The next two weeks were the quietest I had known in years, and I say that as a compliment. Cordelia came by twice to help me pack and organize for the trip. She had heard from Carter. He had called her, hoping she might intervene. She told him, not unkindly but with complete clarity, that she wasn’t going to do that. “You made your bed,” she’d said, which was entirely accurate, and she relayed the conversation to me over tea with a small, satisfied smile that I recognized from her father.
“He actually thought I’d talk you out of it,” she said. “I told him I was looking forward to my room having an actual door this year instead of a pull-out couch.”
“That’s not very diplomatic of you.”
“I wasn’t trying to be diplomatic, Mom. I was trying to be honest. Those are different things, and I think you’ve spent forty years mixing them up on everyone’s behalf but your own.”
I didn’t have an answer for that right away. I thought about it while I packed, folding sweaters into the suitcase on my bed, and I decided, eventually, that she was probably right.
Yvette tried several approaches over those two weeks. The first was a text with a photo of Maisie, their youngest, sitting by the Christmas tree, looking very small and very sad. The caption read, “She keeps asking why she can’t go to the mountain with Grandma.” I looked at that photo for a long moment, at Maisie’s round face, at the way she was hugging her knees to her chest in front of the lit tree. I typed back, “I love Maisie so much. I’ll have her over for a baking afternoon in January, just the two of us. She will have a wonderful Christmas.” I meant every word of it. Whatever had shifted between Yvette and me, it had nothing to do with that little girl, and I was not going to let it.
The second attempt was a Facebook post, one of those vague inspirational quotes about releasing toxic energy and protecting your peace from people who don’t deserve it. I saw it, understood what it was, and muted her account without comment. I did not engage. I had learned, somewhere in the last two weeks, that engaging with that particular kind of performance only feeds it.
The third attempt was Carter calling on a Sunday evening, his voice carrying the specific exhaustion of someone who has been asked to make a phone call he doesn’t entirely believe in. He said they should have handled things differently. He apologized for the text Yvette sent. He did not mention the iPad or the Surface Pro or the Sony headphones. I told him I appreciated him saying so and that I would talk with both of them in January. I kept the call warm and brief.
I was not punishing my son. I was not performing coldness. I simply no longer had the energy to engineer reconciliations I hadn’t caused the need for.
There was a fourth attempt, one I haven’t mentioned, because it was the one that actually troubled me. Paulette herself called, three days before Christmas, her voice bright and performative in a way that made my stomach tighten the moment I picked up.
“Rosalind! I just wanted to say, I’m so sorry if there’s been some kind of misunderstanding between the kids. I had no idea my little gifts would cause such a fuss.”
“There’s no misunderstanding, Paulette. I saw the video. I understand exactly what happened.”
“Well, I just think it’s a shame the grandchildren have to suffer for something between the grown-ups.”
“The grandchildren aren’t suffering,” I said. “They’re going to have a lovely Christmas at home with both their parents and their other grandmother, who, from what I understand, bought them each something from under that tree as well.”
There was a pause on her end, the particular pause of someone who has just realized the conversation is not going to unfold the way they’d planned.
“I don’t think that’s really fair to say,” she said.
“I’m not trying to be fair to you, Paulette. I’m being honest with myself, which is something I should have started doing years ago.”
I ended the call shortly after that, politely but firmly, and I did not feel the particular guilt I expected to feel. I felt, instead, something closer to relief, the specific relief of a door finally closing on a room I’d been standing awkwardly inside for far too long.
On the morning of departure, the temperature in Brockville had dropped to minus nineteen. Cordelia arrived at 6:30 in her Jeep, helped me load the bags without being asked, and handed me a travel mug of coffee before I’d had the chance to go looking for one. Her partner James drove. Cordelia’s two teenagers, Lila and Benji, were in the back seat in various states of blurry excitement, one of them already asleep again before we had reached the highway. We crossed into Quebec as the sun came up properly, turning the fields on either side of the autoroute white and gold. I watched it from the passenger window and felt something I could only describe as uncomplicated.
James, I should say, had a particular talent for making long car rides pass easily. He put on a playlist of old Gordon Lightfoot songs he knew I liked, and somewhere around the second hour, Benji woke up enough to ask what the song was about, and James spent the next twenty minutes explaining the Edmund Fitzgerald to a thirteen-year-old with far more patience than the question probably warranted, and I sat in the passenger seat listening to the two of them and thought, not for the first time, how lucky Cordelia was to have found someone who fit so easily into the rhythm of our family, and how lucky I was, by extension, to have him too.
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
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