“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.

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.”