Tuckers manager is forty-four, and he has known that boy since Tucker was fifteen and first learned to run a register, so when he pulled me to the back of the store in January, I knew it was going to be something.
“Tucker asked me on Christmas Eve if he could pick up the twenty-fifth too,” he said. “Work Christmas Day. I told him yes, even though it broke about three holiday pay rules, because he looked like a kid who needed a yes. But I asked him why. And I have not been able to shake his answer since.”
“What did he say,” I asked.
The manager rubbed the back of his neck. “He said, there is no reason to be home, everybody left, I would rather be somewhere I am actually wanted, and here I am useful. He said, if I am working I do not have to think about the fact that they did not even cancel over me, they just went.”
Somewhere I am actually wanted. My seventeen year old told his manager a store stockroom felt more like a place he belonged than his own fathers Christmas.
He gave up his shift swap in November because his father promised something at the house, and his reward was finding out on a break, from an Instagram story, that the whole family had gone skiing without him.
The text his father bragged about sending said heading out, talk when we are back. That was it. That was the goodbye. To a boy who had rearranged his whole holiday to be there for a plan that never existed.
Here is what that manager did, and it is why I will shop that store the rest of my life. He told Tucker, that day in the stockroom, that a kid who works Christmas to feel wanted is a kid who has been let down by the wrong people, not a kid with nowhere to go. And then he told him he was not scheduling him a single holiday this year, that Tucker was going to be with people who would never once leave without him.
Because Tucker did have those people. He just could not see it through the hurt yet. He came to my mothers on Christmas Day and carried in the ham like he did every year, and my mother, who thinks that boy hung the moon, never let go of his hand the whole afternoon.
This Christmas he is not working a single shift. He is coming to his grandmothers early, to help with the ham, because that is his job in this family and he loves it, and every person in that house chose to be there with him.
His father did not cancel a ski trip over him. This family would not cross the street without him. Tucker has finally learned the difference, and he spends his holidays now on the right side of it.