The Christmas They Called Me Unsettled

My brother Craig is the one with the title. He is three years older than me and he has spent his whole life being the answer to the question. When our mother went to the beauty shop in Delia, the other women would ask after her children, and the answer was always Craig. Craig made district manager. Craig bought the new build out in the cul-de-sac with the three-car garage. Craig got the F-150 with the heated seats and the chrome running boards that nobody in a town like ours actually needs.

This particular Christmas, the Christmas I am telling you about, Craig had just taken a job as a regional director for a farm-insurance company headquartered in Wichita. He was going to oversee four states. There was a signing bonus. There was going to be a company car on top of the truck. My mother had told the whole county about it the way other women tell about a new grandbaby.

So you understand the arithmetic of that table. On one end sat the son who oversaw four states. On the other end sat the daughter who could not get her bedroom door to close in August.

Our father had been dead nine months.

I need to tell you about my father, because you cannot understand the toast without him, and you cannot understand what happened after the toast without him either.

His name was Raymond. Ray to the men at the co-op, Dad to me, and Daddy to me only in the dark at the very end when I was too tired to keep up the grown woman’s voice. He ran the feed store in Delia for thirty-one years. He was not a warm man in the way the greeting cards want fathers to be. He was a quiet one. But he was fair, and he was there, and when I was a girl he let me ride along in the truck on the Saturday deliveries and he would buy me a grape pop from the machine outside the Co-op and we would not say three words the whole trip and it was the best part of my week.

He got sick the spring before last. It started in his pancreas, which is the worst place for it to start, and by the time they found it there was not a thing in Wichita or Kansas City anyone could do but slow it down.

My mother could not take care of him. I want to be fair to her. Some people are built for the sickroom and some people are not, and she is not. She gets a flat, panicked look around illness, a look like a horse smelling smoke. She kept the house and she cooked and she went to church and she told everyone at church that it was in God’s hands, and all of that is a kind of caring, I suppose.

But the actual work of my father dying fell to me, because I was the one who knew how.