The Christmas Breakfast at the Super 8

I did not sleep much. The furnace in that split-level has a register in the floor of my old bedroom, right beside the bed, and it carries sound up from the kitchen like a tin can telephone.

I knew that vent well. When I was fifteen, I used to lie on the floor with my ear against it and listen to my parents talk about money after I went to bed. Later I listened to them talk about Dad’s heart.

At six the next morning, Christmas Eve morning, the furnace kicked on, and I heard my mother on the phone down in the kitchen.

She was talking to my Aunt Deb, her sister down in Leon. I could tell because she called her Debbie.

“No, she got in last night,” Mom said. “Late. With the boy. Hal was out plowing.”

There was a pause while Aunt Deb said something I could not hear. Then my mother sighed, the long sigh she uses when she has decided to be put upon.

“Well, I don’t know, Debbie. She only calls when she needs something. You know that. She’s always been a taker, ever since she left.”

I lay perfectly still. Owen was asleep beside me with one arm thrown over his face, the way he has slept since he was a baby.

“She has that big job out there,” Mom went on. “Nurses make good money. She can afford it. Let her pay for once in her life.”

I am going to be honest about what I felt, because I want to be fair to everybody in this, my mother included.

I was not only hurt. Part of me was angry, the kind of angry that wants to say every true thing at once.

I had a list ready. I could have gone down to that kitchen and told her about the five night shifts and the ATM fee and the six years of free rent in the basement.

I could have waited and said it all in front of Hal.

I did not. I lay there and listened to the furnace come on again, and I thought about Owen waking up on Christmas Eve to his mother and his grandmother saying hard things to each other in the kitchen.

He had already had a whole year of grownups saying hard things in kitchens. He did not need one more of those.

So I got up, very quietly, and I packed our two suitcases. I folded Owen’s clothes on the floor so the zippers would not wake him.

The Christmas presents were still in the trunk of the rental, where I had left them.

At seven, I woke Owen up. I told him we were going to stay at a motel for Christmas, a motel with a waffle maker, and that it was going to be an adventure, just the two of us.

He sat up and looked at me for a long time. Owen is nine, but he has always been older than nine about some things.

“Is Grandma mad at us?” he asked.

“No, bud,” I said. “Grandma has a lot going on right now. We are going to give her a little room, that’s all.”

I did not know yet how true that was. Travis was in the kitchen when we came down with the suitcases.