The Ornaments on His Mother’s Spruce

The box was on my porch when I got home from school on Tuesday, pushed up so tight against the storm door that I had to move it with my foot to get inside.

It was a liquor store box with the cardboard dividers taken out, and somebody had gone around it four or five times with clear tape. My name was on the label in a round, careful hand I did not know. The return address I knew fine. It was the house on Willow Bend Court, forty minutes west of here, where my former husband lives with his new wife.

I carried it in and set it on the kitchen table and stood there in my coat.

It was not heavy. That was the first thing I noticed. A box that size ought to have weighed something.

I cut the tape with the paring knife and folded back the flaps. Inside was a black trash bag. The thick kind, the contractor kind Paul always bought for the garage. It was knotted at the top, and taped to the knot was a sheet of notepaper with a border of little gold stars.

Diane,

We’re going modern with the tree this year. White and gold. Thought you would want these back.

Tiffany

I read it twice. Then I untied the knot, because I already knew what was in there, and I wanted to be wrong.

I was not wrong.

The macaroni star was right on top.

My son Matt made that star in the first grade, out of elbow macaroni and school glue and a whole can of gold spray paint that his teacher must have regretted. It had lost a point sometime around 2009. I had hung it every year anyway, on the side of the tree that faced the wall, and every year Matt had moved it around to the front when he thought I was not looking.

Under the star was the rest of it. Thirty-one Christmases, in a trash bag.

I sat down.

I want to be fair about this. Paul and I were married in June of 1990 and we had thirty-one Christmases in that marriage before the papers were signed. When I moved out, I took my clothes, my mother’s hutch, my sewing machine and half the dishes. The ornaments were in six cardboard boxes in the crawl space over the garage, and you got to them by a pull-down ladder that I could not manage alone.

Paul said he would bring them.

I asked him at the lawyer’s office. I asked him in a note inside a birthday card. I asked him to his face in the church parking lot after our granddaughter was baptized, with his new wife standing right there in a pretty blue dress.

“I’ll get up there, Diane,” he said, all three times. “It’s on my list.”

That was four years ago.

So I will say this for Tiffany. She got up there.

I took the ornaments out one at a time and laid them on the kitchen table. The glass ones were wrapped, each one, in a yellow striped dish towel, and they were good dish towels, the thick kind you do not buy for the garage. There were four towels in all, and she had tucked two or three ornaments into each. Somebody had tried.

Five were broken anyway. A trash bag in a box is not a kind way for glass to travel.

I counted what was left. One hundred and twelve.