The Closing Photo Over the Fireplace
I was not doing it to be ugly. I want that clear. I did not hang it to shame anybody. I hung it because I had let myself get erased for months, a little at a time, and I needed one wall in my own home that told the truth without me having to raise my voice to do it.
When Tyler got home he stood in the doorway with his lunchbox still in his hand and he looked at it for a long minute. I braced for him to ask me to take it down before his mother came. He did not.
He said, “That’s a good picture of you.” And then, quieter, “That’s the house I live in because you let me.”
I did not say anything. I did not have to. He crossed the room and straightened the frame a half inch, which did not need straightening, and he left it right where it was.
Christmas at My House
They came Saturday at two in the afternoon, nine of them, and the house got loud and warm the way a house is supposed to.
Yvonne came in first with her ham in a roaster and her chin up, and she walked through my front room directing people where to put their bags like a woman showing her own place. “Coats on the bed in the back,” she called. “Tyler, get the fire going for your aunt.”
Her sister, the aunt from Knoxville, hugged me and said, “Tyler’s done so good for himself, hasn’t he, this house is just darling.”
I said thank you. I did not correct her in my own doorway with her arms still around me. There would be a better moment, or there would not be, and either way I was not going to spend my Christmas fighting in the kitchen.
The relatives loved the little tree and the stockings and the fire Tyler built, and they loved the ham, and the children, two of them, ran the hallway in their socks the way I always hoped children would run that hallway someday.
I caught Yvonne a time or two steering a cousin past the mantel without letting their eyes stop on it. But a room only has so many walls, and that photograph was dead center over the fire, and sooner or later everyone in that house was going to stand in front of it.
The one who stood longest was Tyler’s grandmother.