The Ornaments on His Mother’s Spruce

“Fifteen minutes,” the nurse said. “I have a watch.”

“I have been cold before,” Irene said.

Marcus set her about six feet from the tree, facing it, with her back to the parking lot, and he stamped the snow down flat around her wheels.

I put the shoe in her lap.

She held it in both mittens and did not say one word for a while. I stood beside her with my hand on the back of her chair.

Then she looked up into the branches, and I saw her find the bird.

“I bought that at Murphy’s,” she said.

She did not say it to me. The man in the red flannel robe had come out onto the covered porch with a blanket around his shoulders, and the two women from the lobby were right behind him, and an aide had brought out a fourth resident in a chair. Irene was talking to them. She had spent twenty-six years behind a counter and she knew how to talk to a room.

“December of 1967,” she said. “The five and dime on the square. Thirty-nine cents, and I had no business spending it. I was as big as a barn. I was carrying my boy and I could not get my own boots buckled.”

Somebody on the porch laughed.

“He was not due until the end of January. Well. The eleventh of January we got eighteen inches. My husband drove for the dairy and his truck was in a ditch out on the county line. I was by myself. I called the operator, and the operator called the township garage, and they sent the plow.”

“They did not,” said the man in the red robe.

“They did so. I rode fourteen miles to the hospital in Warren up in the cab of a snowplow. The driver’s name was Earl. He apologized for his language the whole way and never once stopped using it.”

That was when the headlights came across the lawn.

I knew the car. A gray one, the kind that sits up high. It pulled into the first open spot and the engine stayed running for a second, and I could see there were two people in it.

The driver’s door opened.

Paul got out in his office clothes and his long dark coat, no hat, no gloves. He shut the door harder than he needed to and came across the lot at a walk that I knew like I know my own handwriting. It was the walk he used on contractors.

He stopped at the edge of the lawn. He looked at the tree. He looked at the ladder and the orange cord. He looked at me.

“Diane.” He kept his voice down. He always did, in public. “What is this?”

“It’s a Christmas tree, Paul.”

“The office called me at work. They said there was a display going up outside my mother’s room and did I have any concerns.” He said display the way you would say raccoons. “I’m the one whose name is on the paperwork. If somebody falls off that ladder, or one of these people slips out here, that comes to me. You can’t just…”

He had not seen her. I understood that all at once. She had her back to him, and she was a heap of blankets in a wheelchair, and he had not seen his own mother in four months.

“Earl got me there with forty minutes to spare,” Irene said to the porch, in her counter voice, without turning her head. “And that boy came out hollering and has not stopped giving orders since.”