Christmas Without You

You can do this. I rub my hands together, generating heat. I let a long sigh drag out against them, convincing myself I need another minute to acclimate to the cold. The snow falls in fat, dissimilar flakes around myself and the beige-brown double-wide in front of me. Though the blinds are shut, light filters through all six windows of the house–I checked. As a matter of fact, I looked for every possible excuse not to make my way up the rickety porch steps and stand outside this door, with its chipped white paint exterior, on Christmas Eve. 

A single snow flurry manages to make its way through the fur lining of my hood, falling against my flushed cheek at the same time the door opens. My mother stands on the other side, a faded white rag draped over her shoulder. Beads of sweat span the length of her honey-colored forehead, which dissolves into dark half-moons under her coffee-colored irises. An ugly floral apron makes its way around her front, covering the chest of a long-sleeved cerulean t-shirt. My eyes drop to the brown slippers over her feet, and I realize she’s probably been cooking all day. It’s been six years since I visited home, but it’s clear that some things haven’t changed at all. “Well, come in. I kept wondering how long you were going to stand in the cold before you knocked.” 

Of course my mother knew I was standing outside. A small sigh escapes her lips as she opens the door wider, waving me inside. I can’t tell if she’s sighing from relief or exhaustion, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a distinction between the two on her face. She walks back into the kitchen like this happens every year even though it doesn’t. As a matter of fact, since I left for college, this has never happened. 

I leave my short black snow boots on the red-and-white striped rug. My mother likes to switch out the rugs, shower curtains, and dining room tablecloth in time for most holidays. When I was thirteen, I spilled cherry soda on top of a cheap plastic orange tablecloth that my mother had purchased for Halloween. She froze in place, letting the sweet potato custard stay in the oven a few minutes too long as she watched me, expressionless.

“Mom–I’m so sorry.” I started sniffling immediately, and then huge, wet tears starting rolling down my face and streaking my cheeks as I tried to gauge my mother’s reaction through the blurred edges of my vision. I was too old to be crying like that, really. I was thirteen at the time, but I was always a sensitive person. 

“Sweetheart, that’s okay,” she insisted. She retreated to her bedroom, explaining, “I need to find shears.” She didn’t come back out for the rest of the night, and my older brother ended up throwing out the custard, which was practically on fire when he got in from work. I remember them exchanging words through my closed bedroom door. My brother had sent me to bed with a stomach full of pizza he had ordered when he realized my mother hadn’t cooked anything else. I didn’t sleep much that night, though, instead listening to the sound of my mother’s whimpers through the vent that ran from my room to hers. When I asked my brother about it the next morning, he said my mother liked things to go perfectly according to plan. I wondered if that’s why I always felt like such a disappointment. 

“Melani, are you coming in or not?” I realize that I’ve stopped in the center of the living room. I’m wearing a brown sweater dress over black leggings, and I slowly peel the plaid scarf from my neck, lying it over the back of the deep red couch that hasn’t moved an inch since I left it. It sits against the wall, directly across from the TV where my brother would watch countless hours of football games and reels and highlights. I think, the day that I found him watching a sports announcer going over stats instead of at the eighth grade formal, I knew he cared more about sports than even the most die-hard sports fans. 

Now, the screen large and black, the TV looks too spacious for our home. I glance down the hall to the left, remembering the many nights my brother and I would run down that hall to annoy our mother–asking for money, sharing stories from the school day, or pestering her with questions she either knew the answer to or firmly refused to acknowledge. The light in the hall is dim now, though, and I wonder how many nights she’s spent falling asleep on the very couch I sink into, letting the TV ease her into slumber the same way the sound of two rowdy kids used to. 

“Your brother stopped eating meat a few years ago, right?” When I glance over my shoulder, I’m met with the right side of the house. My mother stands in the white-tiled kitchen behind a brand new stove. You could always look from any corner of the tiny kitchen right into the living room. Adrian and I would often watch cartoons over our mother’s shoulder as she did any manner of things at the end of the long, wooden kitchen table–shaving apples, dicing potatoes, ironing Adrian’s button-up shirts. Adrian spent most of high school attending either math award or sporting banquets. He had such a talent for both that no one, not even the many members of the community that idolized him–the friends he grabbed pizza with routinely after football games, the other members of the virtual reality club he started at school, or the several women that often chased after him like he was some sort of magnet, hoping for the chance to slip him their number–could anticipate what Adrian would do next even though each of us was convinced his future mattered the most to us. 

