The Christmas Note (3 page)

Whenever Kyle was home the kids would beg him to read to them every night at bedtime. I always read using inflection and different, even if sometimes weak, voices, but Kyle had a certain flair when he “read”
Charlotte’s Web
or
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
. In Kyle’s translation, Charlotte the spider spun the words
armpit, nose hair,
and
burp
into her web. Ethan and Emma especially liked
burp
because Wilbur the pig then walked through the barnyard belching. For
Goldilocks and the Three Bears,
I could hear Ethan’s high-pitched belly laugh as Kyle read, “Then Mama Bear said, ‘Somebody’s been pooting on my chair,’ and then little Baby Bear said, ‘Somebody’s been pooting on my chair and blew a hole right through it!’” It didn’t matter how many times Kyle read that story, the kids would howl like it was a brand-new telling. I watch the kids and pray. I’ve never prayed so much in my life. I wash the dishes and pray. I fold laundry and pray. I shower and cook and scrub the floor and pray. It keeps me tethered, grounded, buoyed, or from going insane.

I hang on to their door as I stick my head into their room. “Hey! Do either of you know where the box of games is? We could play something.”

“Right now?” Emma asks, pushing Sugar’s head hard into the blanket.

“Sure.”

“I thought you were busy,” Ethan says.

I step into their room. “Why don’t we get the books and games and everything put away in your room and then it will be totally done! That should only take a few minutes. Then let’s play a game.” I feel the crush of things to do, but know I need to spend time with them.

We finish their room and we celebrate by playing two games of Candy Land and then one of Sorry! and then Battleship with Emma before Mom picks them up to take to her house to eat lunch and spend the rest of the day. Hopefully, by the time they make it home tomorrow I’ll have most everything in order. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay and help you?” Mom asks.

“You are helping by giving the kids a break from tripping over of all this stuff,” I say, waving my arm into the living room. “Hopefully, I’ll find a spot for all of it.” I kiss Emma and Ethan and resist asking them to stay with me so I can see them, touch them, and hear their voices. My throat tightens as I wave to them from the front door.

I haul out the final empty boxes from the kids’ room and feel good that their bedroom is organized. I make a quick trip to the school to take the kid’s shot records and fill out the rest of the enrollment papers and then spend the rest of the day working in my bedroom and organizing the linen and laundry closets. I walk through the condo and know I need to put up some Christmas decorations soon. The sight of lights, evergreen swags, stars, bulbs, the tree, and nativity will make all of us feel better. The first Christmas after my parents divorced I hated putting up the tree and dragging out the nativity, but once they were up, my feelings changed. I search for the boxes filled with all things Christmas so the kids and I can start decorating in the next few days.

The stack of flattened boxes is growing at the front door, and I start to take them out when I see the neighbor’s car pull into her driveway, so I close the door before she sees me. Through the window sheers I can see her walking to her mailbox. I set the boxes down. I’m not going to the curb now. If I see her, I’ll wonder if anyone has told her about her mother and then be plagued with guilt that I didn’t tell her. I shake my head. What a preposterous situation!

This place is too quiet without the kids. I fall into bed and dial Mom’s number to say good night to them but discover they’re too busy to come to the phone. “They’re distracted,” Mom says. I smile. She’s always been very distracting, and right now that’s a good thing. I hang up and stare at the ceiling, thinking of my neighbor. Kyle would have told her her mother had died. Even if his world had collapsed in on him, Kyle would have pushed his way up through the rubble and done what he was supposed to do.

“Someone has to tell her,” he’d say. “If the landlord is a coward, then someone needs to step up.” Kyle would get out of bed at this very moment and go knock on her door, but I turn the light off and pull the blankets up to my neck.

Three

It is dismal coming home, when there is nobody to welcome one!

