“Daddy got me this,” Dakota said, and he held the bow up over his head so the whole living room could see it. He was eight that Christmas, all elbows and cowlick.
It was a youth compound bow, black and green camo, the exact one he had pointed at in the Walmart sporting goods aisle in Beckley back in October.
I knew it was the exact one because I was the one standing beside him when he pointed.
“Look at the tag, Aunt Leah,” he said, and he turned the box so I could read it. “It says so right there.”
It did say so. It was a white sticker tag with a little holly sprig in the corner, and it said Love, Mom and Daddy in my sister’s loopy handwriting, the same loops she used to put on notes she passed in the halls at Wyoming East.
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I had bought that bow. I had paid two hundred and forty-nine dollars for it, plus an arrow kit and a target bag, and I had wrapped it at my own kitchen table on the twenty-third with a roll of snowman paper and a cup of coffee gone cold.
And I had put my own tag on it. I remembered writing it.
From Aunt Leah, with a little heart I drew because Dakota was going to roll his eyes at the heart and I wanted to see him do it.
“That’s a fine bow,” I said. My voice came out normal. I was proud of that later. “You’ll have to show me how far you can shoot it when the ground dries up.”
He grinned and went back to the carpet with his brother and sister, and I sat in Mama’s kitchen chair that she’d dragged into the living room and looked at every other present on the floor.
The snowman paper was mine. The red plaid paper with the gold edge was mine.
The Paw Patrol paper on Gunner’s big box was mine, because I’d had to drive all the way to the Dollar General in Pineville to find it.
Fourteen presents. I had bought every one of them, and every tag on every one of them said Love, Mom and Daddy.
Across the room my sister Misty was sitting on the end of Mama’s couch with her knees pulled up and her coffee cup in both hands.
She would not look at me. She looked at the tree, at the kids, at the ceiling, at anything but me.
My name is Leah Mullins. I was thirty-five that Christmas. I am an aide at a nursing home over in Beckley, which is a little under an hour from Mama’s house if the road is dry and you don’t get behind a coal truck on 16.
I don’t have any children of my own. I had a man for a few years in my twenties, and that did not work out, and the honest truth is I never missed it much. I had my residents, and I had Misty’s three.
Dakota was eight then. Harley was five, and Gunner was four. I had been at every one of their births, standing at the head of the bed holding my sister’s hand while she called me every name she could think of.