The Chapter My Son Read on Christmas Eve

The room

The farmhouse smelled like ham, coffee, and wet wool.

Nate had milked early, and a neighbor kid had the evening string, paid in pie money. By three o’clock the cars were lined along the gravel drive and down the road in both directions. Cousins stamped snow off their boots in the porch. Helen moved through the kitchen in her apron directing traffic with a wooden spoon, and the great-aunts had already commandeered the good chairs by the heat register.

Paul and his wife Marie came in with a tray of bars. Nate’s cousins came in from Fargo with their kids. Our neighbor Ed and his wife stopped by for a cup of coffee and ended up staying through the pie.

And Rhonda came in at two, as she always did, with her pan.

She wore a green sweater and her reading glasses pushed up in her hair. She set the potatoes on the counter next to the ham. She did not look for me. She did not look for Eli. She took a dish towel off the rail by the stove and began to wipe a counter that was already clean.

I watched her from the doorway. Her back was very straight. Nate came in from the porch. He saw her and stopped. For one long second the whole kitchen seemed to tilt toward the two of them.

“Hey, Rhonnie,” he said, to the floor. She turned. “Hey, Nate.” That was all. It was not forgiveness. It was two people being in the same room, and in our family, in that kitchen, on Christmas Eve, that counted for something.

Eli was in the front room, sitting on the piano bench with his hands pressed between his knees. His red cap was on. His cheeks were white.

“I can’t do it,” he whispered when I sat down next to him.

“You can.”

“There’s too many people.”

“Look at me. Who is in this room right now?” He looked around. “Everybody.”

“Everybody who loves you. Not one of them is waiting for you to fail. They are waiting for you to start.”

“Even Aunt Rhonda?” I did not lie to him. “I don’t know about Aunt Rhonda,” I said. “But I know about you.”