Chapter 14: Holidays on Purpose
The second Christmas after the list, we hosted no one overnight and no one who required a performance of family courted through my stove.
Savannah and Derek joined us for a two-hour lunch at the same neutral restaurant as the year before, then left for her in-laws. The conversation stayed on movies and weather and a dog they were considering. When Savannah’s eyes flicked, once, toward a sentence that might have become a complaint, Christopher steered without looking at me for instructions. I ordered dessert for myself and enjoyed it. On the sidewalk afterward she said, “The studio’s tight, but it’s ours.” I said ownership had a way of teaching people. She looked as if she almost understood. Almost was sufficient for a sidewalk in December.
At home I hung a simple wreath on the door my father had planed and painted decades earlier. Christopher tested the locks out of a new habit I had not asked for and I had not rejected. We watched a fire in the fireplace that existed for heat and not for photographs. When midnight passed, I did not think of suitcases. I thought of the trust binder in the office closet, dull and decisive, and of how rarely I needed to open it now.
