The Christmas Breakfast at the Super 8

Back at the motel, I hung our two stockings from the handle of the heating unit under the window.

Owen made them in first grade, red felt with our names in glitter glue.

Around nine, my phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was a text from Hal. Hal does not text much. He types with one big finger and he does not believe in punctuation.

got your card kiddo we will be there merry christmas eve

I did not know who we meant. I did not know if my mother had read the card, or if Hal had found it first on the table and simply decided for everybody.

Christmas morning, Owen was up at six. He found his stocking and announced that Santa had found the motel.

He would not get dressed. He wanted to wear his red flannel pajama shirt down to breakfast, the one his dad’s mother had sent, and I let him.

It was Christmas morning. I put on jeans and my gray hooded sweatshirt and pulled my hair into a ponytail.

The breakfast room was small, six or seven tables beside a big window. Snow covered the parking lot outside.

There was a waffle maker on the counter, the kind you flip over, with little cups of batter you pour yourself.

Somebody, probably Donna, had set a small tabletop Christmas tree with colored lights by the coffee pots.

We took a table by the window, one with three chairs. Owen made his own waffle, very seriously, while I watched him from the table.

When he came back with his plate, he did not sit down right away.

He went to the empty table next to ours, took hold of a chair, and dragged it over, scraping it all the way across the floor.

He pushed it in at the end of our table, so there were four chairs. Then he straightened it, carefully, so it sat just right.

“That one’s Grandma’s,” he said. Then he sat down beside me and started on his waffle like it was nothing at all.

Nobody had told him to do that. I had not said one word to him about who might come.

He had simply decided there ought to be a chair for his grandma, and so there was one.

At nine thirty-five, the lobby door opened, and Hal came in, stamping the snow off his boots on the mat.

I watched him through the doorway from the breakfast room. He was by himself.

He had on his tan canvas work jacket over a plaid flannel shirt, the same jacket he has worn every winter since he married my mother.

His short gray hair was flattened from his cap, and his gray mustache needed a trim.

He stopped at the coffee counter, poured himself a paper cup of black coffee, and came over to our table.

He sat down at our table, beside Owen, with the cup in his hand.

“Merry Christmas, bud,” he said to Owen. Then he looked at me, and he looked at the empty chair at the end of the table. “Merry Christmas, Kels.”

“Merry Christmas, Hal. Thank you for coming out here this morning.”

He set his coffee down. He looked at the empty chair again, and then he looked at the door, the same way I had been looking at it for half an hour.

“Your mother says you wanted your own space,” he said. “Said you thought the house was too crowded with all of us in it.”