The Christmas Trip They Didn’t Know I Canceled

I cleaned up the mess they left, not because they deserved a clean house to come home to eventually, but because I wanted my kitchen to feel like mine again before I left it. I washed the mugs. I wiped down the counters where somebody had spilled cocoa mix and never bothered to wipe it. I packed a small bag. Two sweaters, my winter boots, the paperback I had been meaning to finish since summer, and Otho’s old plaid scarf, the one that still, after four years, smells faintly of him if I hold it close enough.

I left a single note on the kitchen island. The propane is paid through January. The house is locked. I will call when I am ready to talk.

Then I got in my car and drove out past the feed store and the little white church where Otho and I were married forty years ago, past fields gone quiet and gray under the snow, toward a little bed-and-breakfast on the bluffs above the river in Hermann. It is a place Otho and I used to visit every October for the wine festival, back when we still did things just for ourselves, before grandchildren and mortgages and other people’s emergencies filled up every hour we had. The roads were nearly empty on Christmas morning, just me and the plows and the occasional pickup truck loaded down with somebody’s forgotten present, and I remember thinking, somewhere around the second county line, that I had not driven anywhere alone, for myself, in longer than I could recall.

The innkeeper remembered me from all those autumns ago. She gave me the room with the window seat, the one that looks out over the water, and she brought me a pot of coffee without my asking, along with a slice of stollen she said nobody else had wanted yet that morning. I sat in that window and watched the river move under a thin skin of ice, and for the first time since Otho died, the quiet did not feel lonely. It felt earned.