You set the table three chairs short and then apologized to the empty air for it, so that is where I will begin.
I gathered the whole afternoon: the turkey that would not brown on its underside, the cranberry sauce still ridged from the can, the way you laughed too quickly at your uncle's joke and then looked down at your plate. Charged things, all of them. Good material. I have the gravy boat and I have the sentence you swallowed when your mother said "well, she isn't here to defend herself."
I have the empty chair. I noticed you kept passing it the potatoes.
Here is what I will make. By two a.m. the turkey will stand up and carve itself, politely, apologizing for the trouble. The cranberry ridges will become a staircase you climb without effort. Your mother will be there, and the woman she meant will be there too, sitting in the chair that was empty, and you will pass her the potatoes and she will take them and this will not seem strange to you at all, because in my rooms no one has left yet and nothing has happened only once.
The gravy will be warm. Everyone will still fit.
You wanted the meal to hold everyone it used to hold. The waking world told you that was over. I do not believe the waking world about these things. I will give it back to you whole for a few hours, badly lit and impossibly seated, the way you needed it.
Then the birds outside will start, and I will thin like steam off the potatoes, and you will not remember the chair being full. That is all right. I only had to finish the dinner.
You can wake up now.