The Christmas They Called Me Unsettled

So that brings us back around to Christmas.

Christmas at my mother’s house is a performance and we all know our parts. She sets the table with the Noritake china that her mother left her, and she puts out the little crystal glasses that she fills with sweet tea because we are not drinkers, and she makes the ham and the scalloped potatoes and the green bean casserole with the fried onions on top, and she sets a tree in the corner, a small artificial one now because she cannot manage a real one alone, strung with the ornaments from when Craig and I were small.

There were fourteen of us that year. My mother at the head. Craig and Brenda and their two, Maddie who is sixteen and Tyler who is twelve. My aunt Pauline and her husband, Don. Craig’s in-laws, the Reicherts, who had driven up from Hutchinson. And me, down at the foot of the table where the leaf meets the main board, in the seat that wobbles.

And one other person, and I will get to him, because he is the one who cracked the whole thing open.

The talk at dinner was Craig’s new job. Four states. The signing bonus, which Brenda mentioned twice without saying the number but in a way that made sure you knew there was a number. The company car. My mother glowed. She had a word she used all night, she kept saying Craig had “arrived,” as if the rest of us were still standing at the station with our bags.

She asked Craig’s father-in-law about his retirement. She asked Maddie about her volleyball, about the colleges that were already writing to her. She asked Tyler about his hunting.

She did not ask me anything, which was normal, and I ate my ham and I passed the potatoes when they came my way and I helped Tyler cut around the fat on his, and I was, if I am honest, having a decent enough time, because the food was good and the little tree was pretty and my father’s absence was a presence in that room and I was feeling close to him just by being in the house where he had lived.

Then my mother picked up her sweet tea and tapped it with her fork, the way you do when you are going to make a toast, and the table got quiet, and she said she wanted to say something.

She talked about the year. She said it had been a hard year, losing Ray, and that was true, and for a second I thought she was going to say something tender and I got a lump in my throat.

Then she turned it.

She said that out of a hard year, God had still brought the family good things, and the best of them was Craig. She said she had always known Craig would arrive. She said that from the time he was a little boy you could see he was going somewhere, that he had the drive, that he had the ambition, that he was going to make something of himself and by God he had.

And then she looked down the table at me, and she smiled the church-directory smile, and she said it.