My Daughter-in-Law Turned Me Away at Christmas Then My Son Called After Midnight Because My Name Was All Over the Financial News

I spent Christmas Day alone.

I want to tell you about it, because I think people imagine being alone on Christmas is one big sad moment. It isn’t. It’s a hundred small ones.

I woke up at nine after finally falling asleep around six. I made coffee. I turned on the radio, and it was Bing Crosby, and I turned it off again.

I watched a little television. A movie about a dog who saves Christmas.

I opened a present Rebecca had mailed me. A beautiful blue cashmere scarf and a card that said, “For the Oracle. Love you, Mom.”

I called her. We talked for an hour. I didn’t tell her about the porch.

I don’t know why I didn’t. I think I was ashamed. As if it was somehow my fault.

At two o’clock, I thought about taking the lasagna out of the freezer.

I didn’t.

I made a grilled cheese sandwich instead and ate it standing at the counter.

At four o’clock, Todd texted me.

“Merry Christmas Mom. Hope you had a good day.”

That was all.

Hope you had a good day.

I looked at that message for a long time. Then I texted back.

“Merry Christmas, honey.”

Then I put my phone in the drawer, and I didn’t take it out again until the next morning.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s, I spent mostly at my kitchen table with my laptop open, watching Meridian.

On December 28th, when the acquisition was announced, I didn’t scream. I didn’t jump up and down. I didn’t call anybody.

I just sat there and looked at the screen. And then I went to the window and looked out at Marjorie’s blinking Christmas lights for a while.

Then I called Rebecca.

“It happened,” I said.

There was a pause on the line. Then a shriek so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

“MOM! Oh my God! Mom!”

“I know.”

“How much?”

I told her.

There was a much longer pause.

“Mom,” she said, in a completely different voice. A quiet one. “You did that. By yourself. At your kitchen table.”

“I did.”

“Dad would be so proud of you.”

Her father, my husband Frank, died nine years ago. A heart attack in the garden, pulling weeds. He was the only other person who ever really understood what I did for a living.

That was when I finally cried. Not about the porch. About Frank.

I sat alone at my dining room table on New Year’s Eve with a glass of red wine. I’d poured it more out of habit than anything else.

I had made reservations at a little Italian restaurant downtown that I liked. Candles on the tables. A piano player on the weekends.

Then, around four o’clock that afternoon, I canceled them.

It had suddenly seemed absurd. Getting dressed up. Driving downtown. Sitting at a table for one on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by couples and families. The waiter asking, “Just one tonight, ma’am?”

So I stayed home.

Marjorie had added a second string of lights along her fence. They blinked in a slow, cheerful rhythm through my dining room window. Red. Green. White.

The house was very quiet. Just the furnace humming and the clock on the wall.

At 11:45, I made a cup of chamomile tea. I left the wine where it was, still almost full.

At 11:59, I found myself thinking about my mother.

My mother lived alone for the last eleven years of her life, after my father passed. In that same little house in Scranton. She never once complained about it. Not one time.

She gardened. She read mystery novels. She volunteered at the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She went to Mass every Sunday and had lunch with her friend Dorothy afterward.

Every time I visited, I’d look around that quiet little house and feel so sad for her.

I’d always assumed her life was lonely. Small. Something to be pitied.

Sitting at my own dining room table that night, with my untouched wine and my chamomile tea and Marjorie’s blinking lights, I started to understand something.

It might not have been sad at all.

It might have been something else entirely.

Freedom, maybe. Peace. A woman who had spent fifty years taking care of everybody else, finally living exactly the way she wanted. Answering to no one.

Outside, somewhere down the street, I heard people start counting down.

Ten. Nine. Eight.

I didn’t count along.

Fireworks went off over the high school. Somebody’s car horn honked. Marjorie’s dog started barking.

At 12:01, my phone rang.

It was Todd.

I almost didn’t answer.

I let it ring three times. Four.

Then I picked it up.

“Mom.”

His voice was strange. Tight. Like somebody was holding him by the throat.

“Are you watching the news?”

I looked down at my tea.

“I don’t have the television on, Todd.”

“Mom…”

There was a pause. I could hear a television in the background on his end. And voices. A party.

“There’s a special on CNBC,” he said. “A year-end thing. About the Meridian acquisition. They’re talking about the individual investors who had big positions before the announcement. They have names, Mom. They showed a list.”

Another pause.

“Your name is on the list.”

I didn’t say anything.

“They said a former Hargrove Financial analyst was one of the largest individual shareholders,” he went on. His voice was getting faster now. Higher. “They said your name, Mom. Theodora Wells. They put your old company photo on the screen. Stacy’s whole family saw it.”

I took a sip of my tea.

“Mom, what is going on? They said ‘significant.’ What does significant mean? How much are we talking about?”

I looked out the window at Marjorie’s blinking lights.

“Mom? Mom, please. Talk to me.”

“It means I did my job well,” I said. “Happy New Year, Todd.”

And I hung up.

I let him sit with that.

He called back seven times before 12:01 became 1:00.

I watched the phone light up on the table. Todd. Todd. Todd. Todd.

I finished my tea. I rinsed the cup. I poured the wine down the sink.

On the eighth call, I answered.

“I don’t understand,” he said. He sounded like he’d been pacing. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Tell you what?”

“That you were doing this! That you had… that there was… Mom, how much money are we talking about here?”