—
A
NN
R
ADCLIFFE

MELISSA

I never knew my father, but when one of Ramona’s men traipsed through our apartment late at night I’d tiptoe out to the living room, kitchen, or her bedroom where I could see them drinking, smoking, or dancing while each of them held on to a bottle of Jack. I’d imagine which, if any, of those nightly visitors was my father. I asked Ramona one time who my father was, and she slapped me across the face. “It’s none of your business,” she said, her rancid liquor breath burning my eyes. “The only thing he ever did was plant the seed of a fool.” It took me years to realize that seed was me. She has gone out of her way to let people know she doesn’t have children, least of all a daughter, the most worthless of seed. The fact that I live less than three miles from Ramona is ironic to the point of being absurd. We lived in Florida for as long as I could remember. Ten years ago, out of loyalty or extreme stupidity, I followed her here to Grandon, where the winds are as cold in winter as Ramona was on any given day. We talk when she needs money, and the sick, crippled part of me actually wants to help her, while the other part loathes her whiskey voice and the sight of her swollen, overliquored face. She called two nights ago and asked for a hundred bucks to “see her through,” calling me “baby girl” and “lamby,” the names she’s always called me after she’s cussed me or slapped my face until it welted in stripes. “Don’t leave me, baby girl,” she’d say when I was a child. “What would Mommy do without her lamby?” When I refused to give the money to her two nights ago she called me every four-letter word in the book and I reciprocated. I learned how to do combat with her years ago.

This condo is as barren as I am: white, empty walls, cheap carpet, and tacky furniture. It’s a reflection of me and I hate it. I groaned when I saw the moving truck next door and two small children running through the yard, their high-pitched voices slipping through the cracks in my windowsills. I work two jobs to pay my bills and I don’t have the time or the interest in “learning more” about my neighbors. They’ve lived there two days and already the mother has a Christmas wreath on the front door. The condo on the other side of me, owned by an older husband and wife, is bloated with Christmas decorations: lights, wreaths, evergreen swags, nativity set, and two reindeer that move their heads as if they’re eating. My condo is the thorn between two roses. I’ve never owned a Christmas wreath or put up a Christmas tree. What’s the point when you live alone? I was married once; it lasted almost two years, an eternity really, considering neither of us was fit for marriage.

As I pull out of the garage I see my new neighbor draping Christmas lights over the miserly shrubs in front of her condo with the phone pressed to her ear. That’s the second time I’ve seen her wandering in the cold, talking on the phone. From the corner of my eye I can tell she’s watching me pull away, probably hoping for a moment of witty banter between us or to invite me in to their warm, smells-like-pumpkin-bread home that’s already fully decorated for Christmas. I dislike her already, and I can’t even remember her name.

I’ve worked in the mail room of Wilson’s Department Store during the morning hours for two years now. It’s only part-time work, so I transfer hard copy files on to the computer for Layton and Associates, a small law office, in the afternoon. In the same sense, I take the latest cases, which are on computer and make a hard copy file for each one. Feels like they’re doubling up on their work, but hey, they’re paying me to do it, so I don’t complain. Both jobs are what Ramona calls “grunt work,” perfect for grunts like me, she says. Before that, I worked on the assembly line at the pencil factory. You’d be surprised how many pencils don’t make the cut and get pitched into a huge trash barrel. I do my jobs and go home. How I learned to work is beyond me because Ramona couldn’t hold a thought in her head let alone a job. She’d been a cashier, gas station attendant, waitress, prep cook, night janitor, and Avon Lady all in the same year. “I change jobs like I change men,” she said to me once, all boozed up and proud. I pay my bills. I stay out of the way. I probably drink too much, although I’ve always said I’d never be like Ramona. I’d cut my right hand off before I turned into her.

