The Last Christmas Eve

He always starts the story the same way.

She asked for the Rosary that night, he says. Right after we finished the dishes. She was sitting in the old chair by the window, the one with the crocheted afghan. She looked at both of us and said, Let’s pray before I get too tired. And we did. All five decades of the Joyful Mysteries. She held the beads herself for the first two decades. Her hands were shaking, but she kept going.

In his version, their mother smiled when they finished. She reached over and touched his sister’s hand, then his. She said, You two take care of each other. Then she closed her eyes for a little while. When she opened them again she asked if anyone wanted more coffee. Ordinary. Peaceful. The way he likes to remember her.

His sister remembers the night differently.

She remembers their mother saying, I don’t want to argue tonight, before anyone had even started arguing. She remembers the silence after that sentence stretching too long. She remembers their brother finally saying something sharp about the hospital bills and who was supposed to be handling what. She remembers their mother’s face going tight. Not angry. Tired in a way that felt permanent.

In her version, the Rosary never happened. Or if it did, it happened later, after she had already gone upstairs to sit with their mother while he stayed in the kitchen. She does not remember the beads. She remembers the sound of the furnace kicking on and the way their mother’s breathing sounded different once she was lying down.

They have had this conversation three times in the two years since the funeral.

The first time was in the parking lot after the burial. He said, At least we got to pray with her on Christmas Eve. She looked at him like he had described a different woman. She said, We didn’t pray. We fought. You know we fought. He said he didn’t remember any fight. She said she didn’t remember any prayer. They stood there with the cold wind cutting across the cemetery and neither of them knew how to keep talking.

The second time was at their aunt’s house six months later. Someone had brought up their mother’s devotion to the Rosary and how she used to say it every night. He said, Even at the end. His sister did not correct him in front of the others. Later, on the drive home, she said, You keep telling people we prayed that night. We didn’t. He said, I was there. I remember the beads in her hands. She said, I was there too.

The third time was last month. They were cleaning out the last of the boxes from the house. He found the old wooden rosary in a drawer in their mother’s bedroom. The crucifix was worn smooth on one side. He held it up and said, This is the one she used that night. His sister took it from him, looked at it, and handed it back. She said, If you want to believe that, fine. But don’t tell the story like I was part of it.

He still tells it. Not often, and never when she is in the room. When someone asks about their mother’s last Christmas, he says she wanted the Rosary and they prayed it together. He says she seemed peaceful afterward. He does not mention the part where his sister went quiet and left the room for a while. He does not mention that he cannot actually remember whether she came back before they finished or not. The details blur when he tries to pin them down. What stays clear is the feeling that something had been set right, even if only for a few minutes.

His sister does not tell the story at all anymore. When people ask, she says their mother was tired and they spent most of the evening sitting with her. She does not say that she spent part of that time in the upstairs hallway, leaning against the wall, listening to the low sound of their brother’s voice and their mother’s occasional short answers. She does not say she thought, at the time, that he was still trying to win an argument their mother no longer had the strength to finish. She also does not say that she has started to wonder, lately, whether she was the one who left the room because she could not stand to hear how gentle his voice had become once their mother asked them to stop.

Both of them are certain.

He is certain because he can still picture the way the light from the lamp fell across their mother’s hands while she moved the beads. He is certain because he remembers the weight of the silence afterward as something soft, not heavy. He is certain because, for the rest of the night, the three of them sat in the same room without anyone raising their voice, and that had not happened in months.

She is certain because she remembers the exact sentence their mother used, I don’t want to argue tonight, and the way it landed. She is certain because she has never been able to forget the look on their mother’s face when the conversation turned, however briefly, toward money and responsibility. She is certain because she has spent two years carrying the sense that they failed to give their mother the peaceful evening she asked for, and that failure feels more real to her than any prayer she cannot recall.

Neither of them has the other’s memory. Neither of them has managed to convince the other. When they are together now they mostly talk about other things. Work, the house, the nieces and nephews. They do not return to Christmas Eve unless someone else brings it up. When that happens, one of them will usually change the subject. The other will let them.

He still keeps the wooden rosary in his glove compartment. Sometimes, when he is driving alone, he takes it out and holds it. He does not pray it then. He just holds it and tries to remember whether his sister’s voice was part of the responses that night or whether he only filled her in later, the way people do when they want a story to include everyone they love.

She has not asked for the rosary. She has not asked him to stop telling the story. Once, after the boxes were sorted and they were standing on the front porch of the empty house, she said, You really believe we prayed.

He said, I do.

She nodded. She did not say she believed him. She did not say she didn’t. She said, I wish I could remember it the way you do.

He said, I wish I could remember whatever you remember, so I would know what I’m missing.

They stood there a minute longer. The porch light was on even though it was still afternoon. Their mother’s wind chimes, the ones she had hung years ago, moved once in the breeze and then went still. Neither of them reached for the other. Neither of them walked away first. They just stayed where they were, each of them holding a version of the same night, and neither version complete enough to set the other one down.