The Toys We Wrapped Twice

The tire money

There was another envelope in my drawer. It said Tires on the front, and it had $700 in it, and I had been adding to it since spring because my front tires were bald enough that the man at the shop had made a face at me.

I counted out $640 and put it in my purse. I left sixty dollars in the envelope so it would not be empty. I do not know why that mattered to me, but it did.

The next morning I called my friend Kim at work and asked her to cover my shift. She did not ask why. She just said, “Go on, I’ve got it,” the way people at work say it when they can hear something in your voice.

Then I woke up the boys and told them to get dressed, because we were going shopping.

“For what?” Hunter said. He was suspicious. He is always suspicious before nine in the morning.

“For your presents,” I said. “The ones that got lost. We’re going to go get them again.”

Ty sat straight up in bed. Hunter looked at me for a long second, and I could see him doing the math the way he does, wondering where the money came from, wondering if it was all right.

“Can you do that?” he said. “Is that allowed?”

“It’s allowed,” I said. “Some things get lost. You go get them again. Come on, I’ll buy you a breakfast biscuit.”

Twice in one week

At the Walmart in Ottawa, half picked over the day after Christmas, we found the monster truck. We found the snow boots in Ty’s size, last pair on the hook. We found the dinosaur book and the headlamp and the basketball hoop for the back of the door.

The Lego fire station was gone. So was the red Chiefs jersey in Hunter’s size. There was a white one in a youth large, and Hunter held it up and looked at it and put it back.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

He said it like a ten-year-old man, the way his grandpa used to say it about things he wanted very much. I stood there in that aisle and I did not cry, but it was close.

“Get in the car,” I said. “We’re going to Lawrence.”

Lawrence is forty minutes north. The boys thought it was the greatest adventure of their lives. We sang along to the radio and Ty counted cows in the fields along Highway 59 until he lost count somewhere past two hundred.

The Target in Lawrence had one Lego fire station left, on the bottom shelf behind a stack of other boxes. Ty found it. He crawled half under the shelf to pull it out and came up holding it over his head.

There was a red Chiefs jersey at the sporting goods store down the road, number 15, youth medium, the good kind. It was twenty dollars more than the one I had bought the first time. I paid it.

On the way home, Ty asked from the back seat if it was cheating to get the same presents twice.

“Why would it be cheating?” I asked.

“Because the kid who found the first ones has them too,” he said. “So now there’s two of everything. And we only were supposed to get one.”

I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He was holding the dinosaur book on his lap and looking out the window at the fields going by, all brown and stubbled under that flat gray December sky.

“I think it’s all right,” I said. “I think it worked out.”