The Hundred Dollar Bill on Christmas Eve

This Christmas Eve

We went to the candlelight service at Trinity Lutheran at four o’clock. Addie sang in the children’s choir. She wore a red velvet dress I had found at the thrift store in Fairmont and hemmed myself, and when she held up her little candle for Silent Night, she looked like a Christmas card.

Gene was in the third pew, where he always sat. I saw him watching her. I couldn’t read his face.

Back at the farm, the house smelled like ham and scalloped potatoes and the coffee Pat keeps going from noon to midnight on holidays. Mark and Jen were already there with Caleb and Emma. Lisa and Tom came in stamping snow off their boots with Lily on Tom’s shoulders.

Thirteen of us around Pat’s table with both leaves in. The kids at the card table in the corner.

Gene said the blessing. He always says the same one, the one his own father said, the short Lutheran one, and then he adds a line at the end for the people who aren’t there anymore. He did it this year too. His voice caught on it, the way it always does.

That’s the thing about Gene. He’s not a cold man. That’s why I could never understand it.

After supper, we went down to the basement. Pat and Gene finished it themselves in the nineties, knotty pine on the walls, brown carpet, a bar Gene built out of barn wood. The tree goes in the corner by the window well. There is a woodstove that makes the whole room smell like oak.

We opened presents first. The kids tore through everything. Wyatt got a set of toy grain trucks from Mark and Jen and spent fifteen minutes lining them up on the carpet. Addie got a sketchbook from Lisa and immediately started drawing her cousins.

Then Gene stood up and pulled the white envelope out of his shirt pocket.

“All right,” he said. “Line up by age. Oldest first.”

I felt Addie go still beside me on the couch.

The line

It went the way it always went. Caleb. Emma. Wyatt. Lily, with help.

Snap, snap, snap, snap. Four crisp bills.

Addie had her sketchbook open on her knees. She was drawing the tree. She didn’t look up. Her pencil just kept going, little short strokes for the needles, over and over in the same spot, until it was almost a black smudge.

I put my hand on her back. She leaned into it, just a little.

“That’s the bunch,” Gene said, and folded the envelope.

I took a breath. I had twenty-nine words ready and I was going to wait. After the kids were in bed. At the kitchen table. Plain.

And then Wyatt turned around.

He was standing by the tree with his hundred-dollar bill in both hands, the way you hold something you’re afraid of dropping. He looked at Gene, sitting down in the recliner. He looked across the room at Addie on the couch.

He didn’t say anything. He just started walking.