The Box My Daughter-In-Law Mocked At Christmas

So Shay, my daughter in law, who is organized the way some people are tall, just born to it, stood up at the table the next year and said we were doing a forty dollar limit from here on, no exceptions, and everybody could put their name in a hat and draw one person, and that was that. I liked her for it. I want that on the record. Shay has her hard edges, but setting that limit was not one of her hard edges. It was the kindest thing anybody did that whole year, and I told her so.

I will tell you something about Shay that most of this family does not say out loud, because it is not really anyone’s business, except it explains some of what happened later. Shay did not grow up the way Brett did. Her father left when she was nine, and her mother raised three kids on what she made doing hair two towns over, and there were years, Shay told me once, early on, when she and her mother and her brothers got exactly one gift apiece under the tree, and her mother cried in the bathroom afterward thinking nobody could hear her through the door. Shay heard her every year. So when Shay married into a family where somebody’s cousin could show up with an espresso machine worth more than a used truck, it did not look like generosity to her. It looked like the thing that used to make her mother cry in a bathroom, except now it was happening in her own living room, to people she loved. The forty dollar rule was not about being tightfisted. It was about making sure nobody at her table ever had to feel what her mother felt. I want that understood, because what she did to me in that living room was wrong, but it did not come out of nowhere, and I was not going to spend the rest of my life pretending she was simply a hard woman with no reason behind her.

This past December was the third Christmas under that rule, and it was also the first Christmas without Wendell.

My husband died fourteen months before that Christmas. A heart attack, out by the hay barn, in the cold, on a Tuesday in October, and he was gone before the ambulance from Harlow Fire even turned onto our road. Forty six years married. I do not say that number to make anybody feel sorry for me. I say it because it matters to what was in that box.

Wendell was not a man who talked much. He fixed things. He fixed the church furnace twice without ever being asked, he fixed Brett’s truck every time it needed fixing until Brett was thirty five years old and still calling him for it, and the one time in our whole marriage that he sat me down and told me a story about himself, it was about a cigar box.