The Christmas My Mother Slapped My Wife

Packing the bags

I went up to the guest room where our overnight things were, because we always stayed Christmas night, and I started putting our bags together. Katie came in behind me with Callie’s hand in hers, and she knelt down and wiped our daughter’s face with the hem of her own sleeve and said, “It’s okay, bug. It’s okay. Mommy’s okay. We’re going to go home and I’m going to make you cocoa.”

Kyle came up the stairs. He stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, my big brother, the quarterback.

“Don’t make this bigger than it is,” he said.

I kept folding. “She hit my wife, Kyle.”

“She’s Mom, Wade. She’s sixty-eight. She’s had a hard couple years. You know how she gets around the holidays since Dad.”

I zipped the suitcase. “Katie is my family.”

“We’re your family.”

I stopped and I looked at my brother, and for the first time in my life I saw the whole thing clearly, the horse and the pool and the fifty-foot sign, the way the world had been arranged since we were boys to make sure Kyle never had to hear the word no.

“Katie kept this farm from going under,” I said. “Did you know that? When Dad died. She did the books nobody else could read. She caught the tax mistake. She put our own money in during the drought year so Mom wouldn’t lose the herd, and she never told her, and she never told you, because that’s the kind of person you all just called trailer trash at Christmas dinner.” I picked up the bag. “So no. You don’t get to tell me how big this is.”

Kyle did not have anything to say to that. He stepped out of the doorway to let me pass. I have wondered since whether some part of him already knew what was coming for him, whether the words about the books landed somewhere he did not want them to.