The week before Christmas, my granddaughter Lily looked up from my sewing room window seat and said, very quietly,
“Grandma, I heard Mom say you won’t be here for Christmas this year.”
I actually laughed. In my head it sounded like one of those sweet, scrambled things kids repeat without understanding. Kids overhear half a sentence, twist it into a story, and suddenly you’re the villain who stole Santa’s sleigh.
“Of course I’ll be here, sweetheart,” I told her. “This is my house. Where else would I go?”
Lily didn’t laugh.
Her little face stayed serious in the thin winter light, her boots dangling above the old radiator that clanked every morning like it had opinions. “That’s what I thought too,” she whispered. “But Mom said it to Daddy.
She said, ‘One week until Christmas, and then Mom will be gone.’”
Those words landed on my skin like frost. I tried to smooth them away the way you smooth a wrinkle out of fabric. “You must’ve misheard, honey.”
She shook her head hard.
“I know what I heard.”
I told myself children misunderstand all the time. I told myself my daughter Clare was stressed, that Derek was out of work again, that they’d moved back to the property two years ago and everyone was stretched thin. I told myself a dozen comforting lies, because mothers do that.
But that night, after the sun dropped behind the bare oaks and the December wind began worrying the shutters, I sat alone at my kitchen table, wrapping presents on the same scarred wood where I’d rolled pie crust for forty-three years. The farmhouse had been in my family for forty-three years. Every floorboard knew my footsteps.
Every window had reflected seasons of my life—pumpkin-orange sunsets, spring rain, the hard white glare of snow across the fields. At seventy-two, I’d earned the right to call it mine in a way that went beyond the certified copy of the deed locked in a safe deposit box at the bank in town. My name is Lucille Johnson.
I’d lived what most people would call an ordinary American life, the kind you can picture without being told. A faded flag on the porch in July. Mud on boots by the door.
A church bulletin tucked into a kitchen drawer. I raised three children in this house after my husband, Thomas, died fifteen years ago. We’d been married long enough that the silence after he was gone felt like a physical thing, thick as fog.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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