Every chair was full.
I counted them twice because I could not find myself in the picture, and some small, stupid, fourteen year old part of me thought maybe I’d missed my own face in the crowd. I hadn’t. There was no empty chair set aside for me. No extra plate. No place card with my name on it waiting for a daughter who might still make it home before the pie came out.
They hadn’t forgotten to invite me.
They had planned around me.
I was standing in my kitchen in Springfield when the photo landed, still in my work clothes, the lights off except for the string of white bulbs I’d hung over the window because I hadn’t had the energy to do more than that for a tree this year. Outside, a thin snow was coming down over the parking lot, the kind that looks pretty in other people’s windows and just looks cold in your own. I’d logged one hundred and ten hours in the two weeks before Christmas closing out due diligence on the biggest deal of my career, and some pathetic, hopeful sliver of me had still been waiting on a “we miss you, drive safe” text from my mother.
Instead, four minutes after the photo, a second message came through.
It was a scanned repair invoice from Prairie Motors, our county’s only body shop, addressed to my father. Front end collision. Frame straightened. New driver’s side quarter panel. Total: six thousand four hundred and twelve dollars, for the beat up but beloved Ford F-250 my father had bought Lysandra two years back so she’d “have something dependable for hauling hay and getting to her job at the feed store.”
Under the invoice, one line from my father.
Handle this before New Year’s.
