The Christmas My Street Trimmed My Tree

The snowflake

The Thursday before the fourteenth, somebody knocked on my storm door at four in the afternoon.

I almost did not answer. The knocking was very small and very polite, three taps and a pause, three taps and a pause. When I finally opened the inside door there was Hattie Reinke on my step in a pink coat, holding a paper snowflake with both hands.

“We made these at school,” she said. “I made you one because your house is the only one without lights.”

Then she looked past my shoulder, down the hall to the front room, where the drapes were clothespinned shut and the television was murmuring to nobody.

“Mrs. Hegge, are you not having Christmas?”

I’d had three months to practice a lie, and I did not use it on her. Maybe it was the pink coat.

“Not this year, honey.”

She nodded very seriously, the way a child nods when she is memorizing something. Then she handed me the snowflake and went back down my walk. I taped it to the inside of the storm door and didn’t think about it again.

I should have wondered why the street went so quiet after that. For nearly three months there had been a plate of something on my step every few days, a casserole or a loaf of banana bread or a bag of Bev Kittleson’s caramel corn. On Friday and Saturday there was nothing. Nobody knocked. Nobody waved from a garage. I took it for relief.

I was not paying attention. I was sitting in the recliner with the afghan over my knees, waiting for it to be January.

Sunday morning

On the fourteenth, a Sunday, I put on my good wool coat and drove to St. Paul’s for the nine o’clock service, the way I had every Sunday since September.

Bev Kittleson’s pew was empty. She and Delmar have sat in the third row on the right since before my children were born. So was Marv Schaller’s, over by the pillar, where he has sat alone since Joanne died. So was the Reinkes’ row, where Owen always kneels on the cushion and drops the crayons.

I figured a stomach bug was going around, and I thought no more about it.

I can’t tell you what Pastor Nygaard preached. I stood when the others stood and sat when they sat. When the service was over, he came down the aisle and took my hand in both of his and did not let go of it.

He is in his early forties, with a soft voice and a habit of apologizing before he asks you for anything. “Dot,” he said, “I have a stack of Advent offering envelopes that need counting, and I’m terrible at it. Would you mind?”

I have worked with children for thirty-four years, and I know a person who is making something up. But he was holding my hand, and he looked so uncomfortable that I said all right.

It took me the better part of three hours at a folding table in the church office. I’m still not sure there were three hours’ worth of envelopes in that church. Twice he came in and asked if I wanted coffee. Once he checked his watch and said it was early yet.

At ten minutes to twelve he came in and said, “Well, that’s wonderful, Dot. You’ve been a great help.”

“Pastor, did you have a reason for all this?”

He looked at his shoes. “I do. I’m not allowed to tell you what it is. I’m sorry.”

I drove home. And that is how I came to be sitting at the end of my own driveway with the heater running, counting fourteen cars.