The Ornaments on His Mother’s Spruce

“Mrs. Hartley says staff or family on the ladder,” I said.

Irene lifted the shoe by its ribbon, in her mitten, and held it out. Not to me.

“Then you’re family,” she said to her son. “Get up there.”

Paul looked at the ladder. He looked at his office shoes, which were soaked dark to the laces.

I thought about twenty-six Decembers of a walk that did not need shoveling.

“I’ll hold it for you,” I said.

He took the shoe from his mother. I watched him take it. He held it in his bare palm for a second, the way you would hold a bird that had hit a window, and then he closed his fingers and went to the ladder.

I stood on the bottom rung side with both hands on the rails. Thirty-one years, and I had never once been the one on the ground.

He went up four steps.

“Higher,” Irene said.

He went up one more.

“Left. No. Your other left. There by the trunk. Paul, I want to see it from the bed.”

He leaned in. The branches closed around his shoulders and shook a little snow down on me, and I could not see his hands. I heard the snips, and the wire, and then nothing at all.

He stayed up there.

The porch was quiet. There must have been fifteen people at the windows by then, and an aide in every doorway, and not one of them made a sound. The big bulbs were lit all the way up, red and green and that deep blue they do not make anymore, and the snow under the tree had gone every color.

“Is it on?” Irene said.

“It’s on, Mom.” His voice came down through the branches thick. “It’s on good.”

“Then come down before you break your neck.”

He came down. His face was wet and he did not hide it, which I had never known him to do in front of other people in his life. Tiffany went to him and put her hand in his coat pocket with his, and they stood there like that.

Irene looked at the tree for a good long while. All of it. The star down low for the little ones, the sled, the snowflake, the bird in its red light, and up near the top, close in to the trunk, one white shoe.

Then she turned her head toward me, and she spoke up the way she used to call a ticket number across a crowded shop.

“Diane. What time are you coming Thursday?”

Every person on that porch heard it. So did the two beside me.

“Quarter to four,” I said. “Same as always.”

“Bring the butter pecan.”

“I always do.”

Paul cleared his throat.

“Mom. Could I come Thursday?”

“Thursday is Diane’s,” Irene said. “You can have Sunday. After church, not before, they don’t get me dressed until ten.” She squinted past him at Tiffany, who was shaking in that thin white coat. “And bring her. She looks half frozen, and I want to know what kind of woman wraps a thirty-nine cent bird in a good dish towel.”

“Time,” the nurse said, and this time she meant it.

Marcus came back out to take the chair. As he pulled Irene backward toward the doors, she kept her face to the tree the whole way, and the man in the red flannel robe held the door, and one of the women from the lobby said, “Irene, tell the rest about the plow.”