The first thing I noticed about that Christmas dinner was not Ryan’s voice. It was the smell of glazed ham cooling on the table while everyone performed warmth they did not feel. My mother had polished the silver until the forks reflected candlelight in thin, nervous flashes.
She had wrapped garland around the doorway, set red tapers in brass holders, and tucked a small American flag into a ceramic vase on the sideboard beside a bowl of red ornaments. Everything in that room looked carefully chosen. Including my seat.
I was at the far end of the table near the sideboard, where I had always sat once I was old enough to pass dishes without being asked. Ryan sat in the middle. Of course he did.
My mother had called the dinner a little celebration for his promotion, though the calendar called it Christmas. That was our family’s particular skill. They could rename almost anything until the unfairness sounded festive.
Let me tell you about Ryan first, because you need to understand him to understand the room. My brother was two years older than me, and he had been the story our family told about itself since we were children. Not because he was cruel by nature, at least not in the beginning, but because he had been given the role early and had discovered that the performance was effortless when everyone around you was determined to applaud.
He was handsome in a broad, uncomplicated way, and he knew how to enter a room, and those two things combined had convinced our parents, somewhere in his early twenties, that he was the one on whom the family’s future rode. They meant it as love. I believed that then and I believe it now.
The way they meant it did not change what it cost. Ryan arrived that Christmas with expensive wine and a speech already forming in his mouth. He talked about his boss, his promotion, his company’s expansion, his new condo’s neighborhood, and the doors that were opening because people had finally noticed his potential.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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