The Christmas Trip They Didn’t Know I Canceled

I have lived in Tuscumbia my whole life, and I have buried a husband, raised a son, and paid off a mortgage twice, but nothing taught me more about my own family than the sound of an empty house on Christmas morning.

It was not a loud silence. It was the kind that creeps in through the floorboards, the kind you only notice because something that is usually there is gone. No feet pounding down the hall. No cartoons blaring from the den. No Freda calling out for somebody to find her curling iron. Just the tick of the kitchen clock and the low hum of the refrigerator, the two sounds that had kept me company most nights since my husband Otho passed.

I sat up in bed and listened for a long minute before I let myself believe it.

Then I got up, pulled my robe around me, and walked to the window at the end of the hall, the one that looks out over the driveway and the gravel road that curves down toward the feed store. My driveway was empty. Both trucks were gone. Even the packed suitcases that had been stacked by the front door the night before, tagged with everybody’s names in Freda’s neat handwriting, were gone with them.

I want to tell you my first thought was hurt. It was not. My first thought was disbelief, the same disbelief I imagine a person feels the moment they realize the ground under them was never as solid as they thought.

Let me back up, because you need to understand what that empty driveway actually meant.

Three years ago, my son Garnet called me from a gas station parking lot in Springfield, and I could hear Freda crying in the background before he even said a word. The plant where he worked had shut its doors. They had two kids, a mortgage they couldn’t carry, and nowhere else to go. I did not think twice. I told them to come home, to move into the house Otho and I built, the house with the extra bedrooms upstairs that had been empty since Garnet left for college. I told them it was temporary, until they got back on their feet.