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Telling my father to finish at his own pace, I wheel my mother back to her room. We're both relieved by the quiet that settles around us there. I press the call button for the aides to come and lift her into bed, then I sit beside her, holding her hand until she drops into a fitful sleep.

"It went well, don't you think?" I whisper to my father when he tiptoes into my mother's room.

I'm feeling that sappy self-satisfaction of a hostess who has just pulled off a successful dinner party. I'm even more pleased the next day when James for the first time returns my wave from his post on the Queen Anne loveseat, lifting his index finger and smiling tentatively, as if taking a social risk.

I regret, of course, that my mother was confused and isolated at the Thanksgiving table. I have to fight back the guilt that arises from enjoying anything she can't. And even when I sidestep the guilt, my grief for her threatens to engulf even my pleasure at everyone else's enjoyment. But the truth is, I did feel happy. And I don't think it came entirely from the smug satisfaction of knowing James and Norman had gotten a sliver of conversation along with their turkey and pumpkin pie. Or that Mary, probably a social powerhouse in her day, got to wow us once more with her classy blouse and nails.

"Pleased to meet you," people say in Texas when they're introduced. And I was glad, finally, to have met them all. I hope they were pleased as well. My own pleasure came from their having let me in through a crack in their carefully constructed indifference.

Through that crack I have caught a glimpse of the other side of the wall, the one I had fled in my teenage fear and carelessness, the side of the wall where I will live someday.

"How did the nursing home dinner go?" my daughter asked me the following week as we were recovering from the "real" Thanksgiving feast.

"You know that parable in Luke where the master sends his servant out to the highways and hedges to bring in the maimed, the halt, and the blind after the people he'd invited to the banquet don't show up?"

"Mmm … I think so."

"Well, that's how it was. And I got to come too."

Virginia Stem Owens is the author of Daughters of Eve (NavPress) and Looking for Jesus (Westminster—John Knox). She lives in Huntsville, Texas.

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November 13 2000, Vol. 44, No. 13