The Holiday My Family Left Me Off

I want to explain why this was possible, because I do not think a family excludes someone for no reason at all, even when the reason is unfair. Fourteen months before that Thanksgiving, we had all been at Mom’s for a Fourth of July cookout, out in the yard behind the house I grew up in, and Kermit had spent the better part of an hour making comments about Katharyn’s weight. She was newly pregnant then, exhausted, trying to laugh it off the way she always does, and he kept going, calling her Chunk in front of her own husband and half the neighborhood, until I finally set my plate down and told him to stop.

He did not like being told to stop, not in front of everyone, not by his little sister. He turned it around fast, the way people like that always do, saying I always had to make everything about me, that I could not let anyone have a nice day. Mom, who has spent every year since Dad died trying to keep the peace with a son who half runs her finances and manages the forty acres she cannot manage alone, sided with keeping things calm. She pulled me aside later and said, “You know how he gets. Just let it go, for me.”

I let it go, because that is what I have always done. I did not know that letting it go had a price, and that the price was going to be paid slowly, one gathering at a time, for over a year, without anyone ever telling me the bill had come due.