The Christmas My Mother Slapped My Wife

We carried our bags down the stairs. My mother was still standing by the table, one hand on the back of her chair. Brooke was seated, perfectly composed, cutting a small bite of ham as if nothing at all had happened, and I understood in that moment, without being able to prove it yet, that Brooke had gotten exactly what she came for.

We went out the front door into the snow. It was coming down soft and thick under the porch light, the kind of Christmas snow that makes everything look forgiven. Callie held my hand. Nobody followed us out. I buckled my daughter into her seat, and Katie got in beside me, and we drove the eight miles home on the county road with the wipers going, and none of us said a word until Callie, from the back, in a very small voice, asked, “Did I do something wrong?”

Katie turned around in her seat and took our daughter’s face in both hands.

“No,” she said. “You did everything right. You sat there like a lady in your beautiful dress. Your daddy and I are so proud of you.” And then, because Katie is who she is, she added, “And we are going to have the best cocoa you ever had in your life.”

We did too. We got home and I built up the wood stove and Katie made cocoa with the little marshmallows, and we let Callie open one present early, and by the time she fell asleep on the couch in her red dress she had almost forgotten. Children are merciful that way. It is the adults who keep the wound.

The morning

My phone rang at 6:40 the next morning. Christmas morning was the day before; this was the day after, a gray dawn with the snow still holding. It was my mother.

I almost did not answer. Katie, awake beside me, put her hand on my arm and said, “Answer it. Not for her. For you. So you never wonder.”

I answered.

My mother was crying so hard I could not understand her at first. Not the controlled tears of a woman who runs a room. Something torn open. She kept saying my name, “Wade, Wade, oh, Wade,” and then she said the thing that started the whole truth unraveling.

“They came back,” she said. “After you left. They stayed and Brooke sat me down at the table and she had papers, Wade. She had papers in her purse. She had them the whole time.”

I sat up. “What papers, Mom.”

“To put the farm up,” she said. “For Kyle’s business. For the dealership. Brooke said it was to help family, she said it was what your father would have wanted, she said now that Katie was out of the picture we could keep it in the real family. She had a pen. She had them all filled out already, Wade. She’d had a lawyer do them. She wanted me to sign the ground over as collateral last night, at the Christmas table, with your wife’s handprint still on the wall.”

I could not speak.

“And I almost did it,” my mother said, and her voice broke all the way down. “I had the pen in my hand. And I looked at where you’d been sitting and where that baby had been sitting, and I thought about Katie’s face, and I thought, Loretta, you slapped that girl and threw her into the snow and the second she was gone this one slid papers across the table. And I knew. I knew what I’d done. I knew who’d been lying to me. Wade, what did I do. What did I do to that girl.”