Dear Kurl,
A confession, Kurl: I am utterly weary of Christmas, and it’s only the second night of our four-night stay up in Moorhead. I’ve often wondered how a person can have so little in common with his extended family. Perhaps it’s because they’re not actually related to us, except for my maternal grandmother, Gloria, whose house we stay at every year. Every year, we three Hopkirks and Gloria are joined by the Hanssen family. Tony Hanssen is Gloria’s stepson from her second marriage. He’s one of those red-faced, round-stomached men who wear watches that were supposedly designed for Navy SEALs or NASA engineers but are only ever worn by men like Tony Hanssen. His wife, Andrea, is so yogacized and blow-dried and made-up that she looks her age only close up, or under the halogen lights in the kitchen. Their kids, Calder (twelve) and Jonah (ten), went to Montessori and Waldorf and Junior Juilliard and puppetry camp and all the other programs that make children impossible to talk to.
I never feel I have anything to contribute to all these people’s endless small talk—Tony Hanssen collects model boats, Andrea hates her boss, Gloria wants to remodel the kitchen—so I sit there silently, awkwardly, while Shayna and the Hanssen boys stare at their phones. This year I also find myself thinking about you, Kurl, missing you: your broad scratchy palms. That heat coming off your skin. And then one of the adults will direct a question my way and I’ll miss it entirely and snap to attention, embarrassed. It’s exhausting.
Tonight I’m feeling homesick and forlorn, lying here on my inflatable cot across from Shayna’s pullout sofa in the study. My sister just fell asleep holding a family photo of the Hanssens that includes Lyle and Shayna and a very pregnant Raphael.
“Everyone always says she looks like me, but she doesn’t,” Shayna commented, when she pulled it off the desk.
Gloria had said it, too, when we first came through the door. She’d grabbed Shayna’s shoulders, stared hard into her face, and teared up. “Oh my good Lord, it’s like seeing a ghost,” she cried. “Spitting image. Spitting image. Darling, you are the spitting image of your mama.”
Shayna passed the family photo over to me for my opinion, but I couldn’t tell one way or the other. My mother wears heavy bangs in the photo, and her face is round and soft with all the extra weight she’s packed on, carrying me. It looked to me as though a stranger off the street had stepped into our group right before the picture was snapped.
You sounded forlorn, too, Kurl, on the phone last night. It was nothing you said in particular, just something faraway in your voice, as if it were coming from a smaller body than yours. I wanted to call you back right after we said goodbye, but I didn’t know who would pick up. I wish I had the money to buy you a phone for Christmas—to buy us both phones with only each other’s numbers on them. But I suppose there is already enough you have to hide.
Yours,
Jo