The Picture Over My Fireplace

“Not as the owner,” I said, as gently as I could. “And not as somebody’s mother who gets to move the couch to the basement. As a guest. My guest. You’d bring the food. You’d do all the food, if you want to, the way you used to.”

She made a sound that was half laugh and half something else.

“Pat and Jan and their families, whoever wants to come. The tree goes in the front window, because you’re right, it’s the best window in town. But we’ll pick the tree out together. And we’ll decorate it together. And we’ll ask each other before we do things. That’s the only rule. We ask.”

Sandra set her coffee cup down very carefully on the table, like it might break.

“Why would you do that,” she said. It was not really a question. “After I told the whole store your house was his.”

I thought about it for a second. I wanted to give her a true answer.

“Because I worked the last six Christmas Eves,” I said. “I spent every one of them in a unit full of families watching somebody they love on a monitor. And every year I’d look at them and think, if I ever get the chance to have a house full of people on Christmas Eve, I’m going to take it.”

I put my hand on the table near hers. Not on it. Near it.

“I bought the house,” I said. “But I’ve never had anybody to put in it at Christmas. You’ve got twenty people and no house. It seems like a waste for both of us.”

Sandra put her hand on top of mine. Her fingers were cold and dusty with flour.

“Ask me,” she said, after a minute. “Ask me to bring the ham.”

“Will you bring the ham, Sandra?”

“Yes,” she said, and then she cried, and I got up and found a dish towel in her kitchen, and she laughed at me for using her good one.

Ryan and I went out to a tree lot by the Corn Palace the second week of December and brought home a seven-and-a-half-foot balsam fir, and Ryan cut an inch off the bottom in the driveway with his bow saw, and we put it in the front window.

Sandra came over that Saturday afternoon to help decorate. She knocked, and then she waited on the porch until I opened the door. I noticed. I did not say anything, but I noticed.

She was carrying a shoebox. It was an old one, from a brand of women’s shoes I do not think they make anymore. The corners were soft and split, and somebody had taped the lid down years ago with packing tape that had gone yellow.

“I went to the storage unit,” she said. “Thursday after work. First time since I put it in there.”

She set the box on my coffee table and sat down on the couch and picked at the old tape with her thumbnail. Ryan got his pocketknife out and handed it to her, and she slit the tape and lifted off the lid.

Inside, wrapped in tissue paper gone thin and brown, were her ornaments.

Not many. Maybe two dozen. A glass bird with a feather tail. A little wooden sled. A felt angel with a chipped face. A clay star painted green and red, lopsided, with Ryan’s name and 2nd grade scratched into the back in a child’s crooked letters.

Ryan picked that one up and turned it over and did not say anything for a while.

Sandra lifted out the glass bird first. She held it up by its loop of thread, and the lights from the tree caught in it.