I just finished my first semester of college, and I have a big bag of laundry. I come through the door of the house, and things aren’t looking too good for me and my mom.
My sister’s room is exactly the way it looked when she moved out two years ago to go live with my dad: Pepto-Bismol pink walls, and a canopy bed, and this big toy box in the shape of a rubber strawberry, as if she was gonna move back in and be the little girl that she was before she moved out.
My room looks exactly the way it was when I left for college. There’s posters all over the walls, and it’s ridiculous, like me.
When we’re done with that, we have dinner. My mom makes tomato casserole. It was one of my favorite things. It was canned tomatoes with cubes of Wonder bread and American cheese baked in the oven. If you put enough shaky cheese on it, it’s delicious, you know?
So she was doing everything she could, and she warned me, but it was still shocking, you know? She had just taken a second job, a part-time seasonal job at the mall, behind the perfume counter. My mom didn’t like people telling her what to do, so I knew that wasn’t gonna last very long.
While we’re sitting there at dinner, she says, “Pete, we’re not going to have a lot of money this year for Christmas, so I don’t think we’re going to be able to give each other presents.”
I said, “That’s okay, Mom”—and I’m being completely honest. I’m just happy to be home with her. I don’t need anything, and that’s the truth.
But then we laughed again, because no matter how hard things are, you just have to laugh, you know?
The next day I decided I wanted to make the house look as Christmassy as possible. I went up to the attic, and I got down the boxes with the lights, and I hung the lights on the bushes out front and around the gutters. I wanted to go get a Christmas tree.
I grew up in a little town in New Jersey called Delanco. It was a small town, twenty-five-hundred people. It was mostly farms. At that time there wasn’t Walmart or big stores or anything, so I went over to the local Christmas-tree farm to get a tree.
I figured they’d give me a deal because I used to date their daughter. But it turns out they didn’t give me a deal, because I used to date their daughter. And the Christmas tree was like forty bucks—man, I couldn’t afford that. So I went back home, and I got an old saw out of the garage, and I cut out a tree from the side yard, and I brought it in.
It wasn’t even a pine tree, it was like a stunted maple tree. I put it in the tree holder. It had like five branches. I put twenty ornaments on each branch and just kinda put the lights on it and called it a day. My mom came home from work, and she just laughed about it.
And she goes upstairs, and she’s upstairs for a minute. Then she comes back down, and she has a few pictures of gifts.
We go to the kitchen, and my mom makes the best pancakes in the world. (You might think your mom does, but I’m so sorry, you’re wrong.) But this morning she burns them a little bit. So I’m sitting in the kitchen eating these pancakes, cutting around the burnt pieces. And I’m looking out through our backyard at everybody else’s house, and all the light in their houses looks orange and colorful and friendly, with all these people inside. And our house just feels empty and stark and white under the fluorescent light, as we eat these pancakes in silence together, just the two of us.
The house sold pretty quickly. She offloaded it, and she took a little bit of a hit financially, and she took an even bigger hit on her pride. She moved into a much smaller place that she could afford. And it hurt her, I know it hurt her.
But the most important thing to me was right then, when looking at that picture….I got my girl back.

In one paragraph, respond to the following prompt:

How does Peter and his mom's care for each other help them get through hard times? Support your response with at least TWO details from the text.