The Christmas Checks That Never Came

“The cardiologist told me to keep stress off him,” Darlene said. “Those were his words. Keep the stress off him. So I took the bills. I got the mail before he did. I set up a payment plan with the hospital, two hundred and fifty a month, and I told him insurance covered most of it.”

“Darlene,” Ruth said.

“I know,” Darlene said. “I know. And then the furnace went that first winter. And the car. And I got behind on the hospital, and they sent the letter that said collections, and it was ten days before Christmas, and the envelope from you came in the mail with the checks in it.”

She looked up then. Her face was wet.

“I meant to pay it back,” she said. “Every year I meant to. I told myself I’d put it in their accounts in the spring when I had the Saturday money from the hardware store. And then spring came, and something else came with it, and then it was Christmas again, and your envelope came again.”

“And the for Owen and Lily,” Ruth said quietly. “Whose idea was that?”

Darlene closed her eyes. “Mine,” she said. “That first year. So I could deposit them without anyone asking.”

“And the fishing reel,” Ruth said. “And the dollhouse with the porch.”

That was when Darlene broke. I had braced myself for her to argue, or to explain, or to get angry with me.

She didn’t do any of that. She folded over on the edge of that bed and cried like a little girl.

“You asked me if they liked them,” she said. “You asked me every year. And I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you they never saw them. So I made something up, and then I had to keep making it up. I’m so sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”

I sat in the folding chair by the door and did not say one word. It wasn’t mine to say. I will tell you honestly that I felt two things at once.

I was still angry. And I was sorry for her, sitting there in her coat, sixty-four years old, with nobody she had let herself tell.

Ruth let her cry for a while. Then she reached over and put her hand on Darlene’s knee.

“You could have asked me,” Ruth said. “Do you know that? You could have sat in this chair and asked me for that money, and I’d have given it to you. For Tom. He’s my boy.”

“I know,” Darlene said. “That’s why I couldn’t. You’d have told him. You’d have had to.”

“Maybe I would have,” Ruth said. “And maybe he’d have been fine. Tom is not made of glass, Darlene. He’s a grown man who drove truck for thirty years. You’ve been carrying this by yourself for four years because you decided he couldn’t. I don’t think that was yours to decide.”

Then she sat up straighter in the recliner, and her voice changed. It was the voice she had used on Nick when he was a boy. I had heard it twice in fourteen years.

“Here is what’s going to happen,” she said. “You’re going to pay those children back. Every dollar of the four thousand, into their own accounts, with Kayla watching the statements. I don’t care how long it takes, but I want it done.”

“Yes,” Darlene said. “Yes, Mom.”

“You’re going to tell Tom about the bills. And you’re going to tell Nick, yourself, to his face. Not Kayla. You.”

Darlene nodded.