The Fifth Snowman in the Front Yard

Kenzie told me in the bathroom, with a mouthful of toothpaste, at a quarter after eight on Christmas Eve. She is eight, and she repeats things exactly, the way she repeats spelling words.

“Dad says Santa isn’t coming to your house this year,” she said. “Because you’re poor. He said we shouldn’t expect anything, so nobody gets sad.”

She spit, rinsed, and looked at me in the mirror like she was waiting to find out whether it was true.

I had the washcloth in my hand. I remember I folded it in half, and then in half again, and set it on the edge of the sink very carefully, as if it might break.

“Did he,” I said.

“Jace said it was fine,” she said. “Jace said we don’t even care.”

Jace is ten. Jace cares about everything and says he doesn’t. He was out in the living room right then, in the corner of the couch, with his little brother Brody leaning against him and his little sister Lily asleep across both their laps.

Nobody had said a word when they came in the door. That was the first thing I noticed. Four kids coming home on Christmas Eve, and not one of them talking.

Their dad had brought them back at eight o’clock sharp, which was the agreement. Cody Riedel has never once been late with those kids. I’ll say that for him, because it’s true, and because I want to be fair about everything that comes after.

He’d stood on my front step with his hands in his Carhartt jacket and his truck running at the curb, a 2009 Silverado with a crack across the windshield that he’d been meaning to fix for two years. He didn’t come in. He never does.

“Thanks for bringing them on time,” I’d said.

“Yep,” he said. And he looked at me a second longer than he needed to, and I didn’t know why, and then he went back down the walk to his truck.

Now I knew why.

The money

I was thirty-seven years old that Christmas. I managed the deli counter at the grocery store in our town, which is a little place in northern Minnesota where the snowplow is the most important vehicle in the county and everybody knows whose truck is parked where.

I rented a two-bedroom house on a corner lot for $875 a month. The boys had bunk beds in one room. The girls had the other. I slept on the pullout couch and had for a year and a half, since the divorce.

I’d paid rent on the twenty-third, a few days early, because I didn’t want to think about it over Christmas. After rent and the light bill, I had $112 in checking. My next paycheck was the second of January.

That $112 was gas for my car, and milk, and bread, and whatever the propane cost if the tank dipped under twenty percent before the second. It was not Christmas money. There was no Christmas money.

I’d known that since Thanksgiving. I’d made my peace with it. The stockings had an orange in the toe, a candy cane, a new pair of wool socks from the farm store, and a two-dollar thing from the checkout lane at work. That was what I could do.

And I had made them each one present. I’d been making them since the first of November, a little bit every night after they were asleep, out on the closed-in back porch with my grandpa’s scroll saw.