For the sixth consecutive year, Arizona grandmother Wanda Dench sat down to Thanksgiving with Jamal Hinton, a young man she initially invited by text, mistakenly thinking she was talking to her grandson. At the time, Hinton was a total stranger, sitting in his high school classroom.
And for the second year in a row, she will sit down to a holiday dinner at a table with an empty chair, signifying the seat occupied by her beloved husband, Lonnie, who succumbed to COVID in April 2020.