The Picture Over My Fireplace

He rubbed the back of his neck. That is what he does when he is upset and does not want to look upset. He stood there a minute, looking out the kitchen window at the bird feeder.

“I’ll call her,” he said.

“Ryan, you don’t have to.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

He called her that evening, before I left for work. He took the phone out to the garage, but the garage is not very far from my kitchen, and Ryan does not have a quiet voice when he is trying to be clear.

“Mom, it’s Kelsey’s house. She bought it before I ever met her. I pay her rent.” There was a pause. “No. Mom. No, it’s not the same thing.”

When he came back in, he sat down across from me and turned his phone over on the table, face down.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She laughed,” he said. “She said, ‘Oh, honey, you know what I mean. What’s hers is yours.’ Then she asked if we had a ladder tall enough for the gutters, because she wants lights all the way across.”

I would like to tell you I was simply angry after that. I was, some. But then Ryan told me something that made it harder to stay that way.

We were lying in bed the next afternoon. I sleep days, and he had come home for lunch, and he lay down on top of the quilt in his work clothes the way he does sometimes, just to be near me for half an hour.

“Mom hasn’t had a Christmas in six years,” he said to the ceiling.

I turned my head on the pillow.

“Not a real one,” he said. “Not one she hosted. When I was a kid, Christmas Eve was at our house. Every year. Her sisters and their husbands and all my cousins, twenty-some people. She had this whole thing with the tree in the front window, so people driving by could see it.”

“The front window,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

He told me that after the divorce, the house went up for sale, and his mother had stood in the yard while the buyers walked through. He said she put her ornaments in a box and the box went into a storage unit, and as far as he knew, she had never opened it.

“Since then it’s been Aunt Pat’s,” he said. “Pat’s house is nice. Pat does a ham. But Mom just sits in the corner. She brings rolls. She doesn’t even bake anymore at Christmas, Kelsey. She decorates cakes for other people’s parties all year and she doesn’t bake for her own.”

I lay there thinking about a two-foot tree on an end table in a second floor apartment by the bypass.

“I’m not saying it’s okay,” Ryan said. “I told her it’s not okay. I’m just saying I think I know why.”

“I think I do, too,” I said.

The text came the second week of November.

It came to Ryan, not to me, but he showed it to me, which I want to be clear about. Ryan has never once in two years kept something from me to keep the peace.

It said: “Bringing Pat and Jan over Sat the 22nd around 2 to measure for the tree and figure out tables. We’ll do Christmas Eve at your place this year! I’ll handle everything. Love you.”

There was a little Christmas tree emoji at the end. Then a second text a minute later: “Tell Kelsey she doesn’t have to do a thing.”