The Christmas Checks That Never Came

They took him to the hospital in Rochester, and he came home a week later with two stents and a bag of pills.

“If you go over there tonight,” I said, “your dad is going to be standing in that kitchen when it happens. Ten days before Christmas. Is that what you want him to hear?”

Nick looked at the keys.

The second thing was that it wasn’t our money to fight over. It was Ruth’s.

She had saved it out of egg money and Social Security, and she had sent it on purpose to two children she loved. Whatever happened next ought to be her call.

“She’s ninety-one,” Nick said. “I don’t want her finding out her own family robbed her.”

“She already found something out,” I said. “She found out the kids never wrote her. She just doesn’t know why. She’s been thinking for four years that they got her money and never said thank you.”

That was the third thing, and it was the one that had kept me in my car in that parking lot. Ruth thought my children were ungrateful. Darlene had let her think it.

“So what do you want to do,” he said finally.

“I want to take the kids to see her,” I said. “I want them to thank her for thinking of them. In person. And then I want to tell her the truth, kindly, and let her decide what she wants done about it.”

“And Mom?”

“Your mom,” I said, “is going to find out from Ruth. Not from a fight in her kitchen. Ruth is the one she lied to. Ruth gets to be the one.”

He turned the keys over in his hand. Then he got up and hung them back on the hook.

“Her money,” he said. “Her call.” He came back and put his hand on the back of my neck for a second, which is the most he ever says with his hands. “But if Grandma wants me there when she has it out with Mom, I’m there.”

“I know you will be,” I said.

I want to be honest about something. I was angry.

I was angrier than I had been at anybody in years, and part of me wanted to walk into Darlene’s kitchen myself and put those statements on her counter.

But I had known Darlene for fourteen years. She had stayed with us for a week when Lily was born, and she had done every load of laundry in the house without being asked.

She taught Owen to bait a hook. She was not a cartoon. I could not make the woman who did all that fit with the woman who told Ruth about the reel.

And there were things about the last four years that I had noticed and not added up. Darlene had stopped getting her hair done at the shop downtown.

She had picked up Saturdays at the hardware store. She had sold her good sewing machine at a garage sale and said she never used it.

On Christmas Eve, after the candlelight service at church, I got the craft drawer out and set the kids up at the kitchen table with paper, markers, and the box of leftover envelopes from last year’s Christmas cards.

“We’re going to see Great-Grandma Ruth on Christmas,” I told them. “And I want you each to make her a card.”

“A Christmas card?” Lily asked. She was five, and she took her assignments seriously. She already had the green marker uncapped.