The Christmas I Stopped Buying Their Love

Loveta leaned back into the couch cushions, arms crossed loosely, wearing the particular satisfied look of a woman who believes she has just won something.

For one long second the room seemed to tilt sideways, the candlelight smearing at the edges of my vision the way it does right before you either faint or find your footing. I thought of Wendell in that parking lot, of thirty-one years at a parts counter and forty years married to a woman who loved him plainly and never once made him feel evaluated in his own kitchen. I thought about the folder in my drawer, and about slow and steady, and I found my footing.

“Well,” I said, my voice steadier than I expected it to be, “if we’re on the subject of lessons tonight, I suppose I have one more thing for the two of you.”

I got up, opened the kitchen drawer, and set the folder on the coffee table between the wrapping paper and the bracelet Loveta had already stopped looking at.

“Go on,” I told my son. “Open it.”

He looked at me for a second like a boy asking permission to leave the table, then untucked the flap and started reading. I watched his eyes move down the first page, then the second. I watched the exact moment his face changed, the same way it had changed over the truck key, except in the opposite direction, all the color running out of it at once.

“What is this,” he said, not really a question.

“That’s Cheryl from Marceline,” I said. “And that’s the brochure for Willow Bend, the one with your wife’s handwriting in the corner. And that’s a message she sent Renee back in September about Cape Girardeau, and being patient, and letting me come to it on my own. Slow and steady, I believe was the phrase.”

Loveta’s face had gone the pale, tight color of someone doing fast math in a public place. “You had someone follow me?” she said, sharper now, the polish cracking. “That’s insane. That’s actually insane, Hesper.”

“Nobody followed you anywhere,” I said. “I hired a man to look at what was already sitting out in plain sight, texts you sent from your own phone to people who weren’t sworn to secrecy. I didn’t need to invade anything. You’d already told half of Marceline your plans before you ever told me.”