The doorbell rang again.
"You have got to be kidding," Dotty said, and her laugh sounded almost hysterical.
"Should I tell whoever it is there's no room at the inn?" Lee joked.
"That depends who it is," Dotty said. "And whether they're carrying a fully cooked turkey."
It was Libby, standing anxiously on the doorstep, her hands stuffed in her pockets. "Oh, hi," she said, when she saw Lee. "Phillip called me."
"He did?"
"Yeah. He said they were coming home and that his mom says everyone is welcome on Christmas Day, so…" she frowned. "Are you in the middle of dinner?"
"No, that's been a bit of a roller coaster. Come on in." Lee stood aside. "Why aren't you in the middle of dinner?"
"We do it all on Christmas Eve." She toed off her boots and handed Lee her coat. "Christmas Day is mostly just hanging around."
"That sounds nice," Lee said, leading her into the family room. Phillip jumped up off his chair when he saw her, abandoning his plate of snacks to weave through their guests and greet her at the door to the kitchen.
"Must be love," Joe said under his breath. "I've never seen him abandon food like that before."
Lee chuckled. Across the room, he saw Dotty come back up from the basement, where she'd gone to put the lasagnas back in the deep freeze. She beckoned to him.
"Lee, I'm worried about Amanda," she said. "She looked so upset just now."
"We'll figure something out with the oven," he said, trying to sound confident. He thought of the turkey thawing downstairs, and the roast in the fridge. And the guests in his family room who were probably getting hungry.
"Not in time for today." Dotty sighed. "I should start a pot of chili. I think you only have dried beans, though, and the beef is frozen. If I start now, we can eat by… seven."
"Dotty, don't do that yet. You've been traveling all day and you don't need to make dinner for…."
""Twelve," Dotty supplied.
"Twelve. We'll figure something out." He snapped his fingers and started rooting through the drawer near the phone. "I'll call the place we ordered from last night," he said. "We can get dinner for fifteen or whatever and call it a day." He scanned the menu. "They don't have dinner for fifteen."
"Two dinners for six," Dotty suggested. "Then everyone gets an egg roll."
"I don't need an egg roll," Jamie said, pouring an exceptionally tall glass of Coke, "they're gross."
Lee headed for the living room, Dotty hot on his heels, and picked up the phone. He felt a tiny glimmer of hope as it rang, and then a voice asked him what his order was. "Uh, hi. How long do you need for two dinners for six?"
"Four hours," the man on the other end said.
"Four hours?"
"Yep. Four hours."
Lee wasn't sure how to respond. He was sure he'd ordered Christmas-Day food before. Hadn't he? Had it really taken four hours? He must have made some kind of noise because the voice on the other end of the phone continued.
"It's our busiest day of the year, man. People make it a tradition. The turkey doesn't thaw. Ovens break. Moms go on strike. So it's four hours now. If you'd called at one your food would be ready at four o'clock, but you didn't. You're calling now and there are two hundred people ahead of you in line."
"I didn't know my oven was broken at one," Lee said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. "Look, I'll give you fifty bucks to push the order up."
"Lee!" he heard Dotty hiss behind him. He thought she was gasping in horror, but she was laughing, hand over her mouth.
But the man on the other end of the line just laughed, too, over the din in the background. "I've heard that seven times today already, and I'll hear it seven more. Sorry. Four hours. You wanna order or not?"
He glanced at Dotty, brow raised in silent question. "Four hours, huh?" Dotty shook her head. "No thanks." He hung up the phone and turned to look at her.
"Did you really just try to bribe the restaurant?"
"I got desperate," he said, running a hand through his hair. "No matter how we slice it, we're not eating until seven."
Phillip and Libby came into the room just as he finished speaking, hands linked, obviously looking for somewhere to be alone. Phillip stopped short, abruptly enough that Libby walked straight into the back of him. "Seven?" he said. "Why?"
"A bunch of different reasons," Lee said. His eyes narrowed. "What are you two up to?"
Phillip's cheeks colored. "We, uh…"
Libby held up a package. "We were going to exchange presents. We just wanted somewhere quiet to do it and we know the rule about bedrooms."
"Oh." Lee nodded. "Fine. Just, uh, leave the door open a little."
"Very nice, Lee," Dotty murmured as they left the room. "You're developing a real knack for that sort of thing."
"I guess it comes from a lot of experience." He paused at the foot of the stairs. "I should go check on Amanda, huh?"
Dotty nodded. "Spaghetti!" she said, suddenly. "Let's check the pantry. Maybe you can go up with a solution."
The pantry yielded half a box of pasta and two small cans of tomatoes. "Not enough," Dotty said in despair. "Not even for a troop of elves. I'd suggest sandwiches and a call back to the Chinese food place, but we only have one loaf left."
"We really leaned into the idea of it just being the four of us today," Lee muttered. "I meant to stop at the grocery store yesterday afternoon but I got caught up at work."
"Even if you had, would you have bought three boxes of pasta?"
"No." He let out his breath in a rush, suddenly feeling a flutter of the panic he knew had driven Amanda upstairs.
"We're going to have to come clean," Dotty said. "I know Amanda doesn't want to, but we know all these people and they'll understand."
Lee's stomach gave a queasy tip. "I guess." He hesitated. "I'll go do it now."
He was on his way back to the family room when his uncle stopped him. "What's going on, Skip? You look like you're about to break some bad news."
"We've got a bit of a domestic crisis on our hands," he confessed. "We, uh, don't have anything to feed anyone for dinner. The oven quit."
