“That’s from Pat.”

“Pat. Jeez. She hasn’t been here for six or seven years.”

“How long have we been meeting?”

“Sixteen years,” I say. “Since Tara was a toddler.”

“I was here from the beginning,” Jeannie says.

“And me,” Charlene adds.

“I came a few years later.” Vera hands me a plastic green pail decorated with grinning Santas and then a red oven mitt with white snowflakes.

“That was Laurie’s.”

“From two years ago. How do you remember?” Laurie says.

“You always want to do something practical. Or simple. Like those elegant white boxes this year.”

“We’re gonna miss you,” Charlene says. And we realize, truly realize—not just to make polite, everything-will-be-okay conversation—that this is her last cookie party with us. She will not be here next year.

A hush follows. We’ve been appreciating the passage of time as we pass along, touch, examine, and review containers from years gone by, previous parties. Maybe it’s the time of night, the fact that we know we’re more than halfway through the party. And one of us is leaving and one of us is struggling with everyone’s worst fear, the death of a child. And each of us has endured disappointment, sorrow, self-disgust, addiction. And loss.

Vera stands holding a small bag printed with candy canes and holly and she passes it to me and looks into her shopping bag with a downturned mouth. “That’s it. ‘All gone,’ as Peter used to say.” She shrugs, her palms on her hips.

“That one’s for the hospice,” I say and put it in the bag.

“Why a hospice?” Sissy asks. “Why not a safe house or the homeless shelter?”

“We used to give them to a safe house,” Juliet says.

“That was a while ago.”

“This is why we give them to a hospice. Ten years ago Tracy’s mom was dying at Christmastime. And Tracy visited her whenever she could and stayed as long as she could.”

I think of my own mother dying and remember the pain that Tracy was going through and my eyes fill. Almost as a reflex, I grab a piece of peanut brittle, my mom’s recipe.

“And then one night, at two in the morning, her mom was sleeping that heavy-breathing, almost-stopping sleep and Tracy went into the family lounge looking for something. She wanted a cookie. Just something sweet. Something good in all the dismal sadness of waiting for the next step, not wanting it to come and wanting it, wanting her mother’s pain to be over, at the same time. When she realized how much she wanted a cookie that night, she suggested the hospice for our future donations.”

“So what do they think about the cookies?” Rosie asks.