Six Season Passes Wrapped the Same

“Give those back, honey.”

My mother-in-law said it sweetly, the way she said everything in public. She held out her bare hand on the snowy wooden porch of the lodge, palm up, and waited.

Micah and Christa looked at me. Micah is nine. Christa is seven. They had been holding their lift tickets for maybe four minutes, and Christa had already picked which zipper on her jacket she was going to hang hers from.

They handed them over. They didn’t even ask why. Kids who come to you out of foster care learn early how to give things back without a fuss, and that is one of the saddest things I know.

Charla turned and passed both tickets down the porch steps to Stuart’s boys, who had just come stomping up from the parking lot with their dad, cheeks red from the cold and grinning because nobody had expected them.

“There,” Charla said. “Now everybody’s set.”

Not everybody. I was standing right there in my orange jacket with a child on each side of me, both of them empty-handed, and she looked straight past the three of us.

“Charla,” I said. “You just took their tickets.”

“I only bought four,” she said. “I didn’t know Stuart was bringing the boys. Blood first, Cecily. You can buy yours at the window.”

She said it the way you would read off a grocery list. Then she zipped her white parka to the chin, smoothed her silver hair, and went down the steps to help Tate with his boot buckle.

The porch

I want to tell this part plainly, because I have told it in my head a hundred different ways since, and most of those ways made me look braver than I was.

I didn’t say anything else. I stood on that porch with the snow coming down soft and the smell of chili and wet wool drifting out of the lodge door, and I did the math. Forty-five dollars a child ticket. Ninety dollars for two.

I could have made a scene. There were people all around the lodge, families stamping their boots by the door and kids lining up for the rope tow below. I could have said it loud enough for all of them.

But two children were standing next to me waiting to find out if they were worth a fight, and I was not going to let them watch the answer get decided by shouting.

So I took their hands, and we walked inside to the ticket window.

The woman behind the counter had a gray braid and a name tag that said Bea. She looked at Christa’s face, then at mine, and she didn’t ask a single question. She just rang up two child tickets and slid them across with the wicket wires already through the holes.

“Have a good day up there, sweetheart,” she told Christa.

Christa said thank you. She has beautiful manners. She hung her ticket on the left zipper, the one she had picked out on the porch, and she didn’t cry. That was the worst part of the whole day. I would have known what to do with tears.