The Christmas Breakfast at the Super 8

I left for Denver the next fall. I told everyone it was for nursing school, and it was.

But the truth is I could not stand to walk past that garage every day. I could not breathe in that town without him.

Mom married Hal Pruitt three years later. Hal worked forty years at the rail yard in Creston, half an hour west on Highway 34.

He is a quiet man who fixes things before you know they are broken.

My brother, Travis, was sixteen when Dad died. He took Hal’s last name when he turned eighteen.

That was his own idea, and I understood it. Hal was the one who taught him to drive and sat at his ballgames.

Travis is thirty-three now. He has lived in Mom and Hal’s basement for six years, ever since he lost his apartment in Des Moines.

He works at a tire shop in Osceola and mostly keeps to himself.

He does not pay rent. I knew that long before the sticky note. Everyone in the family knew it.

It was never my business, and in six years I had never once said a word about it to anyone.

That night I tucked Owen into my old bed, the double with the white iron headboard.

My high school bulletin board was still on the wall, with a purple ribbon from the Clarke County Fair pinned in the corner.

Owen was asleep before I finished pulling off his socks. He had been up since four in the morning, Denver time.

Then I put my coat back on and went out to the rental car. I did not have two hundred dollars in cash. Nobody I know carries that much around.

I drove the two miles back out to the Casey’s by the highway, in the snow, with the wipers going the whole way.

The ATM was in the corner by the pizza warmer. It charged me a $3.50 fee.

The girl at the register was maybe nineteen, and she said Merry Christmas to me like she meant every word.

Then I sat in the car in the lot for a while with the engine running and the heater on high.

I am thirty-six years old. I have held strangers’ hands while they died.

I did not cry in that Casey’s parking lot, but it was closer than I would like to admit to anybody.

When I got back, the kitchen light was still on. Mom was at the table in her reading glasses with a stack of mail in front of her.

She turned the envelopes face down when I came in the back door.

I put the money on the counter, ten twenties, under the ceramic salt shaker shaped like a rooster.

That rooster has been on that counter my whole life.

“Thank you,” Mom said.

That was all she said. She did not get up. She did not ask about the flight, or Owen’s school, or how I was holding up after the divorce. She said thank you and went back to her envelopes.

Hal was not home yet. It had snowed four inches that afternoon, and Hal keeps a plow blade on the front of his pickup.

Every storm, he clears the church lot and the driveways of three widows on his street.

I never saw Travis that night. His truck was parked in the driveway, a big black one with chrome wheels, newer than anything anyone in our family had ever driven. The basement door was shut, and a television was going.