The Christmas Tags I Read Out Loud

Mama, Wanda Mullins, still lived in the house we grew up in, up a holler off the road between Mullens and Pineville, with a creek out front and a hillside so steep behind it that you could touch the ground standing up.

Daddy had been gone five years at that point. He ran a continuous miner underground for thirty-one years and came out with lungs that could not finish a sentence.

He died in the hospital in Beckley in October with Mama holding one hand and me holding the other.

If Daddy had been alive that Christmas, I believe he would have seen those tags before I did. He noticed everything.

But he wasn’t there, and I was, and I didn’t know yet what I was going to do about it.

So I didn’t do anything that morning. I ate a biscuit with sausage gravy.

I watched Gunner drive his new battery tractor into the coffee table eleven times. I helped Harley figure out the clasp on the little jewelry box.

Then, when the kids were outside in their new boots stomping in the frozen mud by the creek, I went in the kitchen where Misty was scraping plates into the trash.

“Misty,” I said, real quiet. “The tags.”

She kept scraping. The fork went back and forth on the same clean plate four or five times. Then she set it down on the counter and put both hands flat on either side of it.

“I know,” she said.

“You took mine off.”

“I know, Leah.” She turned around, and her face was red and blotchy, and I saw she had been crying in there by herself while I was out in the living room eating gravy. “They need to think he still cares. Please. Just let them have that.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I had come in there with a speech half built in my head, and it fell down like a stack of cans.

“He hasn’t sent a dime since June,” she said. “He hasn’t called them since August. Gunner asks me every night if Daddy’s coming for Christmas. What was I supposed to tell him? That his daddy forgot him?”

“You could have told him Aunt Leah remembered him,” I said.

She shook her head hard. “And then they’d know. They’d know I didn’t have anything to give them either. Not one thing, Leah. I bought them each a candy cane.”

That was the part that sat on my chest for a year. Not the tags. The candy canes.

My little sister standing in the Dollar General with eleven dollars, picking out candy canes for three kids, because that was what she had.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Let it go for now.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, and she hugged me with soapy hands, and I let her.

I drove home that night down the holler road in the dark with the heater on high and the radio off, and I told myself I’d done the decent thing. Mostly I believed it.

To understand Misty you have to understand that she was the baby. Three years behind me, blonde when I was dark, quick to laugh and quicker to cry. Daddy called her Sugar until the day he died.

She married Dwayne Dalton when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-three.