Six Season Passes Wrapped the Same

Down the steps

The sun was going behind the ridge. The kids were taking turns on the toboggan, and Micah was steering, and Tate was screaming his head off in the back.

Charla stood up. She set her mug on the railing again, and she went down the steps and across the yard. I followed her a few feet behind.

Christa saw her coming and stopped. She stood very still in the snow with her pass still in her mitten. I could see her get ready. I could see her brace, the way she does at the doctor’s office.

Charla got down on her knees in the snow in front of her. Sixty-eight years old, bad hip and all. She got all the way down.

“Christa,” she said. “I did a wrong thing to you on the porch at the lodge. I took your ticket and I gave it to somebody else, and I said something about blood. That was cruel. And it was not true. And I am so sorry.”

Christa didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry to you too, Micah,” Charla said, because Micah had come up behind his sister, the way he always does. “You were the man that day. You didn’t make a fuss, and I should have. I am sorry.”

Micah nodded, very serious.

“Are we coming to Sunday dinner now?” he said.

Charla laughed through her crying, the sound of somebody who has forgotten how. “If your mama and daddy say so. I hope so. I’ll make the macaroni you like. The kind with the crackers on top.”

Christa was still holding her pass. She looked at it, and then at her grandmother.

“Do you have one?” she said.

“One what, honey?”

“A season pass.”

Charla shook her head. “Oh, no. I haven’t skied in years. My knees.”

“You could do the bunny hill,” Christa said. “It’s flat. I’m still on the bunny hill. Mostly.”

Charla looked up at me over Christa’s head. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t need to. Some things a seven-year-old can settle better than a grown woman can.

“Then I guess I’d better get one,” Charla said.

The rest of that day

We stayed for pie. Sterling said that was allowed.

We ate it on the porch with our coats on, because nobody wanted to go inside. Stuart brought out the plates. Clarice sat next to me on the steps and put her head on my shoulder for a second, which she had never once done.

“Annie,” Clarice said quietly. “I had a sister.”

“She told you?”

“Just now. In the yard. She told all three of us.” Clarice shook her head. “Forty-two years I’ve known there was a room in that house nobody was allowed in. I just didn’t know there was a baby in it.”

Sterling came over and stood at the bottom of the steps with his hands in his pockets. He looked at his mother, who was down in the snow showing Christa how to tighten the strap on the new mittens.

“Dad knew,” he said. “He must have. All those years.”

“He knew,” I said. “He was the only one she told.”

Sterling was quiet for a long time.

“I think that’s why he never yelled,” he said finally. “He knew she was scared all the time.”