The Envelope He Took Back Off the Mantel
Roy came to the courthouse that Tuesday. He stood at the back in his good sport coat with his cap in his hands, and afterward he shook Ben’s hand like he was a grown man and gave Emma a roll of butterscotch candies out of his pocket.
Barb had a hair appointment.
That was how it went with Barb. Never anything you could put your finger on. There were five school pictures on her refrigerator. There were five stockings on her mantel with names cut out of felt, and every December my two looked at them and I watched them look. When she talked on the phone to her church friends she said “Paul’s wife’s kids.” She told me once, kindly, as if she were helping, that a paper from the courthouse was a fine thing but it did not make blood.
Every Christmas before this one there had been a present for each of them under her tree. Smaller presents. A coloring book the year the cousins got remote control trucks. But something with their names on it. I swallowed the difference because the children had not noticed it, and because Paul loved his mother, and because I did not want to be the reason he saw less of her.
I had swallowed five years of it.
Then she said it out loud, where they could hear.
Our car was parked on the street, behind Kim’s van. Paul had the engine running and the wipers going, and I was reaching back to check Ben’s seat belt, when the front door of the house banged open.
Tyler came down the porch steps at a run.
He had no coat on. He had no shoes on. He ran across his grandmother’s front yard in an inch of snow in a pair of white athletic socks, with his arm stuck out ahead of him, and he came around to Ben’s side and knocked on the glass with his knuckles.
Ben looked at me. I nodded. He put the window down.
Tyler was breathing hard. He pushed his envelope through the window and dropped it in Ben’s lap.
“Here,” he said. “You guys split it.”
“Tyler,” I said. “Honey, no.”
“I don’t want it.” His chin was shaking and he was mad about it, the way boys that age are. “I don’t want one if they don’t get one. That’s not fair. It’s not even close to fair.”
Emma leaned across her brother. “You’ll get in trouble.”
“I don’t care.”
“Your feet,” Ben said. He was staring at Tyler’s socks, which were soaked through and going gray.
“They’re fine.”
Paul had turned all the way around in the driver’s seat. I watched my husband look at that boy, and I watched something go across his face that I had not seen in the house. In the house he had been stone. He was not stone now.
“Tyler,” he said, and he had to stop and start again. “You go on back in before your feet freeze. And you tell your mom I said she’s raising you right.”
Tyler nodded. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. Then he reached in the window and bumped his fist against Ben’s shoulder, and he turned around and ran back across the yard and up the steps, leaving a line of small dark footprints in the snow.
The envelope sat in Ben’s lap. Nobody touched it.
Paul put the car in gear.