The Christmas I Stopped Buying Their Love

By March, he and Loveta had started counseling, at her request as much as his, and by all the reports I got secondhand, she’d finally said the word sorry out loud, more than once, and meant something by it. I won’t pretend I trust her the way I trusted her the first year of their marriage. Trust like that doesn’t come back on the same terms it left on. But I watched her show up at my door in April with a casserole dish and no agenda I could find hiding underneath it, and I let her in, because grace has to start somewhere or it never starts at all.

This past Christmas Eve, one year after that folder sat on my coffee table, Delmus and Loveta hosted dinner at their own place in Marceline for the first time, and they asked me to come stay the whole week instead of driving back to an empty house each night. Loveta didn’t buy me a bracelet. She gave me a photo album she’d put together herself, pictures of Wendell I didn’t know she’d asked Delmus to dig up, our wedding day, him leaning against that old tractor with his hat pushed back, laughing at something out of frame. On the last page she’d written, in that same loopy handwriting I once found folded into a brochure with my name on it: “Thank you for not letting any of us get away with less than we’re capable of. Including me.”

I drove home to Verdon two days after Christmas, back to my own quiet house on my own five acres, exactly where I intend to stay. The truck sits in Delmus’s driveway now, waxed every other Saturday, the way his father used to wax his. I think of Wendell every time I see it catch the light.

I didn’t give my family a lesson in giving without expecting anything back that Christmas. I gave them a lesson in what it costs to be loved by someone who still expects to be treated like she matters. It turned out to be the better gift, in the end, for all three of us.