The Fifth Snowman in the Front Yard

Seven o’clock

They were up at seven. They’re always up at seven on Christmas. Cody’s announcement had not changed that.

Brody came barreling out first, like always, and then stopped in the middle of the living room and looked at the stockings hanging on the bookcase, because we don’t have a mantel.

“There’s stuff in them,” he said.

“There’s always stuff in them,” Jace said, coming out behind him. He said it in a flat voice, the way you say something to make sure nobody gets their hopes up.

They dumped the stockings out on the rug. Oranges. Candy canes. Socks. Kenzie got a little horse figure and Brody got a bouncy ball and Lily got a hair clip with a butterfly on it, and Jace got a pocket flashlight.

“Okay,” I said. “Pancakes.”

“Can we go outside?” Brody said. He’d seen the snow out the side window. He always wants to go out in the snow.

“After breakfast,” I said. “And not till it’s light out. Rules.”

It doesn’t get light in northern Minnesota until after eight in late December. The kids know that. They grumbled about it every winter morning before school. But they knew it, and so nobody argued, and nobody went near the front curtains.

I made pancakes with the last of the milk. I made them in shapes, the way my mom used to, a snowman for each of them with three circles stacked up. Jace looked at his plate for a long second.

“Why snowmen?” he said.

“Because it snowed,” I said.

The door

By ten to eight, the sky out the kitchen window had gone from black to dark blue, and then a pale pink color came up behind the water tower.

“Boots on,” I said.

They didn’t even lace them. They stuck their feet in, pajamas and all, and Jace grabbed the doorknob, and I said, “Wait,” and they all turned around and looked at me.

“Santa doesn’t always come down the chimney,” I said. “Sometimes he comes another way.”

Jace’s face did something complicated. Then he opened the door.

I’m not going to be able to tell you the sound they made. I’ve tried, since, to tell Tara, and to tell my grandpa on his good days, and I can’t get it right. It was all four of them at once. It wasn’t words.

They went off the porch and down the walk like they’d been fired out of something. And there were the four snowmen, in a row, in the pink light, with the porch light still burning behind them because I’d forgotten to turn it off.

“That one’s got my scarf!” Lily yelled. “That’s my scarf!”

“There’s names,” Kenzie said. She’d stopped in front of hers. “Mom. There’s names on them.”

I hadn’t written their names on the outside. But I’d drawn a little shape in the corner of each package, a hockey stick and a horse and a tractor and a star. Kenzie figured it out first. She always does.

I stood on the porch steps with my coffee mug. I was wearing the same parka over the same pajamas I’d had on all night. I was crying and laughing at the same time, which I didn’t know you could do until that morning.

Across the property line, Earl was standing in his driveway in his red and black plaid coat and his old cap with the earflaps. He had his hands in his pockets. He did not wave. He just watched.

And then Lily, who was supposed to be tearing into her package, wasn’t.

She’d gone past the end of the row, down to where our yard meets Earl’s, past the big spruce at the corner, and she was standing very still, staring at something I hadn’t built.

“Mama,” she said. “Who made that one?”