The Christmas They Called Me Unsettled

He looked down the table at me. My brother. Forty-four years old.

“I’m sorry, Nell,” he said. “Dad knew. At the end. He said there’s my boy and I know it tore you up, I saw your face, but you have to know, the last real thing he said to me, that second time I came, when you’d gone to the kitchen, he grabbed my hand and he said, your sister is the best of us. He said it just like that. Your sister is the best of us. And I have carried that around for nine months like it was an accusation, and it wasn’t, it was just true, and I should have told you the day after the funeral and I’m telling you now in front of everybody and I’m sorry.”

I did not say anything. I could not. I sat in the wobbly chair at the foot of the table and I put my hand over my mouth and I cried, finally, nine months of it, at the Christmas table, and little Tyler who is twelve and did not understand any of it got up out of his chair and came down to the foot of the table and put his arms around my neck, because a twelve-year-old knows what to do when a person is crying even when the grownups do not.

I want to tell you that my mother said she was sorry. I am going to tell you the truth instead, because the truth is better than the thing I would make up.

My mother did not say she was sorry. Not at the table. She sat very still, and she folded her napkin in her lap into a small tight square, and then she got up and she went into the kitchen, and I heard the water run.

The dinner sort of ended after that. Not in anger. Everyone was gentle, the way you are gentle around something that has broken. Brenda started clearing plates. Earl came down the table and took both my hands in his big ones and did not say anything, just held them a second, and then went to find his coat. Maddie would not leave my side. She sat in Tyler’s empty chair next to me and leaned her head on my shoulder, this girl I had decided had her grandmother’s chin, and I was ashamed of having thought it.

I went into the kitchen because I cannot be in a house where dishes are being done and not do them. My mother was at the sink with her hands in the water, not washing anything, just standing with her hands in the warm water looking out the window over the sink into the dark where the yard light was and the snow was coming down slow and straight because the wind had quit.

I picked up a dish towel. I stood next to her and I started drying the glasses as she washed them, the little crystal glasses, the way we have stood at that sink a thousand times in my life.