She looked down the street at the sleigh going around the corner. She looked at me. I did not say anything. I did not smile, either. I just stood there in my coat.
Darlene came up the steps past her with her coat over her arm. She stopped beside Brittany for one second and said, not mean, just plain, “Well, honey. The town picked.”
Brittany’s face went red all the way up. She did not argue. She just stood there and took it.
My son came over to me with the baby. He looked at the street, and then at me, and he did not say “Mom, you promised.” He said, very quietly, “Grandpa looks happy.”
“He is,” I said.
“Brit didn’t know,” he said. “About the kids. How they’d be.” He shifted the baby to his other hip. “I didn’t either, maybe.”
When the sleigh came back around and stopped in front of the hall again, Brittany came down the steps.
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She walked out into the street and took the baby from my son, and she walked right up to the side of the sleigh where Dad was sitting with Owen still hanging onto his arm.
Nobody on that sidewalk said a word. Forty kids, and nobody said a word.
“Grandpa Leon,” Brittany said. Her voice shook. “I’m sorry. I was scared of the wrong thing.”
Dad looked down at her over his gold-rimmed glasses. He took his time, the way he does.
“You were scared of your grandpa,” he said. “Joanie told me. That’s all right, honey. You were five.”
Brittany started to cry. She did not make a sound about it. She just stood there in the street with tears running down, and then she lifted the baby up over the side of the sleigh and set her on Dad’s knee.
“Will you hold her for a picture?” she said. “She’s never had one with Santa.”
The baby sat on that red velvet knee and stared up at him, checking his math. Dad’s right hand shook against her little back.
She reached up and grabbed his beard in both fists and held on, and she did not cry, and she did not let go.
Brittany took the picture with her own phone. Then Gus took one of all of them with his professional camera, Dad and Owen and the baby and Brittany standing beside the sleigh, and he said he would email it to her for nothing.
Then everybody went back inside. Dad sat in the big chair by the tree for two hours with Gus standing beside him as his helper, handing out candy canes, and the line went clear back to the ham table.
Brittany came to my chair the first week of January for a trim. We did not talk about it much.
She told me her grandpa used to whistle for her across the yard, before he got sick, and that she had forgotten that until Dad stood up in the sleigh. I told her my mother would have liked her. I meant it.
She put the picture of the baby on Dad’s knee in a frame and gave it to him. It sits on his kitchen table, right where the suit was sewn.
Brittany booked Dad and the sleigh for this year in July, and she paid Vern for the hay.