The Toys We Wrapped Twice

Grandma’s hill

Behind Loretta’s barn there is a long slope that runs down to the creek, and every child in that family for three generations has learned to sled on it. Jeremy learned on it. So did his dad.

We stood at the top of that hill in the snow, the four of us, with Loretta watching from her kitchen window with a cup of coffee. Jeremy had brought the old wooden toboggan out of the barn loft, the one his father built.

He took Ty down first, the two of them on the toboggan together, Ty screaming the whole way, and they wiped out at the bottom in a pile of snow and came up laughing.

Then he looked up the hill at Hunter.

Hunter was standing next to me in his snow boots, the new ones, holding his plastic sled. He looked at his dad at the bottom of the hill for a long time.

Then he set his sled down and got on it and pushed off, and he flew all the way down that hill and slid right into his father’s legs, and Jeremy caught him by the back of his coat before he could tip over.

I watched the two of them stand there at the bottom. I could not hear what they said. But Hunter did not pull away, and after a minute, he let his dad brush the snow off his hat.

That was enough. That was more than enough.

The tires

I bought the tires on the eighth of January. Two front tires at the shop in Ottawa, $318 with mounting and balancing. The man at the counter was the same one who had made the face at me in the spring.

“About time,” he said, and I laughed.

I put the rest back in the envelope that said Tires, and then I crossed out Tires and wrote Christmas, because August would come around again, and I would start over.

Jeremy came to Hunter’s basketball game the Saturday after New Year’s, and to every one after. He sat in the front row of the bleachers at the grade school gym, like he said he would, and he yelled himself hoarse every time Hunter touched the ball.

He has not been late on child support since. He calls me now, sometimes, when things are tight, before they get bad. It is not a lot. But it is a phone call I did not used to get.

Loretta still sets my place at her table. She still saves me a piece of coconut cake. She has never once brought up New Year’s to me again, and I have never brought it up to her.

Two tags

When we unwrapped the presents that New Year’s Day, the tags came off with the paper, and most of them went into the trash with all that red and green.

I saved two.

I peeled them off the paper while the boys were busy with the Lego, and I put them in the pocket of my cream sweater, and when I got home I stuck them on the front of my refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a sunflower.

They are still there. They are a little curled at the corners now, and one of them has a smudge of grilled cheese on it from the night they were written.

I look at them every morning when I get the milk out for the boys’ cereal.

Two tags, in a little boy’s handwriting. One says From Mom. The other one, the last one he wrote, where he ran out of room and the letters climbed down the side like a vine, says From Mom Again.