The Window Grandma Opened on Christmas Eve

Around back

So there I was on my grandmother’s front step with a pan of cheesy potatoes, and my mother had just locked me out.

Through the glass I could see everything. The dining room table pulled out with both leaves in. Grandma’s good dishes, the ones with the wheat pattern. Kevin’s three kids at the card table by the china hutch, already elbow to elbow. The tree in the corner, a real one, because my mother always buys a real one.

And down by the front window, the floor register, blowing warm enough that the edge of the curtain moved.

Lily’s mitten found my hand.

“Mama,” she said, very small, “did we do it wrong?”

I want to be honest about what I felt in that second, because I think a lot of women have stood on a step like that one.

I wanted to pound on that glass with my fist. I wanted to shout, loud enough for the whole table to hear, that every warm breath in that house had come off my credit card. I wanted my mother to feel exactly as small as she had just made my daughter feel.

But Lily was holding my hand and looking up at me. She was six years old and she was learning, right then, what you do when someone you love is cruel to you.

I was not going to teach her that Christmas is screaming at your grandmother’s front door.

So I took a breath that hurt, and I picked up the shoebox from her arms so she would have a free hand for balance in the snow.

“Come on, baby,” I said. “We’re going around back.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to say Merry Christmas to Grandma Bev before we go.”

The snow on the north side of the house was past my ankles, and it was still coming down, small and dry. We went past the propane tank and Grandma’s old clothesline poles, and past the new furnace vent sticking out of the foundation, still shiny, puffing a little cloud into the cold.

Grandma’s bedroom was the last window on that side, with a lace curtain, and the upstairs windows dark above it. Her lamp was on. I knew it would be. Every day of her life, my grandmother lies down for twenty minutes before supper. She says it is how she has outlived everyone she went to school with.

The window was too high for Lily, so I set the potatoes on the concrete step by the foundation, with the shoebox tucked in behind them, and lifted her up in my arms.

She had the double-winged angel out of the box and held it in one mitten. With her bare hand she tapped on the glass with two knuckles, very politely, the way she knocks on the bathroom door at home.