The Christmas Checks That Never Came

“Did Owen ever catch anything with that fishing reel?” Ruth asked me, holding her left hand out flat on the towel so I could get at her thumbnail with the file.

I didn’t know what reel she meant. Owen was eight, and the only fishing reel he owned was a cracked plastic one his grandpa Tom had pulled out of a bin in the garage.

“The one he bought with my check last Christmas,” Ruth said. “Darlene told me all about it. She says the kids just loved them. Lily got that dollhouse with hers, the one with the little porch.”

I kept filing. I am a dental hygienist, and twenty years of cleaning teeth teaches you one thing above all others, which is how to keep your face still while your mind goes somewhere else.

“That’s nice,” I said. “I’ll have to ask him about the reel.”

“You tell him his great-grandma wants a picture of the first fish,” Ruth said, and she laughed, and I laughed with her, and the whole time my stomach felt like I had swallowed a cold stone.

It was the second Sunday in December. Outside her window the parking lot of the assisted living had been plowed into tall gray ridges, and the flag out front hung stiff in the cold.

I went every other Sunday after church to do Ruth’s nails. Nobody asked me to.

I started when she moved in, because she said the aides were too rough with the file, and it turned into our time.

Ruth Brandt was my husband’s grandmother. She was 91 years old, sharp as a tack, and she still balanced her own checkbook every month with a sharpened pencil and a little ruler so her lines came out straight.

She had been a farm wife for sixty years, ten miles west of town, and then a widow for eleven.

When she gave up driving at 88, she gave up the farmhouse with it and took a room at the assisted living.

When I finished her nails, I put the file back in my kit and kissed her on the forehead the way I always did.

She smelled like lotion and peppermints. She squeezed my hand and told me to drive careful.

I sat in my car in that plowed parking lot for ten minutes before I started the engine.

Four Christmases ago, the year she rented out the last of her farm ground, Ruth started sending each great-grandchild a check for five hundred dollars. She was proud of that.

She told me once that she had saved for it out of her egg money for years, and then out of her Social Security once the hens were gone.

She mailed the checks to Darlene’s house, because that was the address she had written in her book for forty years.

Darlene was her daughter-in-law, married to Ruth’s son Tom, and Darlene and Tom lived six blocks from us.

That first year, Darlene had asked Ruth to make the checks out a certain way. Ruth had told me about it once, a long time ago, not thinking anything of it.

“Darlene Brandt, for Owen and Lily,” Ruth had said. “Darlene says she’ll put it in their savings accounts for them. I don’t understand the banks anymore, so I do what she tells me.”

The kids did have savings accounts. Nick and I opened them at our bank when each of them was born. I was on both accounts as a joint owner, and so was Nick.