The Christmas I Stopped Buying Their Love

Loveta stood up so fast her wine glass wobbled on the table. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “You’re turning this into some kind of courtroom because I bought a bracelet and said one true thing about an old house. I’m leaving. Delmus, are you coming?”

He didn’t answer her right away, and that silence, I think, was the loudest thing said in my house that night. He looked at the truck key in his other hand, then at the folder, then at me.

“No,” he said finally. “I think I’m going to stay and help my mother clean up.”

Loveta left alone in the cream coat, gravel spraying under her tires halfway down the drive, too fast for the ice patches I knew were out there. Delmus and I sat at the table a long while after the taillights disappeared, not talking much, just being in the quiet together the way we used to before either wife or funeral came between us. I made coffee. He cried a little, the kind of crying a grown man does when he’s ashamed of how long he let something go on. I didn’t lecture him further. I’d said what needed saying.

The weeks after Christmas were hard ones. Delmus and Loveta separated in January, not with lawyers yet, just distance, both of them staying with family while they figured out whether there was anything left worth repairing. I stayed out of the day-to-day of it as much as a mother can. What I did do was tell Delmus, plainly, that I would love him no matter which way his marriage went, but that I would not watch him disappear into a version of himself who let other people plan around him in silence.

He started driving out on Saturdays again, same as before Loveta, except this time he didn’t check his phone at my table. He fixed the porch step that had been loose since the fall Wendell died. He mowed the pasture edges without being asked. Some Sundays we just sat on the porch and didn’t talk about anything at all, and that quiet felt like something being rebuilt rather than something being avoided.