She listened in my chair with foils in her hair and did not say a word until I was done. Then she said, “I’ll get my niece to cover your face paints till you get there,” and that was all.
I picked Dad up at eleven thirty. He was already sitting on the edge of his bed in the red pants and his black boots with the coat laid out beside him.
He would not let me help with the buttons. I stood in the doorway and watched him do them himself, one at a time, from the bottom up, the way my mother taught him.
His fingers would find a button and lose it and find it again. It took him eleven minutes by the clock on his dresser. I timed it without meaning to.
He did not have to put on a fake beard. His beard is his own, white as the snow outside, and he had let it grow out full since September.
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He brushed it in the mirror. Then he put on his gold-rimmed glasses, the real ones, the ones he has worn since the eighties, and he turned around and looked at me.
“What if they’re scared of me, Joanie?”
He asked it plain. He was not fishing. He was 80 years old and he had been told, in writing, by a member of his own family, that he would frighten children. He had read that sentence probably a hundred times in three weeks.
“Then they’ll be scared in the sunshine,” I said. “Out on Main Street, with their folks right there. And we’ll find out together. Let’s go find out.”
He nodded. Then he opened the coat and read the little square of white cloth one more time, and buttoned it back up, and we went.
Vern had the team on the trailer and the sleigh on his flatbed, and we met him at the empty lot behind the grain elevator at the north end of Main Street.
By the time Dad and I pulled in, he had the horses down off the trailer and in harness, their big black coats gleaming in the sun, and he was buckling the sleigh bells on.
They were the old kind, brass bells on a long leather strap that goes around the horse’s middle, and Vern’s grandfather had bought those too. Every time one of the horses shook his head or shifted his feet, the whole strap rang.
Dad stood by the sleigh and listened to them for a minute. The near horse swung his head around and looked at Dad, and the bells rang, and then the off horse shook his whole body like a wet dog, and they rang again.
Dad laughed out loud. “They shake too,” he said.
Vern grinned at him. “Everybody shakes, Leon. It’s December.”
We had four big bags of candy, the hard kind and the little chocolate bars, that Dad had bought himself at the grocery store.
I helped him up into the back seat of the sleigh, one step on the iron step and one hand on my shoulder and a long breath.
Then I set the bags beside him. Vern climbed up front and took the lines and spoke to the team, and they leaned into the collars, and the sleigh slid forward like it was on glass.