The Reenactment

December twenty-seventh. The call was supposed to be quick. A check-in. Thirty minutes, maybe. Two hours later I was standing in my kitchen doing a voice I did not know I still remembered, some combination of every family gathering I have ever attended compressed into a single impression I was apparently storing without my knowledge.

This is the thing about holiday calls in the days after the actual holiday: the first call is the official one, and then the second call, three days later, is the one where everything real gets said. The stories that got abbreviated on the twenty-fourth come out fully. Someone remembers a detail that changes the whole shape of something. You find out there was a subplot you missed entirely. I was holding a mug for most of it and at some point forgot the tea had gone cold.

the listening face

I told the story about the box, or the short version, the version that doesn't require a decade of backstory, and there was a long pause and then the response was, essentially, yes, that sounds right, that is how things move in this family, slowly and then all at once. Which is not comforting exactly but is at least accurate. The call ended the way good calls end: not with a clean conclusion but with the agreement to talk again soon, which both of us meant.

lost the composure

Gerald is on the shelf. The windowsill looks the way it always looks in late December, the five objects arranged in their arrangement, the gap doing what the gap does. I made more tea after hanging up. It's quiet in the useful way. The twenty-seventh, I think, is always the day the holiday actually lands.