The Santa Who Came by Sleigh

I was 19 that fall. I remember coming home from cosmetology school and finding the whole kitchen full of red.

She had pattern paper taped to the cupboards and pins in her mouth and a sleeve over each shoulder, and she would not let any of us eat at the table for a month.

The party got snowed out that year, a real blizzard, the kind where the county pulls the plows. So the first time Dad wore her suit was December of 1994. He wore it every December after that, through 2024.

My mother died nine years ago, in March. Dad kept the suit in a dry cleaner bag in his closet, and he still calls it “her suit.”

He will say, “I better get her suit out,” the first week of December, every year, like she is in the next room and wants to know if it still fits.

The Parkinson’s came three years after she passed. The doctor in La Crosse said it was the slow kind, and it has been. His hands shake.

He walks a little stiff in the mornings and he has to think about buttons. But he still drives to town in daylight, still mows his own yard, and still beats me at cribbage most Sundays.

And he had been Santa through all of it. The kids never seemed to mind. The little ones would grab onto his hand when it shook like it was a game.

One girl a few years ago asked him if he was cold, and he told her the North Pole was so cold that it takes Santa all winter to stop shivering, and she patted his arm and told him he could borrow her scarf.

That was the man my son’s wife had just told, by text message, that kids did not want him.

I walked him out to his truck after the haircut. It was gray and cold out, and the wind was coming straight down Main Street from the north the way it does.

“Dad,” I said. “Do you want me to talk to her?”

“No.” He had his keys in his hand and it took him two tries to get the right one. “No, I don’t. She’s running it now. That’s her right.”

“It’s not right, though.”

He got the door open and sat down sideways in the seat with his feet still on the curb, the way he does when he is tired. He looked up at me.

“Joanie,” he said. “I’m 80 years old. I knew this was coming one of these years. I just thought somebody would say it to my face.”

Then he swung his feet in and shut the door and drove home, slowly, with both hands on the wheel.

My son called me that night while I was doing dishes. I could hear the baby fussing in the background and the television on, and I could tell by the way he said “Hi, Mom” that Brittany had told him what she sent.

“Grandpa called you,” he said.

“Grandpa was in my chair when it came,” I said. “I read it to him. He couldn’t make out the letters.”

There was a long pause on the line. My son is 31. He drives a feed truck for the co-op and he is a good man, steady, the kind who would rather fix your fence than talk about why it fell down.