he photo came in at 6:48 on Christmas Eve, and I zoomed in on it three separate times before I let myself believe what I was seeing.
My whole family, gathered around Mama’s oak table back in Hazel Crossing, Missouri. The good tablecloth was out, the one with the pheasants stitched into the corners that only ever came off the shelf twice a year. A ham sat in the middle with cloves pressed into it in neat rows. My mother, Evangelina, had her hair done and her church pearls on, laughing at something off camera. My father sat at the head of the table in his good flannel, the one he saved for Christmas and funerals, holding his coffee mug up like he was mid toast. My younger sister, Lysandra, was wedged in next to him, glowing, her hand looped through the arm of some boy I didn’t recognize. Aunts. Uncles. Our neighbors the Pruett family, who’d been coming to our Christmas table since before I could walk.
Every chair was full.
I counted them twice because I could not find myself in the picture, and some small, stupid, fourteen year old part of me thought maybe I’d missed my own face in the crowd. I hadn’t. There was no empty chair set aside for me. No extra plate. No place card with my name on it waiting for a daughter who might still make it home before the pie came out.
They hadn’t forgotten to invite me.
They had planned around me.
I was standing in my kitchen in Springfield when the photo landed, still in my work clothes, the lights off except for the string of white bulbs I’d hung over the window because I hadn’t had the energy to do more than that for a tree this year. Outside, a thin snow was coming down over the parking lot, the kind that looks pretty in other people’s windows and just looks cold in your own. I’d logged one hundred and ten hours in the two weeks before Christmas closing out due diligence on the biggest deal of my career, and some pathetic, hopeful sliver of me had still been waiting on a “we miss you, drive safe” text from my mother.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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