The Hundred Dollar Bill on Christmas Eve

“All right,” Gene said. “Line up by age. Oldest first.”

He said it the same way every Christmas Eve, standing by the tree in the basement with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a white bank envelope in his hand. The kids knew the drill. They scrambled off the carpet and into a crooked row.

Caleb was first, because he was nine. Then Emma, who was seven. Then our Wyatt, six, still in the flannel pajamas with the tractors on them that Pat had given him an hour before. Then little Lily, four, who had to be steered into place by her mother.

Addie did not line up.

She was ten, the oldest grandchild in that basement, and she stayed exactly where she was, on the arm of the couch beside me, with her hands folded in her lap. She had learned. That was the part that sat in my stomach like a stone.

Gene slid the first bill out of the envelope. It was brand new, so new it made that little snapping sound when he pulled it straight. He held it up to the light from the tree the way he always did, like a jeweler.

“Caleb Vogel,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

“Thanks, Grandpa.”

Caleb took the hundred-dollar bill and stared at it. Every kid in that line stared at those bills like they were made of gold leaf. For a farm kid in southern Minnesota, a hundred dollars cash is a fortune you can hold in one hand.

Emma got hers. Wyatt got his, and he said “Thank you, Grandpa Gene” without being told, which I was proud of. Lily got hers and immediately tried to fold it into a paper airplane until Lisa took it away and put it in her own pocket.

Then Gene folded the empty envelope in half and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

“That’s the bunch,” he said, and sat down in his recliner.

Nobody looked at Addie. That was the worst part, every year. Thirteen people in a basement family room, and twelve of them suddenly very interested in the wrapping paper on the floor.

How we got here

I married Ryan Vogel when Addie was three years old.

She came with him. That was how I always thought of it, and I never once thought of it as a burden.

Ryan had been married young, to a girl from Mankato named Amanda, and it had lasted a little over two years. By the time I met him at a friend’s wedding in Fairmont, he was a single dad with a toddler on alternate weeks and a truck seat full of Cheerios.

I was twenty-five and working the front desk at a dental office in Blue Earth. I went back to school for my dental assisting certificate the year after we married. Wyatt came that same year.

Addie was mine from the start. She called me Kristen, because she had a mom, and I never pushed it. But I was the one who sat with her through the croup at two in the morning on our weeks. I was the one who learned how to French braid because she asked me to.

Amanda and Ryan worked it out as decent people. Addie spent most school weeks with us because our place was closer to her school, and every other weekend in Mankato. Christmas Eve was always ours. Christmas Day was always hers. It had been that way since Addie was four.

Amanda remarried when Addie was six. Her new husband, Brad, sold farm equipment out of a big dealership off Highway 169. They did well. They had a nice house with a three-car garage and a big Christmas, and Addie came back every December 26th with a new coat and a new pair of boots.

That was the thing Gene grabbed onto. I know that now.