The Hundred Dollar Bill on Christmas Eve

Why

I didn’t get the whole story until later. It came out a piece at a time over the next few days, mostly from Pat, some from Ryan, and a little, eventually, from Gene himself.

Gene’s own father was a hard man. He farmed through the eighties, when so many families in Faribault County lost their land, and he held onto his by refusing to spend a dollar on anything that wasn’t his own. His rule was simple. You take care of your blood. Nobody else will, and nobody else should expect you to.

When Gene’s sister married a man with two kids from a first marriage, Gene’s father never bought those kids so much as a birthday card. Gene grew up thinking that was normal. That was just how it was done.

“I told myself she had plenty,” Gene said to me, weeks later, at the kitchen table. “Her mom’s people have money. Brad gives her more than I ever could. I told myself it wasn’t my place.”

He turned his coffee cup around in his hands.

“But she sat there,” he said. “Three years. She sat there on that couch and clapped for the others.”

He shook his head.

“My dad would’ve said I did right,” he said. “But my dad never had a grandson walk across a room and show him different.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need my twenty-nine words anymore. A six-year-old had done it in eight.

Pat

There was one more thing that night, and it was the one that undid me.

After the money, after Wyatt counted his bills and Addie leaned against her grandfather, Pat got up out of her rocking chair. She didn’t say a word to anybody. She went into the back room of the basement, the storage room where she keeps the canning jars and the Christmas boxes.

She was gone a few minutes. I heard the lid of the old cedar chest open, the one that used to belong to her mother.

When she came out, she was carrying a Christmas stocking.

It was hand-knitted, red and white, in the same pattern as every other stocking that hangs on the mantle upstairs. Pat knits one for every grandchild the year they’re born. A snowflake at the top. A little Christmas tree on the foot. The name across the cuff in white yarn.

This one said Addie.

Pat stood in front of the couch, holding it in both hands. Her face was red. She’s a small woman, Pat, five foot nothing, and I had never in my life seen her look ashamed.

“I made this the first year you came,” she said to Addie. “When you were three. I knitted it that fall, before Christmas.”

Addie stared at it.

“I never hung it up,” Pat said. “I should have. I was afraid of what Grandpa would say, and I let that be a reason.” She looked at Gene. Then back at Addie. “That was wrong of me, too. Both of us were wrong.”

She held it out.

Addie took the stocking and laid it across her lap, on top of the sketchbook and the two hundred-dollar bills. She ran her fingers over her name on the cuff, very slowly, letter by letter.

“You made this when I was little?” she said.

“Seven years ago,” Pat said. “It’s been in my mother’s cedar chest ever since. I took it out every Christmas and looked at it, and then I put it back.”

That’s when Addie cried. Finally. Not loud. She just bent her head down over that stocking and her shoulders started shaking, and Pat sat down on her other side, so she had a grandparent on each side of her, and held on.

I looked over at Ryan. He had his hand over his mouth.

Jen was crying. Lisa was crying. Even Tom, who sells seed corn and has never cried in front of me in seven years, was looking very hard at the ceiling.

And Wyatt, who did not understand any of it, crawled up into my lap on the carpet and said, “Can we have the bars now?”