The Envelope He Took Back Off the Mantel

“Sarah,” she said. She did not say hello. “Are they home? Is Paul? I want him to hear it.” She looked at me, and for the first time in five years she looked right at me, not past my shoulder. “I want you to hear it, too. I owe you your own piece of it, but I’m going to do theirs first, if you’ll let me. If I don’t do it now, I’ll lose my nerve.”

I got Paul out of the garage. I got the children. We sat down at my kitchen table, with Barb on one side and my two on the other, and Paul and I at the ends.

Barb kept the sack in her lap. Her hands were shaking on top of it.

“Emma,” she said. “Ben.”

She had to stop. She started over.

“On Christmas I told a room full of people that you two came with your mother. I said it right in front of you, like you were not there. That was a mean thing to say. It was a wrong thing to say. And it wasn’t a slip. I meant it when I said it, and that’s the part I have had to look at.”

Ben was watching her with his whole face. Emma was looking at the sack.

“I’m going to tell you why, and it is not an excuse, so don’t take it for one. When I was seven years old, my mother died, and my daddy married a woman who had three children of her own. And in that house her three got the new shoes and I got what was left. Every Christmas. She used to say blood comes first, right at the table. I hated her for it.” Barb’s voice cracked straight down the middle. “And then I grew up and did the very same thing to two children at my own tree. I knew better than anybody alive what that feels like on the carpet. I knew, and I did it anyway.”

“You are Emma and Ben, and you have my son’s name, and my husband’s name, and mine. You are my grandchildren. I should have said so four years ago at that courthouse, and I went to get my hair done instead. I am sorry. I am not sorry your feelings got hurt. I am sorry for what I did.”

She opened the sack.

She took out two Christmas stockings. They were red felt with white cuffs, the same as the five that hang on her mantel every December, the ones she cut and stitched herself when each of those children was born. And across the cuff of each one, in green felt letters sewn down with tiny stitches, was a name.

Emma. Ben.

“I can hardly see to thread a needle anymore,” Barb said. “It took me three weeks. The B is crooked.”

“I like it crooked,” Ben said.

“I don’t want you to take them home,” she said. “That’s the thing. I brought them so you could see them, but they don’t live here. They live on my mantel with the others. Grandpa already put the two nails in. He put them in the middle.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “If you’ll come. I’d understand it if you won’t.”

Ben looked at his father. Paul gave him the smallest nod. Ben got down off his chair and went around the table and climbed right up into her lap, eight years old and too big for it, and Barb put both arms around him and made a sound I had never heard out of her.