by Elizabeth Stainton Walker
The first time I brought my boyfriend home for Christmas, my brother’s wife had just left him. Drew and I were the first to arrive at my parents’ house. My mother and father looked back and forth at each other, unsure of how much to reveal. “She keeps telling him she’s broken,” my mom said. “What does that even mean?”
Drew and I sat at the kitchen counter and shook our heads. I remembered Kip and
Natalie’s wedding four years earlier. She had worn blue ostrich cowboy boots
under her wedding gown.
My mom told us Natalie was staying with a friend and probably would not be
joining us for Christmas. “Kip said he would forgive her anything, but she just
keeps saying she’s broken.” My mother held out her hands in front of her, palms
up, in an effort to demonstrate: “‘Kip, I’m broken.’”
“There are only so many times you can say a thing before you have to explain
it,” said Drew.
The rest of us nodded.
“I hate to say this…” I ventured.
My mom finished my thought. “You think she has someone else?”
I remembered sitting with Natalie in her parents’ motor home while she braided
her hair into two blond pigtails. It was the evening of the rehearsal dinner. I
was nineteen and dating two guys while at college. “I was like you,” Natalie
told me. “One man was never enough for me, until I met Kip.” The conversation
had taken on new significance now.
We heard Kip’s truck pull up in the driveway and the door slam. He did not talk
to us until the next morning, when my mother tells him we are opening presents.
My gift to Kip and Natalie was supposed to be a framed photo of their dog –
really Natalie’s dog – Lena. Kip opened the shiny wrapping paper and cried.
When it was time to say the prayer before Christmas dinner, my mother
volunteered. She was grateful for the blessings of the year, for my meeting
Drew, for my dad’s surviving bypass surgery. “But, God,” she prayed. “We sure
do miss Natalie.” At that point, all of us were bawling, except Drew, who had
never met Natalie. I worried what he would think of my messed-up family, unable
to make it through one holiday without dissolving, and especially of my
brother, who by this time had excused himself and headed down the hall to be
alone.
The remaining four of us ate shrimp and grits at the dining room table. Drew
went to the kitchen to refill his drink. As my parents and I sat, picking at
our food and suggesting possible divorce attorneys, I began to worry that Drew
had become overwhelmed with our dysfunction and slipped out the back door. I
walked into the kitchen and found Drew standing by the sink, his arms folded
around Kip, who was weeping into my boyfriend’s collar. “I know,” Drew said to
my sobbing brother. “I know.”