The Santa Who Came by Sleigh

He was raised mostly by me and partly by my father after his own dad left, and he loves that old man.

“She didn’t mean it like it sounded,” he said.

“How did she mean it?”

“She means it’s time. Mom, he’s 80. Last year he dropped the bag of candy canes and half the kids had to help pick them up. She’s trying to make it nice. She’s got a whole plan, a photo booth, the guy from Rochester does it professional, he’s got a real suit and everything.”

“Your grandpa has a real suit,” I said.

He did not answer that. I heard the baby start to cry for real, and I heard Brittany’s voice from the other room asking who it was.

“Mom,” he said, very quietly. “Please don’t make this a thing. It’s her first year. Everybody on that committee is watching her. Please.”

I dried my hands on the towel and looked out the window over my sink at the dark yard.

“I won’t make it a thing,” I said. And I meant it, at least the way I understood it that night.

Brittany is 29. She married my son seven years ago in a white barn wedding out by Ridgeway, and I did her hair for it, and her mother’s, and all six bridesmaids. She is not a mean girl.

I want to say that plainly before I say the rest.

She is organized and quick and she has opinions, and she works three days a week at the clinic in Decorah doing billing, and she is raising two children while my son works ten-hour days.

Owen is 6. He is their oldest, a skinny blond boy with my father’s ears. The baby was eight months old last December, a round, serious little girl who stares at you like she is checking your math.

Brittany grew up in a town about forty miles west of us. Her own grandfather had Parkinson’s, the fast kind, and he went into a nursing home when she was five.

She told me once, at a family supper a couple of years ago, that she was scared to death of him at the end.

That his hands shook so hard he could not hold a fork, and that when her mother made her kiss him goodbye she cried, and that she still felt bad about it.

I believe she looked at my father in his red suit last year, dropping the candy canes, and she saw her own grandfather in the nursing home, and she saw her five-year-old self crying.

And she decided no child at her party was going to feel that.

That is a reason. I do not think it is an excuse.

The next committee meeting was the Monday after Thanksgiving, in the basement of the community hall. I go every year. I do the kids’ face painting at the party, little candy canes and snowflakes on cheeks, and I have done it for twenty years.

Darlene was there too. She is 74 and she has run the quilt raffle since the Carter administration, and she has been coming to my chair every other Tuesday for eleven years.

She caught my eye when I came down the stairs and gave me a look that said she had heard every word in my salon that Tuesday, dryer or no dryer.