The Christmas I Stopped Buying Their Love

After the plates were cleared, I brought out the gifts. Delmus went first. When he peeled back the paper on the small box and found the key fob inside, his whole face changed, years falling off him at once, and for one unguarded second he looked exactly like the eight-year-old boy who used to sit on his father’s lap and steer the tractor down the fence line.

“Mama,” he said, voice cracking. “Is this real? Did you actually get me a truck?”

“Your daddy always wanted you in something better than that old rust bucket,” I said. “I know he’d have wanted it to come from both of us.”

He hugged me so hard my back popped, and for that one moment I nearly lost my nerve. I nearly let myself believe none of the rest of it mattered.

Then Loveta opened her box. She went very still when she saw the bracelet, the rose gold catching the candlelight. She held it up, turned it once in the air, snapped a photo of it on her phone for what I assume was somebody’s benefit, and then set it down on the coffee table next to the wrapping paper like she was setting down a coaster.

“Cute,” she said. That was the whole of it. No thank you. No hug. Not even the kind of polite, hollow smile people give for gifts they don’t especially want. Just “cute,” and then she reached for her wine glass.

I sat with my hands folded in my lap and waited, the way I used to wait at the front of a classroom for thirty children to settle down on their own. I did not have to wait long.

Delmus cleared his throat. He wouldn’t look at me straight on, which told me everything about whose idea this really was and whose nerve he’d borrowed to say it.

“Mama,” he said, with a small, forced laugh, “we actually didn’t get you anything this year. Loveta and I talked about it, and we think it’s good for you, honestly, to learn to give without always expecting something back. So this year, you know, just enjoy the giving.”