The Christmas I Stopped Buying Their Love
I want to be honest about something. I am not a woman who begrudges her son a wife, and I am not a woman who thinks a daughter-in-law owes her constant company. I raised Delmus to build his own life, and a good mother steps back and lets that happen. What I could not shake was a feeling low in my stomach every time Loveta looked around my home, like she wasn’t visiting me so much as walking through a listing before an open house. I wasn’t being loved less. I was being assessed.
Wendell and I had always talked about helping Delmus get into a decent truck once his old one gave out, the F-150 having long since passed two hundred thousand miles and started leaking oil onto my gravel drive every time he parked. So that fall, quietly, I sold off some of the timber rights on the back forty acres, the ones Wendell’s father had left us, and I put a deposit down on a forest green F-150 with all the trim Delmus had once pointed out to me in a dealer lot magazine, laughing, saying he’d own one like it someday when he won the lottery. I had it delivered to my cousin’s shop in town and covered with a tarp so it would be a surprise.
I bought Loveta something too. She had shown me a bracelet once, in a jewelry case at the mall in Springfield when we’d gone shopping together that one time she seemed to want my company. Rose gold, with a small cluster of stones. She’d held her wrist up to the light and said, half joking, “A girl can dream,” and put it back in the case. I remembered. I ordered it before Thanksgiving.
But the stomach-twist never let up. If anything it got worse as Christmas got closer, because the less Loveta talked about my house directly, the more she talked around it. A comment about how her aunt had “downsized beautifully” into a condo with a walk-in shower. A comment about a nice new senior community going up outside Marceline with a “whole calendar of activities.” A comment about how property taxes on a place my size “must be a real burden for someone on a fixed income.”