Robert Layton is a good twenty-plus years older than me, but I think he’s good-looking with the lines shooting out toward his temples and curving the sides of his mouth. He’s not slobby; he hasn’t let himself go like some older guys you see. I guess he’s a good lawyer because his office is busy, with Jodi and Susan turning more people away than taking them on as clients. Robert’s a grandfather and doesn’t run, in his words, the hamster wheel anymore. I don’t pal around with Jodi and Susan, the other women in the office, and when Robert invites the staff over to his house on the Fourth of July and for the annual Christmas dinner, I never go. The file room is at the back of the office and I’m always in there alone so I’d feel out of my skin if I was plopped down at a dinner party next to Jodi or Robert’s wife, Kate.

*   *   *

I finish work earlier than usual because it always slows down around the holidays at Robert’s office, and I sit in my car, letting it warm up. Snow is falling, but it looks like it’s in slow motion, the flakes are so big and puffy. I watch a woman who looks like my mother—hunched shoulders, thick in the middle, and short legs—walk across the square. She’s holding the hand of a small child and heading into Wilson’s to buy a Christmas gift for the child’s mother, no doubt. I’ve always felt as if there were two women inside me: one who is desperate, drowning, and clinging to anything that can float and the other woman who feels the depth of loss and the hope of beauty and is always searching for the marvelous to spring up out of the gray. That woman rarely shows up, it seems. There’s no need to sift through my emotions right now; the image of the grandmother and child leaves me with a drowning feeling in my stomach, so I drive away.

The little boy next door is tossing a football into the air and catching it when I approach the condo. He waves and I ignore him, pretending not to see as my garage door opens and I pull inside, shutting the garage door behind me before he can run over and tell me all the inane parts of his day. I feel at some point that I should ask what happened to his father, but something inside me doesn’t want to know. I prefer this in-between existence, where I know very little and have to give little in return.

I’m eating a bowl of canned soup and watching TV when someone knocks on the front door. I try to ignore it but realize the light from the TV shines out the front window, giving me away. I step to the door and see the mother from next door through the peephole. She probably wants to borrow something, like a screwdriver I’ll never be able to find or a hammer I’ve never owned. I open the door a few inches and look out at her face. She’s around my age, I suspect, but she looks younger. She’s taken better care of herself. She’s blond and petite to my blah-brown hair and lanky torso. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Gretchen from next door. Remember?” I look at her as if that was a stupid thing to say and her face registers that she agrees. She’s cold and wraps her arms around her. The little boy and girl come running up behind her, and she turns in a huff. “Go back home and stay inside like I asked.”

“But what are you doing?” the little girl asks.

I feel myself getting irritated. It’s cold and I want to close the door.

“I’ll be right back,” Gretchen says. “Go inside and get your pajamas on like I asked. Take your brother back inside.” The girl grabs the little boy’s hand and jerks him toward her. “Sorry,” the woman says, looking sheepishly at me. “I … a man knocked on my door yesterday morning looking for you and…” She pulls her sweater tighter around her and looks out toward the empty street. “I told him that you lived here, but he said he wasn’t going to come back.”

This is going to take forever. “Who was it?”

“I don’t know his name. He didn’t say. He’s the landlord at the apartments where your mother—”

“What about him?” I’m abrupt and she looks startled.

“He said that he found your mother…”

Stand still. Don’t react. Ramona did this to herself. It doesn’t involve you.

“She died in her apartment, and he said he’d like you to clean out her place or else he will.”

I nod. “Thanks.”

She catches the door before I can close it. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

“I’m not,” I say, leaving her in the cold.

I walk back to the sofa and sit down, staring at the TV screen. What am I watching? Today’s Friday. When did she say Ramona died? The landlord came yesterday morning. When did she die? Wasn’t it just two days ago that I talked to her? She asked for money and called me a worthless pig. That’s how sixty years ended. She yelled, she took, she misused, she swore, she badgered, she abused, and then her eyes closed and her mouth shut. I’m glad it’s over. That sliver of me that always wanted something, anything from Ramona, will have to find something else to covet now. I turn off the TV and sit in the dark, waiting for morning.

Four

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor.

—
G
.
K
.
C
HESTERTON