Family Pot Luck is a Dish Best Served Tepid

We file past the buffet, jockeying for position in this begrudging hierarchy, bound by blood and marriage, not by choice. Every year, the dishes are the same.

The secret spice in Aunt Deb’s deviled eggs is her decades-old affair with her sister’s ex-husband. He’s no longer invited, but Deb’s little holiday tradition is to bring him a plate of leftovers on her way home, leaving her husband sleeping it off, belt undone, on her mother-in-law’s couch.

Felicia uses her mother’s recipe for coleslaw, not that it ever measures up. She tries it every year but has no idea that cousin Lauren stirs in extra vinegar on the sly. It’s even more sour than last year, but Lauren’s bloody well tired of cousin Felicia kissing up, so this’ll give her an excuse to purse her lips she won’t forget.

The mashed potatoes are always lumpy, and rarely ever hot. But since Papa Fred is a firm family fave, so are his spuds—unlike Pete and Patty’s green bean casserole, which, like their marriage, has been in the oven far too long and is starting to break down. We scoop it out, regardless, with a ladle Pete’s been accused of stealing from the family homestead for the past 30 years. Everybody knows it’ll go home with Pete and Patty at the end of the night, tucked deep down in her purse.

The main this year is meat—red, rare, bloody slabs of steak charred over flames the height of which demonstrate youngest brother Tom’s masculinity. The only still-unmarried sibling mans the grill the same way he drives his Ford F150 Dually: like he’s got something to prove.

If the baked beans and mac-n-cheese seem a little greasy, it’s because cousins Tabitha and Benjamin have been trying to sabotage each other’s diets. They’ve bet a trip to Bora Bora over who can lose 20 pounds by Easter, and Benny’s already down 7 pounds just by quitting drinking beer.

Of course, Janice is only ever asked to bring napkins because of that one year she messed up the main. She’s such a flake, and only tolerated because she’s engaged to grandson Nick, not that he’ll settle on a date after what—almost five years now?

The only thing that holds it all together—and then the thing that makes it fall apart—is the copious amount of booze supplied by insufferable Barry. He makes a big thing, puffing out his chest, “nothing but the best,” and “no expense spared.” The matriarch smiles benevolently and insists on calling him Doctor Fitzwilliam to make it clear he’s the only son-in-law she approves of.

To top the night is Great Aunt Dotty’s sickly sweet potato pie, but no one’s realized she forgot what step she was on in the recipe and added sugar three times. They’ll finally clue in that her mind is starting to slip when the oven she left on burns down her trailer along with both on either side in Golden Horizons trailer park.