recognition, rather than about the house itself. I wanted them to see the house first. The program was a confirmation of something that existed independently of the program.
And I had thought, somewhere beneath the conscious planning, that if they sat in my house on Christmas Eve and the house appeared on television, the experience of it would be different from being told about it in advance. It would be the thing itself, arriving unexpectedly, with all the force of a thing that does not need to be introduced.
But they were not coming.
So the plan no longer mattered.
Megan arrived at four in the afternoon.
She came through the door with flowers from her own garden, dried and arranged, and a pie that she had made herself, and she looked at the dining table with the three missing settings and she said: they canceled.
I handed her my phone.
