The Window Grandma Opened on Christmas Eve

My mother did not open the storm door. She stood on the other side of the glass in her red Christmas sweater with the gold buttons, looked at the pan in my hands, and then looked at the shoebox in my daughter’s arms.

“Where’s your gift?” she said.

It was 4:40 on Christmas Eve, and the sky over the Hendricks place had already gone the color of dishwater. The yard light had come on by itself. Behind my mother I could see the whole front room lit up gold.

“We made gifts this year,” I said. “Lily made one for everybody. Eleven of them.”

Lily lifted the shoebox a little, the way she lifts things she is proud of. She was six. She had on the red velvet dress I found at the church rummage sale for three dollars, and white tights, and her snow boots, because I could not afford the shiny shoes she wanted.

My mother did not look at the box again. She looked at me.

“Everybody else brought their fifty, Amy.”

“I know, Mom.”

“Kevin brought his fifty. Missy brought a ham. Your cousin drove up from Ottumwa with a gift card.” She said it quietly, the way she says things she has been rehearsing. “Christmas is not a charity.”

I felt my face go hot in the cold.

“It’s potatoes and homemade ornaments,” I said. “It’s what we have this year.”

“Then come back when you can bring enough,” my mother said.

And she reached down and turned the little brass lock on the storm door. I heard it click. I will hear that click for the rest of my life.

What the warm air cost

I need to explain about the furnace, because my mother did not know about the furnace. Nobody did. That was the whole trouble.

My grandmother, Beverly Hendricks, was 91 that winter. She still lived alone on the home place outside Corydon, Iowa, in the white farmhouse my grandpa built the year they married. She still drove to town on Thursdays. She still made her own noodles.

The first week of December, I stopped in on a Tuesday with her mail and found her sitting at the kitchen table in her barn coat and a stocking cap, doing her crossword with her gloves on. The house was fifty-one degrees. I checked the thermostat twice.

“It quit Saturday,” she said, like she was telling me it might rain. “It’ll come back. It always comes back.”

It did not come back. The man from Wayne County Heating came out that afternoon and stood in her basement shaking his head. The heat exchanger had cracked. The furnace was older than my mother. He would not even relight it, because of the carbon monoxide.

“A brand new one’s four grand, easy,” he told me in the driveway. “But I’ve got a rebuilt Goodman in the shop, two winters old, out of a house in Seymour that went to a heat pump. I can put that in for nineteen hundred, and have it running tomorrow by supper.”

Grandma was standing in the doorway with her arms folded. She had heard every word.