The Ornaments on His Mother’s Spruce

Irene did not look at her boots.

“Paul Novak,” she said. “You were standing in my doorway with your coat on and your car keys in your hand, exactly the way your father stood in every doorway he ever came to. I am eighty-eight years old. Some afternoons I am not in the right year. That is no reason to go home.”

“I know that.”

“What you do is, you stand there until I get it right. That’s all. Diane stands there. Sometimes it takes me until the ice cream is half gone.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“I expect you are.”

The car door opened behind us.

Tiffany is forty-four and she is pretty, with careful blond hair, and she was wearing a thin white coat that was never meant for a lawn in northeast Ohio in December. She came across the snow with her arms folded tight, and she stopped a little way back, the way you stop at the edge of somebody else’s family.

She looked at the tree for a long moment. Then she saw what Irene was holding, and her hand went up to her mouth.

“Is that,” she said. “Paul, is that Katie’s?”

So he had told her about Katie. I was glad of that. I had not been sure.

“I didn’t know that was in there,” she said to me. Her eyes were filling. “Diane. I swear to you. He said it was the kids’ school crafts and your sewing things. I would never have put that in a bag. I would have carried it over in my hands.”

“I know you would have,” I said. “You wrapped the bird.”

“The boxes were falling apart. There had been mice in two of them, and when I lifted the first one the bottom came right out. The bags were all I had that would hold.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “I should have driven them over. I must have picked up my keys three times. I didn’t think you would open the door.”

“I would have opened the door.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No,” I said. “How would you?”

She laughed, a short wet one, and then it was gone.

“I’ve lived in that house two years,” she said. “I still reach for the light switch on the wrong side of every door. I open the cupboard for a glass and it’s your shelf paper. Every Christmas I got those boxes down and I hung another woman’s whole life on my tree, and I smiled, and I just wanted…” She shook her head. “I wanted one that was mine. That’s all. I didn’t mean it to look like the garbage.”

I believed her. I want that understood. I had spent two days holding $18.40 against a woman whose real offense was that she had done a chore my husband put off for four years, and done it with the only bag she had.

“Then have one that’s yours,” I said. “White and gold sounds pretty. And Tiffany. Change the shelf paper. I picked that out in 1998 and it was ugly then.”

That time the laugh stayed.

“Ten minutes,” the nurse said.

Irene had not taken her eyes off the shoe.

“This one’s not up,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I was saving it. Marcus was going to…”

But Marcus had been called inside. I could see him through the dining room window with a stack of supper trays, looking out at us over the top of it.