The Toys We Wrapped Twice

The return receipt was in the bottom of Hunter’s duffel bag, folded in half, under a pair of dirty socks and a pack of gum he was not supposed to have.

I almost threw it away with the gum wrapper. Then I saw the store name at the top and the word refund printed in small gray letters, and I sat down on the edge of his bed.

Walmart, Emporia, Kansas. December 24, 10:42 in the morning. Eleven items returned. Refund to cash, $640.18.

I knew every one of those eleven items. I had bought them. I had wrapped them. I had driven them to Emporia myself on the evening of December 23 in two big black trash bags so the boys would not see.

That afternoon, my boys had come in the front door with their cheeks red from the cold and their arms full of the things their dad had given them. A video game. A basketball. Two hoodies.

Ty, who is eight, set his things down on the couch and came over and hugged me around the middle like he was the one who needed to comfort me.

“Mom,” he said, “your presents got lost.”

I laughed, because I thought he was teasing. Hunter, who is ten and more careful with his face, did not laugh. He stood in the doorway with his bag and looked at his shoes.

“They fell out of Dad’s truck,” Hunter said. “On the highway. He had them in the back and the bag must have blown out. He said he drove back and looked.”

“Dad said somebody probably found them,” Ty said. “He said maybe they went to a kid who needed them more.”

He said it so kindly. Eight years old, and he was trying to make me feel better about my own Christmas presents disappearing off the interstate.

I said that was all right. I said things happen. I said the important thing was that they had a good Christmas with their dad and their grandma, and I made hot chocolate, and I let them play the new video game until supper.

Then I unpacked the duffel bags, and I found the receipt.

What was in those bags

I want to tell you what $640 means in my house, because I think it matters for the rest of this.

I am a pharmacy tech at the Dillons in Ottawa. I count pills, I answer the phone, I talk to insurance companies on hold music for most of my afternoon. I make a little over seventeen dollars an hour.

I started saving for Christmas in August. Every payday I took forty dollars out in cash and put it in a white envelope in my underwear drawer. Some paydays it was twenty. One payday, when the car needed a battery, it was nothing.

By the first of December I had $640. I had a list on the refrigerator that the boys had made from the toy catalog, with stars next to the things they wanted most, and I had gone down that list with a pencil.

For Ty, the big Lego fire station he had circled so many times the paper was nearly worn through. A remote-control monster truck with the big tires. Snow boots, because he had outgrown his. A dinosaur book. A pair of walkie-talkies so he could talk to his brother from the other bedroom.

For Hunter, a red Chiefs jersey with number 15 on the back, the good one, not the cheap kind that fades in the wash. It was a hundred and ten dollars by itself and I almost did not buy it.

Also for Hunter, a Lego set of his own, a basketball hoop for the back of his door, a pocketknife his grandpa would have approved of, a knit Chiefs hat, and a flashlight headlamp he kept asking for.

I paid cash at the Walmart in Ottawa, because I always pay cash. I tucked the receipts in an envelope and put the envelope in the top of the first bag.

I did that because the year before, Ty’s remote-control car had come out of the box with a broken wheel, and Jeremy had no receipt, and it took me two weeks of arguing with a customer service desk to get it fixed.

So I thought I was being helpful. I wrote on the envelope in marker: Receipts, just in case something’s broken. I thought I was saving Jeremy a headache.

I had handed him the means to do it, written in my own handwriting.