The Christmas Checks That Never Came

Ruth put the last stack back together and snapped the rubber band around it. Then she looked at the children.

“Owen,” she said. “Lily. Come here to me.”

They came. She took one of Lily’s hands and one of Owen’s and held them in her lap, on top of the card and the red envelope.

“I want you both to know something,” she said. “I’ve been thinking for four years that you got my Christmas money and didn’t care to say thank you. I was a little sore about it, if you want the truth. And I was wrong to be. You never got it. That’s not on you. Not one bit of it.”

“Did somebody take it?” Owen asked. He was looking at the statements.

Ruth looked at me, and I nodded. I would not lie to him, and neither would she.

“Somebody did,” Ruth said. “And it’s somebody who loves you, which makes it harder, and I’m going to talk to her myself. But that is grown-up business, and you two are not to carry one ounce of it. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Owen said. Lily nodded hard enough to make her ponytail swing.

“Good,” Ruth said. “Now. Kayla, there’s a checkbook in the same drawer, under the statements, and a pen. The good pen. The blue one.”

I found the checkbook and the pen and brought them to her. She opened the checkbook on the arm of the recliner and uncapped the pen and pushed her glasses up.

She wrote very slowly. Her hand shakes now, a little, and she takes her time so the letters come out the way she wants them.

I stood behind the children and watched her write the date. Then she wrote, on the line that said Pay to the Order Of: Owen Brandt.

No Darlene on the line. Nobody’s name but his.

Five hundred and no hundredths. She signed it, the same signature she had been signing for seventy years, and tore it out along the perforation and blew on it.

Then she wrote the next one. Lily Brandt. Five hundred dollars. She signed it and tore it out and blew on it, and she held them both up to the lamp to look at them.

“This is this year’s,” she said. “Since I’d guess the ones I mailed to Darlene’s this month aren’t coming to you either.”

Then she looked at me. “Kayla, I want you to take these home and put them in envelopes and mail them back to your own house. Address them to the children. I want them to come in the mail with their own names on them, like they ought to have the first time.”

“Grandma, I can just put them in their accounts,” I said.

“I know you can,” she said. “But a child ought to get a letter from her great-grandmother at least once in her life. You mail them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because there is no other answer to Ruth Brandt when she uses that voice.

Then she reached for the telephone on her side table. It was the big-button kind, beige, with the numbers printed large.

She dialed from memory. I could hear the ring through the receiver in that quiet room.

“Darlene,” she said. “It’s Ruth.”

“Merry Christmas to you, too,” Ruth said. “I’d like you to come see me tonight. Yes, tonight. No, I’m fine. I’m not sick. Kayla and the children are here, and they brought me some thank-you cards, and I’d like to talk to you about my Christmas checks.”