The Christmas They Called Me Unsettled

“And then there’s Nell. Still unsettled. Bless her heart. Forty-one years old and still out there in that drafty old house, still going nowhere. I used to worry about her. I’ve made my peace with it. Some of us arrive, and some of us just, well. Some of us just stay put.”

And the table laughed the soft, worn, comfortable laugh.

Unsettled. That was the word she had used my whole life. Nell is unsettled. Nell can’t settle down. She had used it when I did not go to the four-year college. She had used it when I broke off my engagement to Dale Buckner at twenty-six, which I did because I found out what Dale Buckner was, and she had sided with Dale. She had used it every year I did not marry and did not move to the city and did not get the title on the door. Unsettled. As if I were a glass of pond water that had never been let to stand.

I laughed along. I told you that. I sat there and I laughed along, because fourteen people were watching and the alternative was to make a scene at Christmas nine months after we buried my father, and I was not going to do that. I was going to swallow it the way I had swallowed everything. I reached for my tea.

And that is when Maddie put down her fork.

Maddie is sixteen. She is a quiet girl, tall and a little awkward still, with her mother’s coloring and, I had always thought, her grandmother’s chin, which I did not mean as a compliment even in my own head. She had been quiet all dinner. She is at that age where the family is embarrassing and the phone is more interesting.

But she put down her fork, and she said, not loud, but into a quiet that had not quite closed back up yet, “That’s not true, though.”

My mother looked at her. “What’s that, honey?”

“That Aunt Nell is going nowhere.” Maddie’s face had gone red up to the ears, the way it does when a shy person has decided to say a thing and cannot stop now that they have started. “That’s not true. She, she goes everywhere. She’s the only reason Great-Grandpa Ray wasn’t scared.”

The room went very still.

“Maddie,” said Brenda, in the low mother’s warning voice.

“No,” Maddie said, and now her eyes were filling but her chin, that chin, was set. “I was there. In the summer. Remember you sent me to stay with Grandma for two weeks and I went over to the house where Aunt Nell was taking care of Grandpa? I watched her. She talked to him the whole time. Even when he was asleep. She sang to him. Nobody else would even go in the room. Dad wouldn’t even come in the room.”

“Madeline,” Craig said.

“You wouldn’t come in the room, Dad.” She was crying now, openly, a sixteen-year-old crying at the Christmas table, and she looked straight at her father. “You stood in the doorway and then you went and talked about insurance. I saw you. Aunt Nell was in there washing him and you were in the kitchen on your phone.”

Nobody laughed now.