The Window Grandma Opened on Christmas Eve

Nothing. Then she tapped again.

The curtain moved.

Grandma’s face came to the window. Her glasses were pushed up on top of her head and her hair was still in the pins she sleeps in before a party. She squinted at us.

Lily held up the angel with the double wings, right against the glass.

I watched my grandmother look at that angel. Then she looked at me, standing in her north yard in the snow with a foil pan of potatoes on the step beside me. Then her eyes went down the side of the house, toward the front door, toward the sound of the dining room.

I watched her understand the whole thing without one word.

The curtain fell.

For about a minute, nothing happened. Lily’s breath made little clouds against the glass. I started to think maybe Grandma had decided it was not her business, and I could not have blamed her. She was 91. It was her house and her Christmas.

Then the back porch light came on.

The head of the table

Grandma stood in the kitchen doorway in her good navy wool coat, the one she wears to funerals and to church on Easter. Her purse was on her arm. Her hair was out of the pins, combed fast.

“Bring that baby in out of the cold,” she said.

The kitchen smelled like ham and cloves and the rolls my aunt makes. Grandma took Lily by both hands and pulled her inside and rubbed her fingers between her own until Lily giggled.

“Your hands are ice, sweetheart.”

“Grandma Bev, I made you an angel.”

“I saw. It’s the most beautiful angel I’ve ever seen in my life.” Grandma took it from her and looked at it close, at the wobbly letters on the back that said Grandma Bev, with the B backwards. Then she pinned it to the lapel of her coat, right where she wears her mother’s cameo on Sundays.

She looked at me over Lily’s head.

“Did she lock it?” Grandma asked me quietly.

I nodded. I could not have said it out loud.

Grandma nodded once. Then she buttoned her coat to the top, picked up her purse, and walked straight past the stove into the dining room.

I did not know what else to do, so I followed her with Lily.

Every chair at that table turned. Eleven faces. My mother at the far end with the gravy boat. Kevin halfway out of his chair with a roll in his hand. Missy. My aunt Barb and Uncle Ron. The cousins. Kevin’s oldest, Tanner, fourteen and suddenly very interested in his plate.

My mother set the gravy boat down so hard it slopped.

“Mother,” she said, “what are you doing? Sit down. You’re going to ruin Christmas.”

Grandma stopped at the head of the table, at her own chair, the one with arms. She did not sit in it.

She bent, a little stiffly, and held one hand flat over the floor register under the window. The warm air lifted the edge of her coat sleeve.