Lee wasn't sure what he expected from his uncle, but a chuckle was not it. "I wondered why that roast didn't smell like anything."
"Well that's the other thing." Lee motioned towards the refrigerator. "Even if the oven did work, this is the roast."
Robert looked at the meat, then over his shoulder at the group in the adjacent room. Lee could see the Colonel counting, looking at the roast, and then counting again, probably adding two for adolescent appetites.
"Everyone said they couldn't come, but Amanda always says 'drop by anyway, we always have too much.'"
"She does say that." Robert nodded. "And this time we all listened."
"Anyway, I've gotta figure something out pretty quick before everyone gets drunk and disorderly."
Robert nodded, thoughtful. Lee waited, wondering if he was about to get a lecture about always having a backup plan, or how they should know how to fix an oven. But his uncle just gestured to the group in the other room. "Look, I'm sure no one's going to be put out if we've got to order a pizza or two," he said. 'You know we aren't all here because of the turkey dinner. Though I'm not going to lie, Amanda's is at least as good as Barney's."
"Chinese food is a four hour wait," Lee said. "I don't suppose pizza will be much better."
"Well, get me a menu and I'll give it a try," Robert said. "And you go tell that wife of yours that none of us mind. It happens to us all at some point. I've eaten ration bars in a bunker with fire overhead, for God's sake. With rats for company. Almost everything is better in comparison."
"I guess you're right."
"You know I am." Robert took the menu Lee offered and turned toward the phone, then paused, scanning the menu. "What the hell am I ordering?" he muttered. "Does everyone eat everything?"
"Get four extra-large of whatever's circled, if you can," Lee said. "That should cover us." He paused. "I'm going to break the news to everyone down here before I go up."
He drew in a deep breath and stepped into the family room. "Hey everyone," he said, "we have a little problem."
Amanda stood in her bedroom, sucking in a series of ever-deeper breaths and watching the snow fall outside. The sky was already darkening, only making her feel even more keenly how the day was slipping away. It was four o'clock now, and there was no way she was going to be able to pull something together for all the people downstairs. Not even grilled cheese sandwiches or bacon and eggs.
She had not finished doing her makeup. She had stood instead with her mascara clutched in one hand, her throat aching, certain she was going to cry any second. The only thing that had kept her from giving in was the knowledge she had to go back downstairs and figure things out, and the last thing she wanted was to have to do that with swollen eyes and a red nose.
"Hey." Lee's voice on the doorway made her turn. "You okay?"
"No," Amanda said. "I am not okay. I'm taking a few minutes to put on some makeup and have a panic attack."
"Amanda."
"Lee, there are ten people downstairs in our family room. Ten people we thought weren't coming."
"And Libby."
"Libby too?" She sighed and scrunched her face up in frustration. "I've been running around for two hours trying to figure out what to feed them for dinner and we finally came up with something and the oven doesn't work. This is what I get for throwing invitations around for a month and not really preparing. It's Christmas Day and all I have to serve them for dinner is dip and sugar cookies. And the only reason I have enough cookies is because my mother has a cookie business. This is terrible."
"Amanda." He caught her hands and gave them a gentle shake. "It doesn't matter."
"Of course it matters. I invited them here and we have nothing. It's a disaster."
Beneath their feet, she heard Phillip let out a whoop of laughter, then everyone else followed.
"They're having a good time," he said. "I told them what's going on and it's fine. We'll figure something out."
She took a step back from him, eyes wide. "You told them?"
"Well, I kind of had to. They were going to notice when four pizzas showed up."
"You ordered pizza?"
"Well, no." He hesitated. "The pizza place didn't pick up. But Uncle Robert's still trying."
"I can't believe this," she muttered.
"Hey, it'll be okay. It really doesn't matter."
Amanda sat down on the edge of the bed. "It does matter," she said, staring at her feet in their new wool socks. "It matters to me."
He was quiet for a minute, then he leaned over and kissed her cheek. "You take a minute up here if you need it," he said. "I have an idea."
"What kind of an idea? It had better not involve a drive-through."
He paused for just a second too long — long enough that she felt her heart leap into her throat at the thought of everyone eating burgers and fries around the dining room table — but then he waved a hand at her and kept moving toward the bedroom door. "Just an idea. Take a few deep breaths and come down in ten minutes."
Lee was standing in the entryway, waiting, when she finally came down the stairs. It took her a moment to realize he was wearing his coat, and that everyone else was wearing theirs, too.
"Come on," he said. "We're going out."
"What? Who's driving?" They couldn't all be in any condition to drive, she was sure of it. How many glasses of wine had she poured that afternoon?
"Me," Lee said. "And Joe, and Uncle Robert. We're going to get dinner and then we'll head back here for the evening."
Amanda stood silent and frozen on the landing, looking at all her guests standing in their coats and hats and scarves. Waiting.
"Come on, Mom. We're starving," Jamie groaned.
So Amanda pulled on her boots and slipped her arms into her coat. She picked up her purse and wound her scarf around her neck. She locked the front door behind everyone and got into Lee's car with him and Dotty and Jack. Joe and Carrie took the boys and Libby. Robert took Francine and Billy and Lillian.
"You made sure we didn't forget anyone, right?" she murmured, as he backed out of the driveway.
"I made sure," he said, and Jack chuckled in the backseat.
"Where are we going?" she asked, as they led the little caravan down the street. Snow still fell in big, fluffy flakes, collecting at the base of the car windows. It was a gentle snowfall, though. It made Amanda think of Christmas movies where everyone stayed cozy in a warm house, sipping mulled wine in festive sweaters.
"You'll see," he said. But she knew without him saying.