The Christmas Breakfast at the Super 8

He was eating cereal standing up at the counter in his tire shop sweatshirt, and he stopped with the spoon halfway to his mouth.

“Where are you two going?” he said.

“We’re going to stay out by the interstate,” I said. “It’ll be easier for everybody.”

“Easier than what?”

I did not answer that. I took a card out of my purse, from the box I had bought for Owen’s teachers, and I wrote on it at the kitchen table while my brother stood there and watched me.

Christmas breakfast. Super 8 by the interstate. Nine thirty. Owen would love to see all of you. Love, Kelsey.

I propped it against the rooster salt shaker, right where the two hundred dollars had been the night before.

Mom was still upstairs, getting ready. I did not wait for her to come down.

I hugged my brother, which surprised both of us, and I took my son out to the car.

The Super 8 sits right off the Osceola exit on I-35, across from a gas station and a billboard for the casino out by West Lake.

The woman at the front desk was about my mother’s age, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a name tag that said Donna.

“Just the two of you?” she asked, looking at Owen, who was looking at the bowl of candy canes on her counter.

“Just us,” I said. “Through the twenty-eighth, if you have the room.”

She did. It was sixty-nine dollars a night, plus tax. A room with two queen beds, a microwave, a little refrigerator, and a window that looked out on the snowy parking lot and the interstate overpass beyond it.

I asked her about the breakfast. She said it ran from six to ten, waffles and eggs and biscuits and gravy, free for guests.

I asked her if my family could come and eat with us on Christmas morning.

Donna looked at me over her reading glasses for a moment. I think she saw more than I meant to show her.

She said non-guests were usually eight dollars a head, but she would not tell anybody if I did not.

“No, I’ll pay for them,” I said. “Three of them. If they come.”

“If they come,” she said, and she wrote it on a sticky note and stuck it on the edge of her computer screen. A yellow sticky note.

Owen loved that motel room.

We spent Christmas Eve the way you can when you are in a motel in a small Iowa town.

We bought a frozen pizza and a bag of oranges at the grocery store before it closed at four, and we ate the pizza on the bed.

After dark we drove around the courthouse square to see the lights.

The whole square in Osceola gets strung with lights in December, and somebody always puts a star up high on the courthouse.

Owen pressed his face to the window of the rental car. “Did you grow up here, Mom?” he asked.

“I did,” I said. “Grandpa Don used to drive us around this square every Christmas Eve. Grandma and me and Uncle Travis, all squeezed into the front seat of his pickup.”

“Before Grandpa Hal?”

“Before Grandpa Hal,” I said. “A long time before.”

He thought about that for a while, watching the lights go by. Then he said, “I bet Grandma misses him a lot.”

I had to look at the road very hard for a while after that.