The Hundred Dollar Bill on Christmas Eve

The mantle

Before we left that night, Pat took Addie upstairs.

I followed them. I stood in the doorway of the living room and watched my mother-in-law and my stepdaughter hang that stocking on the mantle, on the brass hook at the very end, right next to Wyatt’s.

There had always been an empty space there. I had noticed it a hundred times and never thought about it. A gap at the end of the row of stockings, just about the width of one more.

Pat had been saving it.

Addie stepped back and looked at it. Five stockings now, all in a row. Caleb, Emma, Wyatt, Lily. And now Addie, at the end, where she had belonged the whole time.

Gene came up the stairs behind me. He stood beside me in the doorway, looking at his wife and his granddaughter and that row of stockings.

“Should’ve been there seven years,” he said quietly.

“It’s there now,” I said.

He nodded. He didn’t say anything else. But he put his hand on my shoulder for just a second, and then he went into the kitchen to get his coat, because he always walks everyone out to their cars with a flashlight, no matter how cold it is.

It was nine below that night. He walked us out anyway.

The coffee

Gene goes to coffee every weekday morning at the café on Main Street in Wells. Six-thirty, the back table, the same five men he’s been having coffee with since the seventies. Two of them are his brothers, Dale and Roger.

Everybody in that town knows the back table. You can find out who’s selling ground, who’s in the hospital and how much the elevator paid for beans before eight in the morning.

Pat told me what happened, because Dale’s wife told her, because Dale told his wife.

On the Monday after Christmas, Gene sat down at the back table with his coffee. Somebody asked how Christmas was. And Gene, who never in his life talked about his feelings in front of those men, told them.

He told them about the hundred-dollar bills. He told them he’d skipped Ryan’s girl three years running because she wasn’t blood. He told them about Wyatt walking across the basement.

And then he said, according to Dale, “I was raised like Dad raised all of us. And I’ll tell you what, he was wrong about that. I was wrong about it. My grandson had to show me.”

Dale said the table went quiet. Then Roger, who has four step-grandchildren of his own, said, “Well, I’ll be.”

That was it. That was all anybody said. But Pat told me Roger called his daughter that afternoon and asked her what the stepkids wanted for their birthdays.

That’s a consequence, I guess. Not the kind you see in movies. Just the kind where a man has to say out loud, in front of the men whose opinion he cares about most, that he was wrong. Gene had to sit at that table and own it. He did.

I respect him for that. I didn’t expect to. But I do.