The Slap At Christmas Dinner
“This is insane,” my father said, and it was the loudest I’d heard him speak in years. “She’s our granddaughter. We have rights.”
“You don’t, actually,” Nate said, still in that flat, level voice. “Not until a court says otherwise. And right now no court has said that.”
Officer Doyle wrote something in his notepad, glanced at Gail for confirmation of the list, and then looked back at my father with the patient, immovable expression of a young man who has been trained not to escalate but also not to bend. “Sir, ma’am, I understand you’re upset, but I have to ask you to leave the premises. If you attempt to remove the child without authorization, that becomes a police matter, and I don’t think either of you wants that today.”
My mother’s face crumpled in a way I’d never seen before, not performance, not the brittle pleading she’d done at Christmas, something closer to actual grief, and for one second I almost went to her. Then I remembered Grace’s cheek under the dome light of the car, the shape of a hand still visible hours later, and I stayed exactly where I was.
They left without Grace. Nate drove me and Grace home that afternoon, my car left in the daycare lot until my hands stopped shaking enough to drive it myself, and somewhere on that short drive I finally asked him the question that had been circling in my head since February started.
“Why now? Why would they try something this reckless, this out in the open, months after Christmas?”
Nate didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice had the careful, deliberate tone he uses when he’s about to tell me something he’s been sitting on.
“Because your sister told them she’s out of options,” he said. “Raymond mentioned something to me last week. He knows Dwight’s cousin. Apparently Courtney’s been telling people around town that if she doesn’t get back in your parents’ good graces before spring, they’re going to make her move out and get a real job instead of living off them. She needs Grace back in the picture so it looks like the family’s healed and none of this happened. That’s what today was.”
It wasn’t jealousy anymore, not only. It was leverage. My parents’ house, my parents’ money, my parents’ good opinion, all of it depended, in Courtney’s mind, on making Christmas disappear as fast and as completely as possible, and using Grace to prove to the neighbors and the church ladies and anyone else watching that the family was fine, actually, better than fine, that nothing had ever really happened at that table at all.