My son invited me to Christmas dinner after a year of silence. When I arrived at his house, the housekeeper grabbed my coat so hard I almost fell backward down the front steps.
Her face was white as paper. Her eyes kept darting over my shoulder toward the big Beverly Hills house behind us, like something terrible was waiting just beyond the front door. The cold California air, sharp with December wind off the canyons, turned our breath into pale clouds between us. She was shaking.
“Mrs. Henderson,” she whispered in a thin, frightened voice, “you need to go away right now. Please don’t walk through that door.”
I stared at her, confused. In my hands I was holding a box wrapped in shiny red paper with a perfect gold bow on top. I’d spent three whole days picking out that gift for Marcus—my boy, my only son, who had stopped talking to me a whole year ago. For twelve months he hadn’t answered my calls, hadn’t replied to my letters, hadn’t returned even one message.
Then, three days ago, he finally called my phone.
“Mother,” he’d said, his voice cold and flat, “come for Christmas dinner. Saturday. Six o’clock sharp.”
That was it. No apology. No explanation. But it was something, and I clung to it like a drowning woman clings to a piece of wood.
Now, standing on his stone front steps in the glow of his fancy porch lights, being blocked by his housekeeper, nothing made sense.
“What are you saying?” I asked her. My brain felt fuzzy, like I’d just woken up from a bad dream. “Marcus invited me here. He told me to come for Christmas dinner. I’m supposed to be here.”
She flicked another quick glance toward the house. Through the enormous front windows I could see bright light spilling across polished floors and white walls. A huge Christmas tree stood in the center of the living room, so tall it almost brushed the ceiling, covered in thousands of tiny sparkling lights and expensive ornaments, the kind you see in glossy Los Angeles magazines about celebrity homes.
“I could get fired for telling you this,” she whispered, voice shaking. “But I can’t let you go in there. Get back in your car. Drive far away. Don’t ever come back here.”
My legs suddenly felt like jelly.
I am Dorothy Henderson. I’m seventy-one years old. I drove three long hours that afternoon from my little rented apartment in Riverside, where the freeway noise hums all night long, to this enormous modern mansion in Beverly Hills, California, with its gated driveway, sculpted hedges, and fountain throwing water into the cold December air like money.
For twelve months, Marcus never answered when I called. He never wrote back to my letters. He forgot my birthday. He forgot Thanksgiving. I left him fifty messages on his phone—some angry, most of them crying—begging him to please tell me what I’d done to make him so angry, to at least let me know he was alive and all right.
Then last week I finally heard his voice. It sounded like ice.
“Mother, come for Christmas dinner. Saturday. Six o’clock sharp.”
No “How are you?” No “I’m sorry.” No warmth at all. But after all that silence, I took whatever I could get.
Now this woman was telling me to leave.
“Is Marcus sick?” I asked. My voice shook like leaves in a storm. “Is he hurt? Did something bad happen to him?”
“He’s perfectly fine,” she said. Her accent was soft, the kind that comes from far away and takes years of effort and courage to use in a strange country. Her name tag said Maria. “But you are in danger here. Please believe me. I have a mom too. She’s far away in my home country. I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t try to save you.”
Behind her, a shadow moved past one of the big windows. Tall. Wide shoulders. A man’s silhouette. My lungs seemed to shrink.
“Go now,” Maria whispered, eyes filling with tears. “Por favor. Please just go.”
I stumbled backward, walking away from the front door faster and faster. My heel caught on a small bump in the stone path and I almost went down. I threw out a hand and caught myself on the side of my car.
My old sedan looked small and tired parked in front of Marcus’s house. The faded blue paint, the little rust spots near the wheel wells, the cracked plastic on the side mirror—every flaw glared under the mansion’s perfect soft lighting, beside the giant fountain throwing glittering water into the air. The house itself probably cost more money than I had made in my entire life as a public school teacher.
Maria was already running back toward a side door that blended seamlessly into the smooth white wall. Her black shoes crunched over the decorative gravel. She slipped inside, and the door closed behind her.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page to discover the rest 🔎👇
