The Christmas Breakfast at the Super 8

The sticky note was yellow, the little square kind my mother has kept beside the kitchen phone since I was in grade school.

She pressed it into my palm while Owen was still hugging her around the waist. I thought it was the Wi-Fi password.

I unfolded it under the light over the stove and read it twice to be sure I had it right.

Two hundred a night. Cash. Your room is made up.

“Mom,” I said. I said it quietly, because Owen was standing right there in his coat and boots, with snow melting off his stocking cap onto her linoleum. “What is this?”

“It’s what a room costs,” she said. She did not look at me when she said it. She looked at Owen and smiled and asked him if he wanted hot chocolate with the little marshmallows.

Owen said yes. He always says yes to my mother. He had been counting down to this Christmas since Halloween, with a paper chain taped to the refrigerator in our apartment in Denver, one link for every day.

I stood in the kitchen I grew up in, holding that sticky note, and I did not say one more word.

It was her house. She had every right to charge whatever she wanted for a room in it.

There was nothing there to fight over, and I was not going to start a fight in front of my son on his first night in Iowa.

And I was not going to make Owen sleep on a cousin’s floor on Christmas Eve.

It was after ten o’clock at night, and the nearest cousin was forty minutes away on county roads that were still drifting shut.

So I put the sticky note in my coat pocket. I helped Owen get his boots off.

I watched my mother make him hot chocolate in the same brown mug I used to drink from, and I kept my mouth shut.

I am an emergency room nurse in Denver. I have been one for eleven years.

My divorce was final in March, and that Christmas was going to be the first one where it was only Owen and me.

Brian, my ex-husband, had Owen for Thanksgiving. We agreed I would have him for Christmas week. Brian is not a bad father.

I wanted Owen to have a real Christmas that year. A real one, with snow, and his grandma, and the house where his mother grew up.

So I picked up extra shifts. Five of them, twelve hours each, nights, spread over the fall.

Christmas week fares from Denver to Des Moines were $620 a ticket that year. Two tickets came to $1,240. The rental car for six days was $580, and the bags were another $140.

Altogether it was just short of two thousand dollars.

I did not tell my mother what the trip cost. I did not think I needed to.

I called her in October and said, Mom, we are coming home for Christmas, and she said, well, all right.

My dad died when I was nineteen. He had a heart attack in the garage on a February afternoon, working on his pickup.

I was home from community college that weekend, and I was the one who found him.

I did CPR on my own father on a concrete floor until the ambulance came out from town.

It took them eleven minutes. I counted every one of them, and it did not matter. He was gone before they got there.