The Leftovers

didn’t really matter. It was a half hour to the mall, and they needed to talk about something . If nothing else, it was a chance for her to practice her small talk, to remember what it felt like to be a normal person having a harmless little chat, nothing too heavy or disturbing. It was a skill she’d need to develop if she was ever going to reenter the social world in a serious way—get through a job interview, say, or a dinner date with an interesting man.
    “It’s—it’s pretty warm for this time of year,” she ventured.
    “I know!” Karen’s reply was oddly emphatic, as if she’d been waiting all day for a chance to discuss the weather. “Yesterday afternoon I went out in just a sweater.”
    “Wow. In December. That’s crazy.”
    “It’s not gonna last.”
    “No?”
    “Cold front’s moving in tomorrow. I heard it on the radio.”
    “That’s too bad.”
    “What can you do?” Karen’s high spirits returned as abruptly as they’d vanished. “Be nice if it snowed for Christmas. We haven’t had a white one in a while.”
    There was nothing to it, Nora thought. You just kept babbling, piling one inane remark on top of another. The trick was to sound like you were interested, even if you weren’t. You had to be careful about that.
    “I talked to Mom this afternoon,” Karen said. “She might not make a turkey this year. She says maybe a big roast beef or possibly a leg of lamb. I reminded her that Chuck doesn’t like lamb, but you know how she is. Things go in one ear and out the other.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “Though I have to say, I do kind of sympathize with her on the turkey question. I mean, we just had turkey for Thanksgiving and the leftovers lasted forever. It’s like, enough with the turkey already.”
    Nora nodded, though she didn’t really care one way or the other—she wasn’t eating any meat these days, not even poultry or fish. It wasn’t so much an ethical objection as a conceptual shift, as though food and animals had ceased to be overlapping categories. Even so, she was relieved to hear that there might not be a turkey at Christmas dinner. Karen had made a big one for Thanksgiving, and the whole family had gathered around it for what felt like an excruciating length of time, rhapsodizing about its golden brown skin and moist interior. What a beautiful bird, they kept telling one another, which was a weird thing to say about a dead thing without a head. And then her cousin Jerry had made everyone pose for a group photograph, with the beautiful bird occupying the place of honor. At least nobody would do that with a roast beef.
    “This is so great!” Karen said, as they waited at a red light on the mall access road. She squeezed Nora’s leg, just above the knee. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
    The truth was, Nora could hardly believe it herself. It was all part of an experiment, the impulsive decision she’d made to stay home this year and face the holidays head-on, instead of running away to Florida or Mexico for a week, baking in the sun, pretending that there was no such thing as Christmas. All the same, she’d surprised herself by taking Karen up on her invitation to go to the mall, the epicenter of all the madness.
    It was mostly Kevin Garvey’s fault, she was pretty sure of that. A month had passed since they’d danced at the mixer, and she still hadn’t figured out what to do about him. All she knew was that anything—even a trip to the mall with her sister—beat the prospect of another night of sitting at home like a teenager, waiting for him to call. It should’ve been obvious by now that it wasn’t going to happen, but some part of her brain wasn’t getting the message—she kept checking her e-mail every five minutes, carrying the phone everywhere she went, just in case he decided to get in touch while she was in the shower or the laundry room.
    Sure, she could’ve picked up the phone or shot him a casual e-mail. He was the Mayor, after all; if she wanted, she could’ve just dropped in on him during his office hours, started complaining about parking meters or something. Back when she was young and single, she’d never had a problem taking the initiative, asking a guy out or at least smoothing the way for him to do the asking. But that wasn’t the point anymore. Kevin had said he would call her, and he seemed like a guy who could be trusted to keep his word. If he wasn’t that kind of guy, then the hell with him—he