The Toys We Wrapped Twice

New Year’s Day

New Year’s Day was gray and cold, with no snow on the ground yet, just that flat Kansas winter light that makes the whole world look like it was drawn in pencil.

I wore my cream cable-knit sweater, the one Loretta gave me two Christmases ago, and put my hair up in a claw clip because I could not do anything else with it. The boys carried the presents out to the car in two cardboard boxes.

Loretta’s farmhouse sits at the end of a long gravel drive, with a windbreak of cedars on the north side and the old red barn behind it. The kitchen smelled like ham and cloves and brown sugar before I even got the door open.

She hugged the boys first, the way she always does, and then me, and she held on to me a beat longer than usual and looked at my face.

“You look tired, honey,” she said.

“It’s been a week,” I said.

She did not ask. She just took my coat and told the boys to put the baskets in the front room and go wash their hands.

Jeremy’s truck pulled in about twenty minutes later. I heard it before I saw it, and I knew that sound, the way the muffler rattled when it idled. He came in stamping his boots and said hi to everybody.

He said hi to me too. He did not look at me when he said it.

He looked worn. That was the first thing I noticed. He had always been a big, broad man, but there were gray circles under his eyes, and he had not shaved in a few days.

His aunt Dot was there too, and an old neighbor from down the road who comes every year because his wife passed. There were eight of us around that big dark table.

Loretta sat on the long side in her red sweater, with her short gray hair set the way she always sets it for holidays. Jeremy sat across from her, in his dad’s chair, with the window behind him. I sat on the near side with the boys at the end next to me.

We said grace. Loretta’s grace is always short, because she says God knows what is on the table and does not need a list.

There was the ham, glazed and studded with cloves, sitting right in the middle, still uncarved, with a bowl of dinner rolls beside it. Scalloped potatoes. Green beans with bacon. Deviled eggs. Her cherry Jell-O salad with the cottage cheese in it that nobody under forty will touch.

While we waited on the boys, the men talked about the Chiefs and whether they would hold on to the top seed. The old neighbor talked about his wheat. Ty kicked Hunter under the table and got told twice.

Jeremy did not say much. He kept his eyes on the ham and turned his fork over on the tablecloth.

Through the lace curtains behind Jeremy’s chair, the gray daylight came in soft and even, and it lay on the table and on the ham and on all our plates, and I remember thinking how ordinary it all looked.