I wanted the smell of roasted ham and cloves when I opened the front door. I wanted my mother calling out from the kitchen that I’d better not have tracked snow inside. I wanted my sister rolling her eyes and hugging me anyway. I wanted my father pretending not to get emotional before midnight prayer, wanted the sound of my brother Brian talking too loud over everybody, wanted all the little irritations that, in memory, had rounded into something almost tender. I wanted to feel like my absence had left a shape in the house and that my return would fill it.
The flight was delayed by thirty-seven minutes. A kid behind me kicked the seat the entire way. The man across the aisle coughed wetly into a napkin and kept apologizing to no one in particular. I didn’t care. I was weirdly cheerful. That should have been the warning sign.
By the time I got the rental car and made the drive from the airport, the roads had gone slick and silver under a fresh layer of ice. The sky had that heavy, sealed look winter skies get when more snow is coming, and the whole neighborhood where I grew up looked like a postcard somebody had forgotten to age. Warm lights in windows, wreaths on doors, roofs frosted white, every house appearing generous from the outside.
I remember carrying too much when I walked up the front path. My duffel over one shoulder. My laptop bag sliding down the other. A gift bag in one hand already gone soft at the bottom from wet snow. My hair dripping where the wind had blown flakes into it. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I should have texted from the driveway so they could come help.
Then I opened the door without knocking because it had always been that kind of house, and for one small breath I got exactly what I had come for.
Heat rushed over me, fragrant and close. Cinnamon. Ham. Burnt sugar. Somebody had music on low in the next room, those old carols my mother played every year because she said the modern versions had no soul. Voices drifted from the dining room. Laughter. Silverware clinking. The soft, chaotic noise of people already settled into each other.
