“You’re being dramatic,” she said.
I looked at her for a long moment.
“Merry Christmas, Mom,” I said.
Then I opened the front door and we walked out.
The drive home was twenty-two minutes.
I know because I watched the clock.
Oliver sat in the back seat with his seatbelt on and his face turned toward the window. Highway lights slid across the glass in long orange stripes. He didn’t ask for music. He didn’t ask how long until we got home. He didn’t tell us anything about astronauts or zero gravity or the Russian cosmonaut whose name he’d practiced all morning.
He just looked at the dark.
Jess had her hand on my arm the whole way. Not saying anything. Just her hand there, warm through my sleeve.
About halfway home, Oliver spoke.
“Dad,” he said.
“Yeah, buddy.”
A pause. “Did I do something wrong?”
The question landed somewhere in my chest I didn’t have a name for.
“No,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Not even a small thing.”
“Then why did we leave?”
I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He was watching me, careful, still holding it together.
“Because sometimes,” I said slowly, “when someone hurts a person we love, we leave. That’s it.”
He seemed to turn this over. “Grandma hurt my feelings.”
“I know.”
“On purpose?”
I thought about the look on my mother’s face when she said it. Measured. Deliberate. The expression of someone who believed they were doing something useful.
“I don’t know,” I said. Which was as honest as I could be.