Eleven Keys Under the Christmas Tree

The first name in the book

Jordyn wrote the card in the neat block handwriting she uses on patient charts. She wrote it three times before she was happy with it, and then she propped it against the jar.

It said, “Welcome home. Please sign in. $45 a night covers heat, sheets and hot water. Love, Ethan and Jordyn.” No lecture. Nothing about keys. Nothing about her father. Just that.

It was the evening of the thirtieth, snowing lightly, the kind of fine dry snow that blows sideways in northern Iowa and piles up against the storm door.

The lamp on the hall table made a warm circle on the wood. I was still in my red plaid flannel shirt from work, and Jordyn had pulled on her cream sweater against the draft from the door.

I set the jar on the little table in the front hall, the narrow one under the coat hooks that had been Agnes’s for as long as anybody remembered.

Jordyn opened the guest book beside it and smoothed the first page flat with her hand.

Then she stopped. “We can’t be the first ones in it,” she said. “It’s not our guest book. It’s for the people who come home here.”

She looked at me, and I knew what she was thinking before she said it. It was Wednesday. Agnes had supper in the dining room at her place at five, but Jordyn had the night off.

“Go get her,” I said. “I’ll make the hot dish.”

So Jordyn drove across town to the assisted living on the east side and signed her grandmother out for the evening.

I made a tater tot hot dish, the only thing I make that anybody has ever asked for seconds of.

It took both of us to get Agnes up the porch steps.

The second step from the top was loose and tipped under your foot, and I made a note in my head to fix it in the spring when the ground thawed.

Agnes stood in the front hall with her walker and her good wool coat still buttoned and looked around at everything. The staircase. The wood trim. The coat hooks. The lamp on the little table.

“It smells the same,” she said quietly. “Oh, it smells exactly the same.”

Then she saw the jar. She read the card, slowly, with her lips moving a little. And then she looked at me over the top of her glasses for what felt like a very long time.

“Ethan,” she said. “Did Curt give out keys to this house?”

I did not want to tell on her son. I did not want to lie to her either. “Eleven of them,” I said. “At Christmas Eve. One for everybody.”

“Everybody but me,” Agnes said. It was not a question. Nobody had told her, but nobody had to. She had raised Curt. She knew him better than any of us did.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she held out her hand. “Give me that pen, honey.”

Jordyn handed it to her. Agnes leaned on her walker with one hand, bent over the little table, and wrote on the first line of the first page in that tall, looping schoolteacher hand.

When she straightened up, Jordyn read it and put both hands over her mouth.

It said, “Agnes Halvorsen. Came home for supper. My grandchildren’s house. God bless it.”

Then Agnes opened her purse, took out her coin purse, and very carefully folded a five-dollar bill into the jar.

“That’s for supper,” she said. “I’m not staying the night. But I’m not freeloading in my granddaughter’s house either.”

“Grandma, no,” Jordyn said. “You never pay here. Not ever.”

“Then it can be for the wedding flowers,” Agnes said, and patted the jar the way she had patted the closing papers.

That was the end of the discussion. Nobody in that family has ever won an argument with Agnes.

We ate hot dish at her old dining room table. She told us about the blizzard of 1975, when the drifts came up to the porch roof and the whole street ate supper in this house for three days because it had a gas range.

At eight o’clock Jordyn drove her back. I washed the dishes in the yellow kitchen and kept looking down the hall at that guest book under the lamp, with one name already in it.