“Mom,” I mumble quietly. She looks up from the pot she’s stirring on the stove, a dull smile affixed to her face. It’s as if she woke up one morning, practiced smiling, and fell asleep with it glued there. Her eyes widen a fraction, the only indication that she still exists somewhere inside that body. I shake my head once, quickly. “Adrian is not coming to dinner.” 

“What do you–? I don’t understand.” Tears the size of the snowflakes outside begin to well in her eyes, and she holds that dirty rag against her bottom eyelids to keep the tears from overflowing.

Which brings me to the crux of why I’m here. “Listen, Mom. I heard about what happened with Adrian. I’m kind of upset you didn’t tell me.” It was Adrian’s girlfriend, Maxine, who eventually revealed to me the fate of my own brother. 

“He was so talented.” That was the first thing she said to me when she called. There was a sadness in her voice that was uncharacteristic of the quiet, kind Maxine. The first time we met her was when Adrian visited home from college. He went off to college two years before I did, and my mother wouldn’t admit she missed him. Instead, she paced the house from the second Adrian left until he landed back on our doorstep, with Maxine’s hands wrapped around his waist. She was half his height and didn’t look like the kind of girl Adrian would go for. Based on the posters that lined his walls for ages and the magazines I found lying open on his desk when Mom sent me in to drop off his laundry, I thought Adrian was more into blondes. Everything about Maxine was dark. She had eyes the color of charcoal. Her hair was bone-straight and black, long and shiny as it fell past her shoulders and stopped just short of her butt. She was wearing a black blouse that was cropped at her waist and white shorts so tiny my mother squinted as she took Maxine in. She was also incredibly bony. Where my mother and I were all curves, Maxine looked like she could fit in the palm of Adrian’s hand. I think my mother took it personally. She had never complained to either of us about interracial dating, but there was an unspoken rule in the house, after Dad left when I was born to gallivant with a white woman, that she would at least know. It was clear, by my mother’s face during that visit, that this was as much of a slap in the face then as it was when she learned the news from our father. 

Maxine didn’t say much of anything. She offered the minimum of pleasantries required and stayed glued to my brother’s side (literally, her hand never left his shoulder) every time we saw them together thereafter. I once asked Adrian what they had to talk about and he said, “I don’t know. We’re hardly ever talking.” I had gagged, and he had laughed and kicked me out of his room. 

On the call, though, Maxine spoke more words than I’d ever heard her say. “He was so talented. Do you know that, Jane?” Jane is my middle name. My parents had thought they were clever, giving me the initials MJ. It never stuck, but my brother always called me Jane. It didn’t feel touching to hear Maxine use it in that moment. It felt urgent, like she was trying to tell me something without saying it directly. “Jane?” 

“What did you expect me to say, Melani? You wouldn’t have come home anyway.” My mother comes into the living room with a paper plate in one hand and the handle of a pot gripped carefully in the other. She drops the plate onto the table in front of me and begins scooping stewed potatoes onto it. “You haven’t been home in six years, and you hardly ever pick up the phone and call.” 

“Mom, was that not in the plan? Were you banking on Adrian to fix all of our problems? Did you expect him to end the entire cycle of poverty?” I bite my lower lip to keep from disrespecting her further. We lived under strict rules in my house. When I moved out of state for college on a full-ride scholarship, I appreciated the independence. But I also came to appreciate several of the values my mother had instilled in me. “Your expectations for him were always too high.” 

She ignores my statement, gesturing with her rag to the tree which I’m just noticing. It’s average-sized, tucked away in the corner between the wall and the TV stand. There are six presents stacked in one general area underneath it, one for every year since I left. I look back at my mother, and there’s a fresh sheen over her eyes. She begins fanning herself, walking away from me and back into the kitchen. “I don’t know what you want anymore. I used to call your brother about these things. I’m glad the two of you stayed in touch for a little while, at least.” 

It’s true. When I first left for college, I had such trouble adjusting that I’d call Adrian every night. He was usually studying or with Maxine. Sometimes, when I’d call, he’d put his hand over the phone and speak loudly into it. “Don’t tell Mom I’m at a party,” he’d say with a smile. I could hear it in his voice. “I don’t want to shatter her image of me.” He would always answer my call, though, even if he couldn’t talk for long. 

