The Box My Daughter-In-Law Mocked At Christmas

I did not say anything right away, because I was turning that over, the way you turn over a stone to see what is living underneath it. Then I told her I knew some of that story, that Brett had mentioned it once, years back, and that I had never once thought less of her for it, only more. I told her that grief and money fears do some of the same work on a person, they both make you brace before anybody’s even swung at you, and that I understood bracing better than most people in that kitchen, because I had been doing it myself for fourteen months.

“I’m not asking you to forget what I did,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m telling you I’m not going to carry it around either. There’s a difference.”

She nodded, and reached over, and for just a second she put her hand over mine on the edge of the sink, the way you would with somebody you were deciding, right then, to trust a little more than you had the day before. We finished the dishes. Neither of us cried, which I think we both, in our own stubborn ways, were grateful for.

We still went to the candlelight service that night, all fourteen of us, because that is what Harlow does on Christmas Eve regardless of what happened at anybody’s house that afternoon. Emma carried the box in her coat pocket the whole service, which I only found out when she showed me on the walk home, her mittened hand closed around it the way you’d hold something that might fly off if you let go. The organist played the same four carols she has played every year since I was a young mother sitting in that same pew with Wendell’s arm around my shoulders, and when the lights went down for the candle lighting, Emma leaned over and whispered that she wished her grandpa could see what she’d gotten for Christmas. I told her he probably had a better view of it than either of us did.

Betty Hargrove, who sits two pews up from us and has farmed longer than most people in this town have been alive, caught me in the church basement afterward over coffee and a plate of the same seventeen casseroles, and she asked what all the commotion had been about earlier, because word travels fast in a town this size no matter how quiet you try to keep a kitchen conversation. I told her the short version. She laughed, not unkindly, and said her own mother used to say money arguments are just grief arguments wearing a disguise, and that she’d learned that the hard way three different Christmases after her own husband passed. I have thought about that more than once since.