The Christmas I Stopped Buying Their Love

The night my daughter-in-law called my Christmas gift “cute” and dropped it on the couch like a dish towel, my son cleared his throat, wouldn’t look at me, and said the family had decided I needed to learn how to give without expecting anything back this year. He said it gently, like it was a kindness they were doing me. He had no idea what was already sitting in the kitchen drawer three feet from my elbow.

My name is Hesper Qubillen. I’m seventy-three years old, and I live alone now on Route 9 outside Verdon, in the same low brick house my husband Wendell and I bought the year our son was born. Wendell farmed feed corn and ran the parts counter at the tractor dealership in town for thirty-one years. I taught third grade at Verdon Elementary until my knees gave out on the stairs. We raised one son in this house, buried two dogs in the back pasture, and hosted every Fourth of July cookout the church softball league ever had. It was a good, full life, right up until two Novembers ago, when Wendell went out to the feed store for a bag of scratch grain for the chickens and never made it back to the truck. A clerk found him in the parking lot. The doctor said his heart just stopped, quick as a switch flipping off. I keep telling myself quick was a mercy. Some days I believe it.

After the funeral, the house went quiet in a way I wasn’t ready for. Wendell had a way of filling a room just by being loud about the weather or the Cardinals. Without him, even the refrigerator hum sounded like company. Our son Delmus stepped up at first, the way a good boy does. He called every Sunday. He drove the forty minutes from Marceline most Saturdays just to sit at my kitchen table and eat a plate of whatever I’d made too much of. “Don’t you worry, Mama,” he told me at the graveside, his hand heavy on my shoulder. “I’ve got you now.”

He meant it. I want to say that plainly, because everything that happened after does not erase the boy who meant it.