes in January aren’t going to now. Because of you. And because of Walt.”
After I hung up, I sat at my kitchen table and cried.
I couldn’t tell whether I was crying from happiness or from shame.
Both, probably.
On Christmas Eve, Lily texted me. She has her own phone now. She’s ten. Adam says it’s for emergencies.
Grandma why arent you coming tomorrow?? Dad said you were busy but you’re never busy on Christmas.
I looked at it for a long time.
I’m helping at the place where Grandpa used to volunteer, I wrote back. Serving Christmas dinner to people who don’t have anybody to eat with.
A few minutes later:
Thats nice. But I wanted you to come. Who’s going to do the presents? I cant reach the high ones under the tree.
I set the phone on the table and pressed my hands over my face.
At nine that night, I made the pecan pie anyway. I couldn’t say why. I had the pie crusts and the butter and the heavy cream. I had pecans left in the pantry from Thanksgiving. I made it the way my mother taught me, in the same glass pie dish she used, with the little crack on one side that Walter always said gave it character.
When it came out of the oven, I put it on the counter to cool. I looked at it.
Then I covered it with foil and slid it into the refrigerator.
At ten o’clock on Christmas morning, I walked into the Westdale Community Resource Center in my oldest jeans and Walter’s red flannel shirt.
The old stockroom in back had been transformed. Long folding tables draped in red and green paper tablecloths. A small plastic Christmas tree with battery-powered lights on every table. Paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling on fishing line, dozens of them, made by the kids from the after-school program. A man in a Santa suit with a real white beard was setting up a chair in the corner. Gus, the welder with three fingers missing, was stringing lights over the door.
The kitchen smelled of turkey and gravy and coffee.
Clare handed me an apron. Red, with WESTDALE printed across it in white.
“Potatoes,” she said. “Sixty pounds of them. The peeler’s in the drawer. Harold’s on gravy. Don’t let him put anything weird in it.”
“What would he put in it?”
“Last year it was nutmeg,” said Clare darkly. “We don’t talk about last year.”
I peeled potatoes for two hours. Harold sang along to the Christmas music on the little speaker in a surprisingly good baritone. The college kids from Miami were back, wearing reindeer antlers. Two women from a Methodist church in Oxford were making stuffing in hotel pans the size of bathtubs. A teenage boy doing community service for reasons nobody asked about was washing pots with tremendous seriousness.
At eleven, the doors opened.
They came in out of the cold. Two hundred and twelve of them, Clare told me later. Old men in worn coats. Young mothers with babies on their hips. Teenagers in hoodies with their hands jammed in their pockets. A family of six who’d been living in their car since October. A woman in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank. A man in an Army jacket with a dog on a rope. Kids, lots of kids, running straight for the Santa in the corner.
I left the kitchen and took a spot on the serving line. Mashed potatoes. One big scoop per plate, and a second if they wanted it. Most of them wanted it.
“Merry Christmas,” I said, over and over. “Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.”
Some of them looked at me. Some didn’t. Some said it back. An old man with no teeth told me I had a nice smile. A little girl in a purple coat asked if I was Mrs. Claus. I told her I was her cousin.
Around twelve thirty, I was scooping potatoes onto a plate when I glanced up and saw the next person in line.
She held a tray in both hands. She was about sixty. Thin, in a navy blue winter coat a little too big for her, a knit hat pulled low over gray-blond hair. Her head was down. She wasn’t looking at anyone.
But I knew her.
I’d met her exactly four times. At Adam and Renee’s wedding twelve years earlier. At Lily’s christening. At Noah’s fourth birthday party. And at Walter’s funeral, where she’d come up to me in the receiving line, held my hand a long time, and said she was so sorry, he seemed like such a good man.
Patricia Gorski. Pat.
Renee’s mother.
She held out her tray. She didn’t look up.
I put a scoop of mashed potatoes on her plate.
“Merry Christmas, Pat,” I said quietly.
She froze.
She looked up. Her face went from pale to gray to bright red in about two seconds.
“Joanne,” she said. She nearly dropped her tray. “Oh God. Oh my God. What are you doing here?”
