Six Season Passes Wrapped the Same

Telling Sterling

I bought the passes online on my lunch break and printed the confirmations at the nurses’ station. Each one had a kid’s name on it. You take the paper up to the ticket office on your first visit, they snap your picture, and they hand you a card on a lanyard.

When I got home that morning, Sterling was out on the front steps in his work clothes, scraping frost off his boots with a stick and drinking his coffee. I sat down next to him and set the stack of papers on his knee.

He read the top one. Then the next one. Then he went through all six.

“Tate and Will?” he said. “You’re buying Stuart’s boys passes too?”

“I’m buying all the grandkids passes,” I said. “Every one of them.”

He looked at me for a long moment. I could see him doing the math too. He’s better at it than I am.

“That’s four of your nights,” he said.

“That’s four of my nights.”

“You know she’s going to think you’re showing her up.”

“I’m not trying to show her anything,” I said. “I want our kids to open the same box as their cousins. Same paper. Same bow. Same everything. I want them to watch the other four open it at the same second, and I want nobody to be first.”

Sterling put the papers down very carefully, squared up the edges, the way he does with an invoice.

“Okay,” he said. “Then I’m paying for the paper.”

Wrapping

I wrapped them on Christmas Eve after the kids were asleep. Six flat boxes from the craft store. Each one got the printed confirmation, a new pair of wool mittens from the farm store, and a little packet of hand warmers.

Same paper on every one. Same ribbon. I made the bows myself, all six, and I redid Coral’s twice because it came out lopsided and I couldn’t stand it.

I wrote the names in the same pen, in the same handwriting. Sully. Coral. Tate. Will. Micah. Christa.

When I finished, I lined them up on the coffee table and looked at them for a while. You could not tell them apart from three feet away. That was the whole point.

Sterling came out in his socks and stood behind me.

“They look like a set,” he said.

“They are a set.”

Christmas Day

We had not planned to go to Charla’s that Christmas. Nothing had changed. She still had not said a word to the kids.

But Clarice called on Christmas morning. She said her mother had been up since five, that she’d made a ham big enough for twenty, and that she’d set two extra plates at the table and told everybody nobody was to touch them.

“I’m not asking you to come in,” Clarice said. “Just come out to the yard after. Just for the sledding. The kids keep asking where Micah is.”

So we went in the afternoon, after the dinner was done. That was Sterling’s line. He said we wouldn’t sit at her table until she’d made it right with the kids, and he meant it.

Charla’s front yard runs down into the pasture, and the pasture runs down to the ditch, and every Christmas since Sterling was small there has been sledding on that slope. Tobias used to haul out the old toboggan and a burn barrel, and the grown-ups would stand around it with coffee while the kids wore a groove in the snow.

Stuart had the barrel going when we pulled in. The cousins came running up the hill the second they saw our truck. Tate got to Micah first and practically tackled him into a drift.

Charla was standing on the porch steps with a mug in both hands. She didn’t come down.