The Christmas They Called Me Unsettled

He was not crying. He was too old and too far into it to cry. He just stood there and said it, flat and true, the way old farmers say things.

“So I don’t know what you think your daughter is,” Earl said. “But I buried my wife in October and this woman is the reason I didn’t lose my mind doing it. And there’s a lot of us. You don’t know how many of us there are.”

And then he sat down.

And I understood the last thing he said, because it is true, and until that moment I had never let myself count. There are a lot of us. There are a lot of people in those two counties whose worst week of their life I was in the room for.

My aunt Pauline said, into the silence, in a small voice, “She sat with Jean.”

Jean was my mother’s older sister. My aunt. She died of the emphysema four years ago, in Beloit, and I had driven over every evening for six weeks.

“She sat with my Jean every night,” Pauline said, and she was looking at my mother now, not at me. “Loretta, she sat with your own sister every single night for six weeks and you never, you always said she was just, you said she was at loose ends and had the time. She wasn’t at loose ends. She was holding Jean’s hand. I was there some of those nights. I saw it.”

I looked at my mother. Her face had gone a color I had never seen on it. The church-directory smile was gone and under it was something I did not have a name for, something that was not quite shame yet but was on the road to it.

But it was Craig who broke. That is the thing I did not expect, and it is the thing I will remember until I am the one in the hospital bed in somebody’s front room.

Craig stood up. My big brother, the regional director over four states, stood up at our mother’s table and his face came apart like a boy’s.

“She’s right,” he said. “Maddie’s right. I stood in the doorway.” He was not looking at any of us. He was looking at the little artificial tree in the corner, at the ornaments from when we were small. “I couldn’t go in. I couldn’t go in and watch Dad, I couldn’t do it, I’m his son and I couldn’t do the one thing, and Nell did it. Nell did all of it. I took the Wichita job partly because I could not stand to be two hours away. I needed to be far enough away that nobody would expect me to come, and I let Nell do it, and then I let everybody say I handled everything because I wrote a check and I was too much of a coward to say it wasn’t me.”

“Craig,” my mother said.

“No, Mom.” He turned to her, and his voice was not angry, it was worse than angry, it was ashamed all the way down. “You stood up at his funeral and said I handled everything. And I let you. And Nell stood right there in the fellowship hall and let you, because that’s what she does, she lets us. She let us our whole lives. We decided she was the one who didn’t amount to anything, and the only reason we got to go on and amount to things is that she stayed home and did the part that nobody else would do.”