The Box My Daughter-In-Law Mocked At Christmas

My daughter in law held my gift up over her head like a referee calling a foul, and she said, in front of my son and my grandkids and her own mother and three of my husband’s cousins, that some people just cannot follow simple rules.

She meant me.

I did not say a word. I sat there in my red cardigan with my hands folded in my lap, and I let her finish, because I knew something she did not know, and I was not going to hand it to her early.

I am Carol Ann Mink. I am sixty seven years old. I have lived in Harlow, Ohio my whole life, in a town so small the water tower has our name misspelled on it and nobody has ever bothered to fix it. I raised one son in this town, buried one husband in the cemetery behind the Methodist church on Route 9, and last December, I sat through the ugliest ten seconds of my life at my own son’s Christmas, and I did not flinch, because flinching was not going to help the thing I had hidden.

Harlow is the kind of town where the feed store still carries a pot of coffee for anybody who stops in, and the Methodist church basement smells like the same seventeen casserole dishes every Wednesday, and everybody knows whose truck is whose from two streets over. We get our snow early and it stays late. The Christmas Eve service is candlelight, same as it has been since before I was born, and the whole town more or less fits into those two church buildings on Route 9, one Methodist and one Baptist, and everybody waves at everybody regardless of which door they walk through on Sunday. I tell you all this because it matters what kind of place raised a man like Wendell, and what kind of place I was sitting in when his memory got held up over somebody’s head like evidence.

Let me back up, because you need to understand what that forty dollar limit meant before you understand why it mattered so much that she broke it over my head.

Three years ago, before any of this, our family Christmas exchange had gotten out of hand. Not rich people trouble, nothing like that. Just the ordinary kind of trouble that happens when fourteen people are supposed to buy for each other and some of them have more to spend than others. One year my husband’s cousin Pam showed up with a espresso machine for Brett and Shay that cost more than my husband’s work truck was worth, and my sister in law felt so small next to it that she cried in my kitchen while the turkey was still in the oven. It was not a mean thing Pam did. It was just a hard thing, for people who watch every dollar, to sit across from somebody who does not have to.