Eleven Keys Under the Christmas Tree

Grandma Agnes

We closed in the middle of October at the title office in Forest City. Agnes signed her own papers. Her mind was as sharp as it ever was. It was her knees and her balance that had quit.

She signed slowly, in that tall, looping handwriting old Iowa schoolteachers have, and when she was done she set the pen down and patted the stack of papers like they were a good dog.

In the parking lot she cried. Not loud. Just quiet tears she wiped with a tissue she kept tucked in the sleeve of her cardigan, while Jordyn knelt on the cold blacktop beside the car door and held her other hand.

“Sixty-one years,” she said. “I came into that house a bride. Your grandpa carried me over the front step and nearly dropped me, and I laughed so hard he had to set me down on the porch.”

“You can come over anytime, Grandma,” Jordyn said. “Anytime at all. It’s still your house.”

Agnes shook her head and smiled at her. “No, honey. It’s yours now. That’s how it’s supposed to go. You make it yours.”

She looked over at me. “And you fix that wiring before it burns down around her.”

I promised I would. I spent every evening and both weekends of the rest of October in that upstairs, pulling out old knob-and-tube wiring that had been sagging in the walls since about 1925.

I put in a new 200-amp panel to replace the old fuse box in the basement. I ran new circuits to every bedroom.

I found a mouse nest, two mason jars of nails, and a 1951 Lake Mills basketball program inside one wall.

Jordyn painted the kitchen. She bought the paint at the hardware store on Main and had them match it to a chip she cut out from behind the refrigerator, so it came out the same butter yellow it had always been.

When Agnes saw a picture of it on Jordyn’s phone, she held the phone close to her face for a long time and said, “Oh, you kept my yellow.” That was the whole review. Jordyn kept that text for weeks.

We moved in the first of November. We were not married yet. The wedding was set for the second Saturday in June at the Lutheran church three blocks away, the same church where Agnes had married.

For six weeks it was the best house in the world. It creaked. It had drafts. The upstairs bathroom took four minutes to run hot water. We loved it anyway, every inch of it.

Then came Christmas Eve, and eleven red boxes.

The keys get used

I want to be fair to Jordyn’s family, because most of them are good people, and none of them meant to run us over.

But a key is a key. Give a person one, and sooner or later he uses it.

Rick used his first. On the morning of the twenty-seventh, at five minutes after eight, I came down the stairs in my socks to find my fiancee’s uncle standing in our kitchen running water into our coffee pot.

“Morning,” he said cheerfully. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d come see the old place in the daylight. You want a cup? I’ll make it strong.”

Rick drives a propane truck out of Northwood, and he was on his way to a job. He had not thought about it any more than that.

To him it was still his mother’s kitchen, and his mother had always had the coffee on by six.

I said thank you. I drank the coffee. I did not tell him that Jordyn had just gotten home from a twelve-hour night shift at the hospital in Mason City and had been asleep upstairs for exactly forty minutes.

The next day it was cousin Beth, who came in through the back door at ten in the morning with two plastic baskets of laundry because her dryer was broken and “Grandma’s dryer always worked better anyway.”

The day after that it was Nancy, Curt’s oldest sister. She let herself in around noon and walked right upstairs to see “what we’d done with Mom and Dad’s room,” which was our bedroom now.

Jordyn was in the bed. Asleep. Nancy walked right in and got halfway across the room to the window before she saw her, said “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m sorry, honey,” and backed out again. Then she stayed downstairs for another hour looking through the cupboards.

The fourth day it was Kim and cousin Steve together, bringing a box of Agnes’s old Christmas ornaments they thought should “stay in the house,” and they had a long, loud conversation in the front hall about where they used to hang.

Jordyn works nights in intensive care. She sleeps from about eight in the morning until three in the afternoon. Four days running, somebody with a red-box key woke her up in the middle of her sleep.

On the fourth afternoon, I came home from a service call at the co-op elevator and found her sitting on the bottom step of the front stairs in her robe with her elbows on her knees, crying.

Not sobbing. Just tired crying, the kind that comes when your body has nothing left to hold it in. I sat down on the step beside her and put my arm around her shoulders and waited.

“I love them,” she said. “I love every one of them. But it’s like we don’t live here, Ethan. It’s like we’re just the people who watch the house.”