The Christmas My Mother Slapped My Wife

“Oh, I love that you don’t fuss over what you wear,” she would say to Katie at Easter. “I could never be that comfortable. I’d feel underdressed at my own table.”

“It’s so smart that Callie goes to the public school,” she said once, in front of everyone, while her own kids were enrolled at the private academy an hour away. “The mix is good for them. Builds character. Katie would know better than any of us about making do.”

“You must have learned to cook cheap growing up,” she said at Thanksgiving, tasting Katie’s dressing. “You can always tell. There’s a certain, what’s the word, resourcefulness to it.”

For six years Katie smiled through it. She would squeeze my hand under the table, which was our signal, and I would change the subject, and later in the truck she would let out a long breath and say, “She’s just insecure, Wade. It’s fine.” She was better than all of us, and she paid for it by swallowing a hundred small insults so I would not have to fight my own family at every holiday.

I told myself I was keeping the peace. What I was actually doing was letting my wife take punches so I did not have to throw any. I know that now. It took me thirty-eight years and one slap to know it.

What I did not know was coming

Here is the part I could not see, the part that only came clear afterward, and I am going to tell it here even though I did not learn it until later, because otherwise that Christmas makes no sense.

Merrick Ford was drowning.

Kyle had over-ordered inventory for two years running, big lifted trucks that sat on the lot through a soft farm economy while the interest on the floor plan ate them alive. Brooke had kept up the sponsorships and the country club membership in the county seat and the new addition on their house, all on the theory that a dealership has to look successful to be successful. By that fall they were behind on the floor plan financing, which is the loan that lets a dealer keep cars on the lot, and when that loan gets called, a dealership dies in about a week.

They needed collateral. Real collateral. The kind a bank does not laugh at.

They needed the farm.

Two hundred and forty acres of paid-off, clear-title Kansas wheat ground, owned outright by a sixty-eight-year-old widow, is the most valuable thing for forty miles. And Brooke had spent that entire fall out at the farmhouse, more than she had come in the previous six years combined, drinking coffee with my mother, driving her to the doctor in Wichita, bringing her little treats from the good bakery. My mother, lonely four years into widowhood, ate it up. She told me on the phone how thoughtful Brooke had become. “She’s really matured, Wade. She checks on me.”

And while she checked, she talked. I pieced this together later from three different people, so I know it is true.