The Hundred Dollar Bill on Christmas Eve

Ryan

My husband stood up.

He’s a big man, Ryan. Six foot two, shoulders from twenty years of lifting feed sacks and sorting hogs. When he stands up in a low basement, the room knows it.

He walked over and stood beside his son. He put one hand on top of Wyatt’s head and left it there. Then he looked across the room at his father.

He didn’t yell. Ryan has never yelled at his dad in his life, and he didn’t start that night.

“Dad,” he said. “He’s right.”

That was all. Three words.

I looked up at him from the floor. His jaw was set. His eyes were wet.

And I knew, in that moment, how much the last three years had cost him. I had been so busy being angry at him for letting it go that I never once asked what it was like to be the son who couldn’t make his father see.

Gene sat in his recliner for a long time. Longer than was comfortable. He had his hands on the armrests and he was looking at Addie, really looking at her, maybe for the first time in three Christmases.

Addie was looking down at the hundred-dollar bill in her lap.

Then Gene got up.

He didn’t say anything. He set his coffee cup on the side table and walked across the room to the stairs, and went up them, one at a time, the way he’s climbed stairs since his knee surgery. We heard him cross the kitchen floor over our heads.

Nobody moved. Lily said, “Where’s Grandpa going?” and Tom shushed her.

I heard a drawer open upstairs. The one by the phone, the one that sticks, where Gene drops his wallet and his keys the minute he walks in the house. Then it closed.

Then the stairs creaked again.

What Gene did

He came back down with his brown leather wallet in his hand. It was the same wallet he’d had since I’d known him, worn white at the corners. He walked past Mark and Jen, past Pat, past Ryan, and stopped in front of the couch.

He was breathing a little hard from the stairs. He didn’t look at me. He looked at Addie.

He opened the wallet and took out a bill. It wasn’t new. It was soft and folded and a little gray at the edges, the kind of bill that has been in a man’s wallet a while. He smoothed it on his knee and held it out to her.

“Addie,” he said.

She looked up at him. She didn’t take it.

“This one’s yours,” Gene said. “It should have been yours three years ago. And the year after. And last year.”

His voice did that catch again, the same one from the blessing.

“I was wrong, sweetheart.”

Addie still didn’t take it. She looked at me. I nodded, very small. She reached out and took the bill from her grandfather’s hand.

Then Gene turned to Wyatt. He took out a second bill, this one a fifty and two twenties and a ten, because that was what he had left, and he folded them together and pressed them into Wyatt’s pajama pocket.

“And that one’s for you,” he said. “For doing what your grandpa should have done.”

Wyatt looked into his pocket, then up at him. “That’s not a hundred,” he said, completely serious.

“It’s a hundred,” Gene said. “Count it.”

Wyatt counted it, out loud, on the carpet, with his tongue in the corner of his mouth. Fifty, seventy, ninety, a hundred. He looked up and grinned.

That’s when the room laughed. Not a big laugh. Just the kind of laugh that lets the air back into a place.

Then Gene sat down on the couch beside Addie. Right beside her, where I had been sitting. He’s not a hugger, Gene. But he put his arm across the back of the couch behind her, and after a minute, she leaned against him.

I watched his face. He closed his eyes.