Six Season Passes Wrapped the Same

Who we are

My name is Cecily. I am forty-three years old, and I have been a respiratory therapist at the hospital in Montrose for nineteen years. I work twelve-hour shifts, mostly nights, and I am good at it. I can get a breathing tube taped down on a man twice my size while his wife is screaming in the hallway. I don’t rattle easily.

My husband, Sterling, runs the parts counter at the implement dealer out on the highway. He knows every tractor in the county by its serial number and every farmer by what he owes. He is quiet. He is not a yeller. His father was not a yeller either, and I married him partly because of that.

We tried for a baby for six years. It didn’t happen, and the doctors couldn’t tell us why, which in some ways was harder than if they could have. When I was thirty-seven we took the county foster classes in a church basement in Delta, eight Tuesday nights of folding chairs and bad coffee, and we got our license that spring.

Micah came to us when he was four, and Christa came with him because she was his sister and we would not take one without the other. She was two. She had brown hair that stood straight up in the back and a cough I could hear from the porch. I treated that cough myself for a month before it finally broke.

The adoption was final three years ago, on a Thursday in October, in a judge’s chambers that smelled like furniture polish. Micah wore a clip-on tie. Christa wore her Halloween costume because she said it was a party, and the judge let her.

Charla came to the hearing. She sat in the back row in her good coat and left before the cake.

Charla

I should be fair to my mother-in-law, because she is not a monster, and I knew that even on the porch.

Charla is sixty-eight. She was widowed six years ago when Sterling’s father, Tobias, had a stroke out in the field during sweet corn harvest. Their place is five acres outside Olathe, what’s left of the farm after they sold the rest, with a pasture that slopes down to an irrigation ditch and a big cottonwood by the gate.

She raised three kids there. Sterling is the oldest. Then Clarice, who lives in town and teaches second grade. Then Stuart, who is divorced, lives in Grand Junction, and has his two boys every other weekend.

Charla runs the family. She hosts Sunday dinner every week without fail. She sends a card on every birthday with a ten-dollar bill inside.

She taught all three of her kids to ski on a little two-lift hill up the mountain, the one with the rope tow and the lodge porch, and every December she takes the grandkids on opening weekend. It is her thing. Everybody knows it is her thing.

And from the day Micah and Christa came to us, she kept them at arm’s length.

It was never anything you could point to in court. She was polite to them. She remembered their birthdays. But she never held Christa on her lap. She never let Micah help in the garden the way she let Sully and Coral. When the grandkids lined up for pictures, she would say, “Let me get just my four first,” and then she’d wave mine in afterward like an afterthought.

“Just my four.” I heard it for five years.

Sterling talked to her about it twice that I know of. Both times she said he was imagining things. Both times she was extra warm to the kids for about a month, and then it faded back to that same polite distance.