Six Season Passes Wrapped the Same

The weeks after

We stopped going to Sunday dinner.

That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing in a family like Sterling’s. For six years, every Sunday at one o’clock, there had been a roast or a ham at Charla’s place, and every grandchild in the yard after, throwing sticks for the dog. Our chairs being empty was something everybody noticed.

Charla called the house the second Sunday. Sterling answered.

“Is she going to say it to them?” I heard him ask. Then, “Then we’re not coming, Mom. I love you. We’re not coming.”

She called again the fourth Sunday. Same answer.

Clarice came by in between with a plate of cookies and stood in our front yard with her hands jammed in her coat pockets. She wouldn’t come in. She said she couldn’t stay.

“I told her she was wrong,” Clarice said. “Right there on the porch, after you went inside. I said, Mom, those are my niece and nephew, and you just humiliated them in front of half of Montrose County.”

“What did she say?”

“She went white. And then she said I didn’t understand, and that she didn’t want to talk about it.” Clarice shook her head. “She’s been like that about some things my whole life. Like there’s a room in her house nobody’s allowed in.”

I didn’t know what she meant then. I thought she was just being kind.

The idea

The idea came to me at three in the morning, on a night shift, which is when most of my ideas come.

It had been a terrible week. The flu had come through the valley early, and we had an old farmer up from Paonia on high-flow oxygen who kept trying to pull his mask off to tell me about his heifers. I was standing in his doorway at three a.m. watching his numbers, and I thought about Christa on the chairlift saying “the real ones.”

And I thought: what if there were no real ones and other ones? What if, for one winter, every single kid in that family had exactly the same thing, from the same hand?

The little hill sells a youth season pass. It’s good for any day the lifts run, all winter. The price goes up after Thanksgiving, and by December it was one hundred seventy-nine dollars a child.

Six grandchildren. Sully and Coral, Clarice’s two. Tate and Will, Stuart’s boys. Micah and Christa, ours.

One thousand seventy-four dollars.

That is not pocket money for us. Sterling’s truck has two hundred thousand miles on it. We were already stretched paying for Micah’s braces. But a respiratory therapist in December can pick up all the shifts she wants, because everybody else is sick.

I picked up four extra twelve-hour nights before Christmas. Four nights of the flu ward and the old farmer and his heifers, who it turned out was going to be fine, and who told me the name of every cow he’d ever owned.