The Toys We Wrapped Twice

The kitchen table

When we got home, the boys asked if they could wrap the presents themselves.

I said they could. Then I watched them use an entire roll of red paper and an entire roll of green paper on eleven presents, because neither one of them had ever measured anything in their lives.

Hunter did the tape. He took it very seriously, and he got tape on the table, on the chairs, on the cat, and on the back of Ty’s shirt without Ty ever noticing.

Ty did the tags. I had a pack of those little stick-on gift tags from the dollar store, and he sat at the end of the table with a black marker and his tongue between his teeth and wrote on every one.

He wrote From Mom on the first one. He wrote From Mom on the second one. On the fourth one he ran out of room and the M in Mom curled down the side of the tag like a vine.

Hunter looked over at one point and said, “You don’t have to put From Mom on all of them. We know they’re from Mom.”

“Yes I do,” Ty said, and he kept going. “So everybody knows.”

I was at the stove making grilled cheese. I did not turn around for a minute.

I did not tell the boys what their dad had done. I want to be clear about that, because I have thought about it many times since, and I still believe it was right.

They loved him. He loved them. Whatever he had done, it was between him and me, and it was not going to become a thing my boys carried around in their chests.

So when Ty asked me, while he was writing the tags, if Dad would be sad that his bag fell out, I said, “I think Dad is probably very sorry about it.”

That was true. I did not know yet how true it was.

Grandma’s table

It was Hunter who asked about New Year’s.

He was sitting on the floor next to the pile of wrapped presents, which by then looked like a pile of lumpy red and green rocks, and he said, “Can we open them at Grandma Loretta’s?”

I asked him why.

“So Grandma can see,” he said. “She always likes to see us open stuff. And she didn’t get to see the first time.”

Loretta Wendt is Jeremy’s mother. She is sixty-six years old. She cooked at the grade school in Williamsburg for thirty-one years, and half the grown people in that town still call her Miss Loretta when they see her at the post office.

When Jeremy and I divorced, Loretta drove to my house the next week with a casserole and sat down at my table and said, “You’re still my daughter, Stacy, and those are still my grandbabies. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

And every New Year’s Day she puts a ham on the table at her farmhouse outside Williamsburg, and the whole family comes, divorced or not, and she does not allow any fighting at her table.

Jeremy would be there. He always was. He always sat in his dad’s old chair, across from her.

I thought about saying no to Hunter. I thought about telling him we could open them at home on New Year’s morning, just the three of us, and keep it simple.

I am going to be honest here, because I think you should know what I was thinking. Part of me wanted Jeremy to see it. Part of me wanted him to sit there and watch.

I told myself it was for the boys, and mostly it was. But not all the way. I was not proud of that part. I went to bed that night and lay there and asked God to take it out of me before Friday.

In the morning, I called Loretta and asked if the boys could bring a few presents to open after dinner.

“Of course they can,” she said. “Bring them in the front door. I’ll clear off the end of the table.”