Eleven Keys Under the Christmas Tree

Curt’s reason

“I was born in this house,” he said. “Not in the hospital. Right upstairs, in the front bedroom. There was a blizzard and Dad couldn’t get the car out, so Doc Peterson came on foot with his bag.”

“Dad died in this house too,” Curt said. “Right in that front room. I was twenty-six. Mom held his hand and I held hers, and the three of us sat there till the sun came up.”

He looked around the hall at the coat hooks and the wood trim and the staircase.

“When the doctor said Mom couldn’t do the stairs anymore, I went out to my truck and sat there for an hour. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand losing this house.”

“I couldn’t buy it. Your mom and I don’t have that kind of money. And I couldn’t watch some couple from the city gut it for a lake place.”

He swallowed. “So when you told us about Ethan’s grandpa, I thought, well, there it is. God’s giving us a way.”

“Selling it to you cheap was the only way I could think of to keep it.” He held up his own key on his key ring and looked at it.

“And then I thought, if everybody has a key, then it’s still all of ours. Then I didn’t really lose it.”

“I didn’t think about you two at all,” he said, and his voice cracked a little.

“That’s the truth of it. I thought about me. I thought about my dad. I didn’t think about my girl working nights and trying to sleep.”

“Rick told me he’d been coming by for coffee,” he said. “I thought that was nice. I thought, good, the house still has people in it.”

He shook his head. “It did have people in it. It had you.”

Nobody had ever heard Curt Halvorsen talk like that. Rick had stopped laughing. Lori had her hand over her heart. Deanna stood with her hand resting on her husband’s shoulder and did not move.

I did not say anything clever. I did not say, “I told you so,” because I had not told him anything, and I did not want to.

I just stood there with my hands in my pockets, which is how Moser men stand when we have feelings.

“Curt,” I said finally. “Nobody’s taking the house from you. You can come here any day you want. You’re Jordyn’s dad. Just knock, so she can sleep. That’s all the jar was ever about.”

He looked up at me for a long moment. Then he nodded once, the way a man nods when a deal is done.

He worked the brass key off his key ring with his thick thumbnail, stood up, and walked over to the little table.

He held the key over the jar for a second. Then he dropped it in, and it clinked against Rick’s twenties and Agnes’s folded five.

“I’ll knock,” he said.

The rest of the winter

Rick and Lori slept in the back bedroom that night. In the morning, Rick made the coffee strong, the way he promised, and when I came down at seven, there were two more twenties in the jar and a five on top of them.

Curt and Deanna went home a little after one. Before he went out the door, Curt stopped and looked at the second step from the top, the loose one, and pushed on it with the toe of his boot. He did not say anything about it.

The news went through the family the way news goes through every family in northern Iowa, by phone, by church parking lot, and by the line at the Casey’s counter.

By the end of the first week of January, everybody knew about the jar.

Some of them laughed about it. Some of them were a little hurt.

Nancy called Jordyn and said, “I didn’t think. I’m so sorry, honey. I’m too old to be walking into people’s bedrooms.” Jordyn told her it was all right.

And the walking in stopped. That was the real change. Nobody came through the door unannounced again. Not Rick. Not Beth with her laundry. Not Kim and Steve with any more ornaments.

People called first now, or they knocked and waited on the porch like regular company.

Beth called to ask if she could do a load in February, and she left ten dollars on the dryer. She signed the guest book too.

Over the next two months, four more of the red-box keys came back. Kim brought hers back in a sandwich bag with a plate of bars.

Steve mailed his in an envelope with no note, which is about as much as Steve says about anything.

The rest of them are probably in kitchen drawers all over Winnebago County. That is fine. A key in a drawer does not wake anybody up.

Jordyn sleeps until three in the afternoon now, every day she works, and it changed her whole winter.

The guest book filled up slowly, a few lines at a time. Rick and Lori again in February, for the Lutheran church soup supper.

Nancy and Jim, for coffee, after calling ahead. A cousin’s little boy who wrote his name in purple crayon, very large, across two lines.

The jar filled up too, mostly with fives and twenties from people who stayed over after the Legion or came up for a funeral. By March there was a little over three hundred dollars in it.

We used that money to pay for the flowers at the church in June. Agnes had said it should be for the flowers, and in that family, what Agnes says goes.