Six Season Passes Wrapped the Same

The bunny hill

Charla bought her season pass at the ticket window on New Year’s Day. A senior pass, which at that hill is cheap, eighty-nine dollars, because they figure most seniors won’t use it.

She used it.

She came up every Saturday Sterling and I could bring the kids, and some Saturdays when we couldn’t, when Clarice drove. She skied on a pair of old straight skis she dug out of the barn that she’d bought in 1985, and the guy at the rental shop laughed out loud when he saw them and then adjusted her bindings for free.

She never went past the bunny hill. She didn’t care to.

She skied it with Christa. Every time. She would take Christa’s poles and hold them crossways between them like a bar, Charla skiing backward, real slow, and Christa holding on to the poles and making a pizza wedge with her skis, and Charla saying, “Pizza, pizza, now French fries, honey, now pizza,” the whole way down.

I watched them from the lodge porch, the same snowy porch, with a cup of the bad coffee. Bea from the ticket window came out on her break and stood next to me.

“That your mother?” she asked.

“My mother-in-law.”

Bea watched them for a minute. Charla had fallen over in the soft snow at the bottom, and Christa was trying to pull her up by both hands and laughing so hard she fell down too.

“I remember her,” Bea said. “From the first day.”

“So do I.”

“Well,” Bea said, and she sipped her coffee. “Looks like she remembered something too.”

February

In February, Charla asked me to meet her at the cemetery in Olathe.

It was a cold, clear afternoon, the kind where the San Juans are so sharp against the sky they look cut out of paper. She was standing by Tobias’s stone, and right next to it was a small flat marker I had never noticed, half grown over with dead grass.

Annie. Born in October. Gone in March. Forty-seven years.

Charla had brought a little rag and a jug of water. She got down on her bad knees again and cleaned the marker off, all the edges, until you could read every letter.

“I never came out here,” she said. “Tobias did. Every year. I couldn’t.”

“You came out here now.”

“Christa asked me if I had any babies that died. She’d heard Clarice and Stuart talking.” Charla wrung out the rag. “I told her yes. A little girl. And Christa said, then she’s my aunt. Annie’s my aunt.”

I had to look at the mountains for a while.

“She asked if she could meet her,” Charla said. “I said there wasn’t anything to meet but a stone. She said that was fine. She wants to bring her something in the spring. Flowers off the bunny hill, she says. I told her nothing grows up there in May but snow.”

“She’ll find something.”

“I know she will.” Charla stood up slowly, brushing off her knees. “She’s like you. She doesn’t quit.”