The Bill They Mailed Me After Christmas

For four years that truck ran up and down every county road in three townships and I never saw a dime of trouble from it. Tyler made the payments, mostly. I say mostly because two or three times over the years the payment came up short and Cornerstone, being local and knowing me, would call the house instead of doing anything drastic, and I would drive in and cover it and not make a thing of it. A few hundred here. Once it was most of a payment, near six hundred dollars, the fall Harold passed, and I paid it standing at the counter in my funeral black because I could not stand the thought of a late mark on a note with my name on it. I never told Dale. I never told Connie. I did not want Tyler embarrassed. I told myself it was keeping the peace.

That is the trap, keeping the peace. You keep it and keep it and one day you look up and you are the only one paying for it and everybody else has come to think peace is just a thing that happens, like weather, and not a thing you are buying with your own quiet money.

So. Christmas.

Every year of my life the family Christmas was at the old house, my house, because it was the home place and because I had the good long table and because Harold made a standing rib roast that Dale talked about all year. After Harold died I kept doing it. The first Christmas without him I cooked for fourteen and cried in the pantry twice and came out with my face washed and served the pie. The second year Connie said maybe it made more sense to have it at their place, with the big kitchen, so I would not have to work so hard. I said that was kind. I brought three pies and the potatoes and I washed the roasters after.

This past year, the third year, nobody called.

I want to be careful here because it is easy to make it sound like they forgot me, and it was not forgetting. I found that out. In early December I called Connie to ask what I should bring and when I should come, the way I had every year for forty years, and there was a little pause on the line, the kind of pause where a person decides how much of the truth to hand you, and Connie said, and I am giving you her words as near as I can hold them, “Ruth, I think this year we’re just going to do something small, just us. Everybody’s kind of tired, you know? It’s been a lot.”

Tired. Everybody’s tired. Just us.