The Fifth Snowman in the Front Yard

Grandpa Walt’s saw

The saw was a Delta from 1974. Grandpa Walt had cut a hundred birdhouses and a thousand puzzle pieces on it, and when his hands got too shaky for it, he gave it to me instead of selling it. He said I was the only one who ever sat still long enough to learn it.

He’s ninety-one now and lives at the care center in Grand Rapids. He doesn’t remember the saw most days. I remember it for him.

On that saw, I’d cut four name signs out of pine boards I’d gotten free from the lumberyard’s scrap pile. Each one was about two feet long, with the name in tall letters and one little shape cut at the end.

Jace’s had a hockey stick. Kenzie’s had a horse, because she would ride anything with four legs if you let her. Brody’s had a tractor, a John Deere, and I’d painted it green and yellow with a model paint set from the dollar store. Lily’s had a star.

I’d sanded each one by hand until it felt like a river rock. I’d sealed them with the polyurethane left over from when Grandpa redid his kitchen table. They were good. I knew they were good.

But I had planned to give them from me. From Mom. And I had planned for Santa to come too, in the small way he could, with the oranges and the socks.

Now their father had told them Santa wasn’t coming at all. And that the reason was me.

The phone

At nine o’clock, after they were all in bed, I sat on the edge of the pullout couch and typed a text to Cody.

It was long. It was the kind of text you write with your jaw clenched. I read it over twice and deleted it.

Here is why. If I fought with him that night, the kids would know by morning. Kids always know. Jace would hear me on the phone through the wall, or see it on my face, and then Christmas would become a fight between Mom and Dad.

And that would mean Cody was right about something. Not about Santa. About Christmas being something that happened at his house, and not at mine.

So I called my sister instead.

Tara is two years younger than me and works nights as an aide at a nursing home in Duluth. She picked up on the second ring, and I could hear a call light dinging somewhere behind her.

“He said what,” she said.

I told her again.

“I’m coming up,” she said. “I’m off at seven. I’ll be there by ten.”

“The roads are bad,” I said. “They’re saying eight inches today, and it’s wet. Stay home. I mean it.”

“Then I’m calling him.”

“No, you’re not.”

She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Mandy, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. And that was the truth.

Three o’clock

I didn’t sleep. I lay on the couch and listened to the house tick and the furnace kick on and off, and I watched the light from the streetlamp come through the front window and lie across the floor.

At ten to three I got up for a glass of water. I stood at the front window and looked out at the yard.

It had snowed all day, the heavy kind, the kind that comes when the temperature hangs right around freezing instead of dropping to ten below like it usually does up here in December. The thermometer on the porch post said thirty-one degrees.

The whole yard was smooth and white and untouched, and the spruce trees along the side were bent with it. Wet snow. Packing snow. The kind you can’t get in Minnesota half the winters, because it’s too cold and it falls like sugar.

And I stood there with the glass of water in my hand, and I thought: Santa doesn’t have to come down a chimney.

He just has to have been here.