“I’m simply following the recommendations of the CDC,” Reagan would say.

“Oh, the CDC . . .”

Reagan didn’t need to get Covid. She was fat and prone to bronchitis. She was exactly the sort of person who showed up in those “Who we’ve lost” retrospectives in the local newspaper.

If you asked Reagan, every single person in her family looked like someone in a Covid obituary. They were all fat. Her dad was diabetic. Her mom was a cancer survivor. Her sister still smoked. What were they playing at? They weren’t lucky people. They were the sort of people who got laid off right before Christmas and got pregnant in the back seat of cars. Why were they willing to roll these dice?

Her grandpa had locked down right away.

“I’m worried about your grandpa,” her mom said back in April. “He won’t let me come over.”

Good, Reagan had thought.

“He’s still grieving,” her mom said. “He shouldn’t be alone.”

Reagan couldn’t really argue with that. There was no good argument. There was no answer. No good way to deal with any of this.

She’d called Grandpa on Thanksgiving Day and cooked up a plan for Christmas. She’d had to convince him it would be safe.

“I’ll stay home for two weeks, Grandpa. I’ll be totally quarantined.”

“Well, I don’t know that I want you to do that for me, Reagan . . .”

“I want to do it.”

“That’s a long time for a young person to stay home.”

“I’d be home anyway, Grandpa.” Reagan hadn’t seen friends since March. She hadn’t been on a single date.

“Well, I don’t know . . .”

“I’m coming,” she’d said. “We’re going to have Christmas together.”

Reagan didn’t know how to make mashed potatoes. (Single people didn’t make mashed potatoes.) But she’d looked up directions online, and it didn’t seem hard.

Her grandpa made the gravy.

He’d already set the table with her grandma’s red poinsettia tablecloth and gotten out two of the good plates, the not-quite-china with the purple flowers around the edges.

Reagan had never seen this table so empty.

Normally it was so crowded with food there was no room for your dinner plate. And no room for anyone under forty, anyway. Reagan had spent every Christmas of her life sitting at one of the card tables set up in the living room. The kids’ tables.

This wasn’t how she wanted to move up.