Over dinner, Penny announced that she had told her whole class about me.
“What did you tell them?” I asked.
She swallowed a bite of turkey.
“That you figured out something really important. And then you did it. And then you gave some of it away to people who needed it.”
Todd looked at me over Penny’s head.
There was something in his face I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Since he was a little boy on a chair in my kitchen, sneaking mozzarella.
“Did they think that was interesting?” I asked Penny.
“Emma Kowalski said it sounded boring,” Penny said. “But Emma Kowalski thinks everything is boring. She thinks dolphins are boring.”
I laughed. Todd laughed.
Even Stacy laughed. And it was a real one. Not a polite one. She snorted a little and covered her mouth, and that made Penny laugh too.
After dinner, Penny fell asleep on my couch with a blanket over her and a slice of pie still on the plate beside her. Stacy went upstairs to call her sister.
Todd sat across from me in the living room with a cup of coffee. The fire was going. It was quiet for a while.
“I’ve been thinking about the Christmas before last,” he said finally. “A lot.”
“You don’t have to, Todd.”
“I want to.”
He looked down at his hands. The same hands that used to bring me dandelions.
“I just went along with it,” he said. “With all of it.”
“I know you did.”
“I let Stacy manage everything. Including you. Especially you. And I told myself you’d understand. That you were tough. That you’d be fine.” He shook his head. “I never stopped to think whether you understanding it was the same thing as it being okay.”
“It wasn’t okay.”
“I know.”
“You were a grown man,” I said, “standing in your own hallway, while your wife handed back food I’d made for you. Food I made for you since you were five years old.”
He winced. Like I’d touched a bruise.
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t need you to feel terrible about it forever, Todd,” I said. “I just needed you to see it.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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