The Ornaments on His Mother’s Spruce

So I go Thursdays. I get out of the school office at half past three, and I am in her doorway by a quarter to four with a pint of butter pecan and two spoons. We eat it out of the carton. She tells me who has died and I tell her which children got sent to the office.

Nobody else goes. I do not say that to be unkind. My children live in Columbus and North Carolina and they come when they are home. But Paul lives forty minutes away, and the sign-in book at the front desk is a plain spiral notebook, and I can read.

His name was last in it on the ninth of August.

Outside Irene’s window, about twenty feet across the lawn, there is a blue spruce. The Kiwanis planted it when the home was built and it is a good twenty-five feet tall now. It is the only thing Irene can see from her bed besides the parking lot.

The home puts a tree up in the dining room every year, a nice one. But Irene had not been going down to the dining room much. She had been taking her trays in her room since Thanksgiving.

I sat at my kitchen table Tuesday night with one hundred and twelve ornaments and a four-foot tree, and I thought about that spruce.

Wednesday on my lunch I went to the hardware store and bought a spool of green florist wire and a pair of snips. That was $7.

Thursday I packed every ornament into two laundry baskets with bath towels between the layers, set the lights on top, and put the baskets in the back seat of my car before school.

It had snowed four inches in the night, the way it does up here when the wind comes off the lake.

I did not go to Irene’s room first. I went to the front desk and asked for Marcus.

Marcus is the activities aide. He is twenty-four, he is tall enough to change a light bulb without a chair, and he wears a brown and orange stocking cap indoors from October to April. He runs the bingo and the chair exercises.

He came up the hall pushing a cart of puzzle boxes.

“Mrs. Novak. You’re early for a Thursday.”

I kept the name. It was on my desk plate at the school for twenty-two years and it is on both my children. I saw no reason to hand it back.

“Marcus, I have a strange question,” I said. “Can I hang some ornaments on that spruce outside Irene’s window?”

He looked at me. Then he looked through the glass doors at my car, where you could see the laundry baskets in the back seat.

“Some,” he said.

“One hundred and twelve.”

“That’s not mine to say yes to,” he said. “Let me get Mrs. Hartley.”

Nancy Hartley has been the director at Maple Glen for eleven years. She came out of her office with her reading glasses on her head and walked with me, in her good shoes, across the snowy lot to my car. I lifted the bath towel off the first basket.

She looked for a long time. She picked up the clothespin reindeer and turned it over.

“Whose are these?”

“Mine,” I said. “And Irene’s. They were on our family tree for thirty-one years. They came back to me this week and I don’t have a tree that will hold them. She does.”

Mrs. Hartley set the reindeer down very gently.