The Window Grandma Opened on Christmas Eve

“I’ll call your mother,” she said.

“Grandma, it’s going to be nine degrees tonight.”

She looked at me for a long time. My grandmother has pale blue eyes that do not miss much. Then she said the thing that set all of this in motion.

“Your mother is already carrying me,” she said. “The taxes. The insurance on the car. If she finds out about this, she’ll make it a thing, and then I’ll be a thing. I’d rather be cold.”

I did the math in my head standing in that gravel driveway. I worked days as a dental assistant in Centerville. Dan was a lineman for the co-op. We had about four hundred dollars in checking and a credit card we had paid down to almost nothing that fall for the first time since Lily was born.

“Put it on my card,” I told the furnace man.

He had it running by six o’clock the next night. Grandma stood with her hand over the register in the kitchen for a full minute, feeling the warm air come up, and did not say anything at all.

Then she made me promise. “Not a word to your mother. Not to Kevin. Not to anybody. I’ll pay you back out of the egg money.”

Grandma had not sold eggs since 2014. I promised anyway.

The rule

My mother’s Christmas Eve rule started the year my dad left, when I was twelve and Kevin was nine. She was a single mother working at the courthouse in the recorder’s office, and money was so tight that year we had boxed macaroni for Christmas dinner at our own kitchen table.

The next year she got a raise, and she made a rule. Christmas Eve would be at Grandma’s, and it would be done right. Everybody brings a main dish. Everybody brings a gift worth fifty dollars for the exchange. Nobody shows up looking poor.

I understood the rule. I even loved it, for a long time. It was my mother’s way of telling the world that we were fine.

But that December, after the furnace, I had a Visa bill with $1,900 on it and a husband on a bucket truck in Texas.

An ice storm had come through east Texas the week before Christmas and taken down half the lines between Tyler and Longview. The co-op sent volunteers, and Dan was the first to raise his hand, because the storm pay was double time and we needed it. He left on the eighteenth. He called every night from a motel in Kilgore with his voice gone hoarse.

“Go to your grandma’s,” he told me on the twenty-third. “Take Lily. Your mom will be fine.”

I told him about the fifty-dollar rule.

“Your mom’s not going to care about fifty dollars,” Dan said. “It’s Christmas.”

He was a good man and he did not know my mother the way I did.

So Lily and I made the gifts. We bought a bag of old-fashioned wooden clothespins at the Dollar General for $2.25, and a jar of gold glitter, and pipe cleaners. We made angels at the kitchen table four nights running.

Lily drew a face on every one with a fine-point marker, and on the back of each one she wrote a name in her big wobbly letters. Grandma Bev. Grama Janet. Uncle Kevin. Aunt Missy. Tanner.

She saved the best one for Grandma. It had two layers of wings.