The Ornaments on His Mother’s Spruce

The popsicle stick sled with Jenny’s name on it in red marker. The clothespin reindeer with one eye. The brass one from the card shop that said Our First Christmas 1990, which I held for a while and then set down like any other. A Cleveland Browns ball from 1999, the year they came back. A crocheted snowflake, starched stiff as a cracker, that Paul’s Aunt Helen made. A school picture of each of my children glued inside the ring of a canning jar lid.

Two strings of the old fat colored lights, the ceramic kind that get hot, wound around a piece of cardboard.

A glass bird with a spun tail and a metal clip where its feet should be.

And one white leather baby shoe on a red ribbon, with 1994 written on the sole in blue ink.

I did not cry until I got to the shoe. Then I did, at my own kitchen table with my coat still on, and I am not ashamed to say so.

When I was done I washed my face and looked at the box again. The postage label was on the top flap. Nine pounds, six ounces. $18.40.

She had stood in line at the post office and paid $18.40 to send me my own life in a trash bag, when she lives forty minutes away and passes my street on the way to her sister’s.

I could have called Paul. I thought about it. But I had called Paul for thirty-one years, about the gutters and the taxes and whose turn it was at the hospital, and in all that time it had never once gotten anything hung.

And I will tell you the truth. I was not sure, sitting there, that I had any right to be angry. She had not kept them. She had not put them out at the curb. She had sent them where they belonged, with a note, and wrapped the breakable ones in her good towels.

It was only the bag.

So I got my phone out of my purse and typed it with one finger.

“The box came today. Thank you for the $18.40 in postage. Diane.”

She wrote back in about a minute. “You’re welcome! Glad they got there.”

I put the phone in the drawer with the pot holders and shut it.

Then I looked at my tree.

I live in half a duplex on Chestnut Street now. My tree is four feet tall and it sits on the table in the front window. It will hold twenty ornaments if I am careful and none of them are heavy.

I had one hundred and twelve.

And it was more than the number. Half of those ornaments had another woman’s fingerprints on them, and I do not mean Tiffany’s.

Paul’s mother is named Irene. She is eighty-eight years old. She worked the counter at the dry cleaner on the square for twenty-six years, and she knew everybody’s business in town and never told any of it. That was her whole pride.

She has lived at Maple Glen for two years, since she broke her hip on her own back steps. She has room 14, on the ground floor, with a window that looks out on the front lawn.

I go every Thursday.

When Paul and I split, his mother called me on the telephone. I was braced for it. I thought she was going to tell me what a wife ought to put up with.

“He can have the house,” Irene said. “I’m keeping you.”