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Bo snorts.

“Thank You for Dottie. You know what she is to me. You were there for all of it.” I feel her gaze land on mine. “Thank You for Bo, every loud inch of him. And thank You for Olivia, who You dropped into my life through a wrong number, which is a funny way to answer a prayer I didn’t know I was praying.”

The table’s gone quiet. Even Bo.

“Thank You that nobody at this table is missing tonight. Amen.”

“Amen,” Dottie says, thick.

“Amen,” Bo says, already reaching for a roll.

I open my eyes and Olivia’s looking at me, and I wink at her, because if I don’t make it a little bit of a joke I’m going to have a whole feeling in front of the green beans.

She doesn’t wink back. She just holds my eyes a second, filing it somewhere she keeps the things she doesn’t say.

Then it’s chaos, the good kind. Plates going every direction. Bo narrating his own meal. Dottie insisting everyone take more than they want and then more again.

“This is the best mashed potatoes,” Bo announces around a mouthful, pointing his fork at Olivia. “Grandma’s are good but these are the best.”

“Traitor,” Dottie says, without heat.

“They’re the same recipe,” Olivia tells him. “I followed her notes.”

“They taste better when you make them.”

“That’s just love, buddy,” I say.

Bo considers this, then he sets down his fork and looks at me across the table like he’s about to deliver a ruling.

“I love Olivia more than you do, Dad.”

I set down my own fork. “Is that right?”

“Yep.” He goes back to his potatoes, case closed. “You’ve only loved her since the phone. I’ve loved her since the pie.”

Dottie laughs so hard she has to put a hand on the table.

I don’t correct him. There’s no correcting him, and anyway I’m not sure he’s wrong on the timeline. I just look across at Olivia, who’s gone pink in the best possible way, biting back a smile she’s clearly losing hold of, keeping her eyes on her plate because looking up would give away exactly how much a ten-year-old just undid her.

“He’s got a point about the pie,” I tell her.

“Eat your ham,” she says.

I eat my ham.

After the plates are cleared and the ugly pie turns out to be the best thing on the table, which Bo notes for the record, Dottie disappears into the hall closet and comes back with a shoebox and a fistful of markers.

“Time for the tree,” she says.

Olivia looks at me. “The tree?”

I get up and open the coat closet, and there it is on the back of the door, where it’s been since I was younger than Bo. A trunk cut from brown paper, bare branches reaching toward the top of the door, and hanging off every branch, dozens of paper leaves in a dozen different hands.

“We write what we’re thankful for,” Bo explains, already digging out this year’s leaves. “Then they stay up forever. That’s the rule. Forever.”

Olivia steps close and reads them, and I let her, because I know what’s on there.

There are leaves from when I was ten, in my own crooked handwriting. Thankful for my bike. Thankful for Grandma. Leaves in Dottie’s careful cursive going back years. And a run of them from when Bo was small, mine getting shorter and rougher, the handwriting of a man tired all the way through.