The Ornaments on His Mother’s Spruce

Paul stood there with his mouth still open.

“Is that him now?” Irene said.

Nobody on the porch answered. They were all looking at Paul.

“It’s him, Irene,” I said.

“Well, come around where I can see you. I’m not an owl.”

He came around. He walked through four inches of snow in his office shoes and stood in front of her, and I watched his face do what it did when he saw her out there in the cold, in her hat, with a baby shoe in her lap.

“Mom. What are you doing outside?”

“I’m looking at my bird.”

He looked up. I saw him see it. Then I saw him see the rest: the macaroni star, the sled, his aunt’s snowflake, the canning lid with his son’s school picture in it.

“These are ours,” he said.

“They were,” I said.

“How did you get these?”

I had told myself in the car that I would not do this in front of her. But he had asked me straight, and I have never been any good at lying to that man.

“They came in the mail Tuesday,” I said. “In a box.”

“In a box.”

“In a trash bag, in a box. With a note that the tree was going modern.”

Irene’s head came around then. Not to him. To me.

Paul’s eyes went to the car and back.

“I told her to take care of the stuff over the garage,” he said slowly. “I told her it was all yours. The kids’ school things. Craft things.” He stopped. “I didn’t go through it.”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”

“I didn’t know Mom’s bird was in there.”

“It was in a dish towel. Tiffany wrapped it. All the glass ones. She used her good towels, Paul, which is more care than those boxes got from either of us in four years.”

I said either of us on purpose. I could have gotten a neighbor boy up that ladder myself, and I had not, and I knew why. As long as they were in his garage, he still owed me something.

Paul looked at the shoe in his mother’s lap.

He knew it, too. Of course he did.

“Mom,” he said, and his voice was not the contractor voice anymore.

“You have not been here since the tomatoes came in,” Irene said.

“I know.”

“Diane comes Thursdays. She has come every Thursday for two years, and before that she came to the house. Do you know what she brings? Butter pecan. Do you know I like butter pecan?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then where have you been?”

He was quiet long enough that I thought he would not answer. The nurse had her wrist turned over to look at her watch, and she turned it back.

“In August,” Paul said. “When I came. You looked right at me and called me Walt.”

Walt was his father. He has been gone nineteen years.

“You asked me when Paul was coming,” he said. “I was standing right there, Mom. I told you it was me and you said Paul was at school. I didn’t know what to do. I sat in the parking lot for an hour. And then every week I’d think about driving out here, and I’d think about you not knowing me again, and I’d find something else that had to be done.”

It is a hard thing to hear a man say out loud in front of a porch full of strangers. I looked at my boots.