The Christmas Tags I Read Out Loud

I thought he was going to say I’d made his mama cry on Christmas. I would not have blamed him one bit.

“Okay, buddy,” I said. “Go ahead.”

He didn’t say anything else. He walked over to the tree, got down on his knees, and reached way in the back behind the bottom branches, behind the tree skirt, where nobody ever looks.

He came out with an envelope. It was a white envelope that had been folded over and over, and it was a little bent from being shoved back there.

“I made it last week,” he said. “I hid it so Gunner wouldn’t open it.” He held it out to me. “It’s for you.”

I took it. My hands were shaking. It wasn’t sealed, just tucked. Inside was a card he had made out of a piece of blue construction paper folded in half, the kind they give out at school.

On the front he had drawn a bow and arrow with a marker. It was a good drawing. Better than good. On the inside, in nine-year-old boy handwriting that leaned hard to the right, it said this:

Dear Aunt Leah. I always knew it was you. I told only you about the bow. Daddy never gets my right size. Thank you for Christmas last year and this year. Love, Dakota.

I read it twice. Then I couldn’t read it anymore because I couldn’t see.

“You knew,” I said. It came out like a croak.

He shrugged, real big, the way boys do when they are about to cry and would rather die. “I’m not dumb,” he said. “I just didn’t want Mama to be sad.”

That was what did it. Not the card. That. A nine-year-old boy who had carried that all year long, keeping his mama’s secret for her, so she wouldn’t have to be sad.

I put my arms around him. He let me, which he hadn’t done since he was about six. He put his face in my red flannel shirt and his shoulders went up and down.

Then Harley was there, helmet still on, wrapping her arms around my neck from the side. And then Gunner barreled into all three of us at once, yelling, “Group hug! Group hug!” because he had no idea what was going on but he knew he didn’t want to miss it.

We went over in a pile on Mama’s carpet, all four of us, in wrapping paper and torn tags. Gunner was laughing. Harley was laughing. Dakota was wiping his face on his sleeve and pretending he wasn’t.

I was holding on to all three of them and crying and laughing at the same time, and over Gunner’s head I could see the couch.

Misty hadn’t moved. She was still sitting there with her arms crossed tight, and the tears were running down her face, and she wasn’t wiping them. She was just watching her kids hug me.

That was the hard part for me. Even then, in the middle of all that. I hadn’t wanted it to cost her anything.

But it did cost her something. She had to sit on Mama’s couch and watch her children find out.

Mama got up out of her recliner. It takes her a minute now, with her knees. She came across the room and sat down on the couch right beside Misty and put her arm around her.