The Christmas I Stopped Buying Their Love

Slow and steady. Like I was a horse being led toward a trailer I hadn’t agreed to board.

I sat with that folder for two full days before Christmas Eve. I did not cry, though I expected to. Mostly I felt a strange, cold clarity, the same feeling I remember from the morning after Wendell’s funeral, when the fog lifted just enough for me to start making lists of what needed doing. I was not going to accuse anyone of a crime, because there wasn’t one. I was going to do something simpler and, in its way, harder. I was going to let the truth sit on my table in plain sight and see what my family did with it.

On Christmas Eve I set the good china, the pattern with the little sprigs of holly that Wendell’s mother left me. I lit two cinnamon candles on the sideboard, more out of habit than cheer. I roasted a turkey too big for three people because cooking small felt like giving up on something. At six o’clock, headlights swept up the gravel drive.

Delmus looked tired when he came through the door, the kind of tired that lives behind a person’s eyes rather than in their shoulders. Loveta came in behind him in a cream coat, and the first thing she did, before she even said hello to me, was glance at the Christmas tree, then out the window at the dark shape of the barn, the way she always did. Like she was still taking inventory.

Dinner was pleasant in the flattest sense of the word. We talked about Delmus’s job at the co-op, about Loveta’s sister’s baby, about the weather turning colder than usual for December. Nobody mentioned Willow Bend or Cape Girardeau or equity. Delmus checked his phone twice at the table, something Wendell would never have tolerated, and I let it go, because I was saving my fight for something bigger than table manners.