It had always been just the three of us. I think my mother tried her hardest, but I was so tired of living under her weird dictatorship by the time I left for school. I applied to colleges as far away from home as I could think of. The house was always too quiet, like everyone was holding their breath. My mother ran such a tight, impossible ship that it seemed like anything could set her off at any moment. My brother handled her a lot better than I did–I think that’s why she loved him so much. He understood her in a way that I couldn’t. He could calm her down, tell her she was overreacting without making her feel crazy. She took everything too personally, would always lash out. My brother once told me that my mother was so angry all the time because she was actually hurt. It took moving 800 miles away and reading about intergenerational trauma in textbooks for me to finally understand what he meant. 

My mother wanted us to be perfect because she thought perfection would protect us. That’s how I know this is so hard for her. Adrian was, by all standard measures of the notion, perfect. He played for a successful team in the NFL. He had a successful long-term relationship. He had received good grades in school, and the entire community was proud of him. 

But there were things going on with Adrian that he felt like he had to hide. Perhaps that was my mother’s mistake in raising us. She hadn’t raised us to be perfect. She had just raised us to act like it. 

“The only thing I ever wanted to do was love him. To love both of you.” My mother brings in a few slices of ham and forks them onto my plate, not meeting my eyes before scurrying back. 

I stare at my plate blankly before calling toward the kitchen, “How many years have you prepared dinner like this?” 

She lets out a shaky sigh, and I turn to see her grip the edge of the sink as if to keep herself from falling over. She laughs at me. “We used to do this every year, Melani. It was tradition. I know you think your brother came back all those years, but he didn’t. It turns out you both wanted to get away from me.” When I don’t respond, she continues. “Don’t ask me when I started doing this. The truth is, I never stopped.” 

She makes her way into the living room with her own plate in one hand, a canned soda in the other. She sits the beverage on a coaster on the table, a coaster that looks like it hasn’t been moved in years. She puts her plate down beside it and slowly begins removing her apron. “I know it wasn’t fair to you. I guess I didn’t call you because I didn’t want it to be real.” 

I sigh. “It’s a good thing Maxine called when she did. You know I would have found out from the tabloids.” His death blew up on social media, and it was the one time in my life I regretted not being on it. 

She looks at me, sliding the rag off her shoulder and wringing it out in her hands. I wonder how long she’s been using that thing, how often she washes it. She pierces me with a look so heart-wrenching I feel myself shift uncomfortably in my seat a cushion down from hers. Then, she grins. “I’m glad you flew in when you could.” 

“Mom, of course I flew in.” I don’t know what else to say, so I grab my plate and begin eating. It’s been so long since I’ve had my mother’s food that I’m surprised by the taste of it. I begin eating ravenously, and my mother slowly starts to chuckle next to me. Before we know it, we’re both bent over in laughter, plates of food abandoned on the table in front of us. 

My mom sips from her cola, saying, “I’m sorry that I pushed tradition on you so hard that I forgot to explain the real value of it.” I stare back at her, but she looks off into the distance, at some place behind my head, and I know that she’s talking to both Adrian and me. “I spent so much time teaching you how to live your lives that I forgot to let you just…live it.” I open my mouth to protest, to tell her I accept her apology, to say anything before she can let the bomb drop, before she can release the explosion. And then she says, “I guess that’s why you didn’t want to” to the space behind my head. 

Before I know it, we’re both crying. I manage, somehow, to make my way down the sofa to my mother. I open my arms to pull her in, but then she gestures for me to turn around. I do, and she wraps me in a hug from behind that I feel all the way in my heart. “Mom, what happened to Adrian was about way more than our upbringing.” 

“Of course it was.” She brushes a sprig of bouncy black curls out of my face, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “But it certainly didn’t help matters, did it?” 

We cry in silence for a little while before I feel myself get stiff in this position. I rise up and look back at her. “I’m sorry I never came home for Christmas before this. I always–.” Meant to? No, that’s not true. Not entirely. I gulp before continuing, “Thought about it.” 

She kisses my cheek, holding my face in her hands. “Melani, you don’t owe me anything.” 

I consider her words for a minute before nodding. “Or maybe we all owe each other the bare minimum of things.” I take one last look around the house, avoiding our rooms on the other side of the kitchen. I smile at my mother. “I’ll always be back for Christmas.” 

Her lips lift. “Merry Christmas, Melani.” My mom sits the rag down on the table. 

I smile back. “Merry Christmas, Mom.”