The Christmas Note (2 page)

Although it’s late, I pick up my cell phone off the nightstand and check one final time for texts and e-mails. I need to call the phone company tomorrow to get us hooked up with Internet and phone service ASAP so I can set up the computer. I spend an hour writing an e-mail because it takes me forever on the tiny cell phone pad. The muffled sounds of yelling creep through my walls, and I set the phone on my nightstand, listening. Our neighbor is shouting, but it seems to be one-sided, into the phone no doubt. I lie down and stare up at the ceiling, holding Kyle’s picture to my chest and waiting for her to hang up so I can get some sleep. The shouting ends and I wonder what she’s doing over there now? Pacing the floor? Raiding the refrigerator? Breaking something? It’s all part of the process. I know it well. Now I’m just tired and praying and thinking of Kyle and waiting for tomorrow.

Two

I’ve learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.

—
M
ARTHA
W
ASHINGTON

GRETCHEN

I wake up early and begin to unload boxes of clothes into my drawers and closet. I’ll work in here as long as I can so I don’t wake up the kids. They begin school on Monday and I want them to be rested. At eight o’clock, I’m inside my small bathroom organizing my cabinets when I hear the soft padding of feet across the carpeted floor. Emma stands in the doorway with Sugar in her arms and eyes half cracked from heavy sleep. Her hair is blond like mine and hangs at the side of her face, tangled like fishing line. “It smells kind of funny here,” she says, stretching.

“That’s a new smell,” I say, emptying out the final box and breaking it down. “New carpet, new glue, new paint.”

“So it’s fancy?” she says, trying to fit inside one of the bigger boxes.

I laugh and motion for her to get out of the box. I know full well the construction is cheap; the builder cut costs wherever he could, including these thin-as-cardboard cabinets, but it’s home. When Kyle would come home after a tour of duty, he would hold his tongue when someone complained about their house, job, the heat, or potholes in the road. He would have just come from sleeping on a cot, brushing his teeth outside with sand beneath his feet, driving on a road that was more holes than dirt, with hidden bombs along the way, and holding his position in one-hundred-plus degrees of heat, wearing long sleeves and carrying a rifle. He didn’t have much tolerance for someone when they complained that their coffee was cold.

“Sure! Let’s think of it as fancy,” I say. Emma leads us into the hallway, and I can see Ethan digging through a box in their bedroom.

“Whatcha looking for?” I ask, leaning my head inside the door.

“My connecting pieces I build stuff out of.” He’s so much like his dad. He loves to put things together: a model airplane, a Radio Flyer wagon, a block castle just for the challenge. He’s in heaven if something can be dismantled and then put back together again, whereas I cringe at the thought of Lincoln Logs or LEGOs.

“Just empty out that box and I’ll take it out to the curb along with these others, and then we’ll eat breakfast.” Ethan brings the box to me as I’m coming back in for another load. A gust of early winter wind blows in, and I hurry as I pick up several more of the boxes that I’ve flattened. Ethan grabs a few and stumbles out the door behind me. Emma chooses to watch us from the warmth of the entryway. My pajama bottoms and T-shirt are too flimsy for this wind and I hurry, stacking the boxes at the curb. A rolling sound makes me look up and I see our neighbor, Mary Sunshine, pulling her garbage can down the driveway. I attempt a half smile, embarrassed to be out here in my pajamas, and if she smiles, I don’t recognize it. Perhaps people smile differently here; maybe their mouths look frozen in a perpetual scowl.

“We have garbage, too,” Ethan says, dumping his boxes onto the stack. She bobs her head in what I guess is a nod. “Bet we’ll end up having more garbage than anybody on the whole street today.” The revelation sinks into the competitive part of his brain and he glances down the street. “Yep. Just look. Nobody has higher garbage.”

“And we’re not even done bringing it all out yet,” I say, more to Ethan than to her, whatever she said her name was.

“Are you going to work?” Ethan asks.

“Yes,” she says, slapping the garbage handle grime off her hands and walking up her driveway.

“My dad had a bad accident on his job. A bomb went off and he—”

I don’t want to talk about this so early in the morning. I fold my arms against the winds and take quick steps toward Ethan. “Let’s go get some more boxes and see how high that stack can get.” I look at her. “Have a great day at work.” The look on her face is a smile, frown, grimace—what in the world do you call that kind of expression? Ethan and I finish hauling out the boxes, and he gives me a high five when we discover that yes, we do have more garbage than anyone else on the street.

Emma is tilted back on her heels, holding on to the doors of an open cabinet, and I imagine the entire cupboard coming loose from the wall. “Don’t swing on the cabinets, Em.”

“Why not? I’m hungry.”

I open one of the bottom cabinets, revealing the few boxes of cereal we have: Cheerios, Rice Krispies, and Frosted Mini-Wheats. “Ta-da!”

“Where’s the fun cereal?”

“This is it,” I say, reaching for the Rice Krispies. “Ta-da always means
whoo hoo!
Look at this! Nothing says fun like snap, crackle, and pop.” I pick up the boxes of cereal and give each of them a shake. There’s hardly any Frosted Mini-Wheats left, and I wonder why I packed the box in the first place. Kyle wouldn’t have packed it. Army men pride themselves on their packing skills! “Kyle, you need to go through these cupboards,” I say to myself, throwing away the empty box. I’m feeling sorry for myself again and I hear Kyle’s voice telling me to push myself up out of the rubble.

He grew up in Oklahoma, and when he was ten a tornado swept through his small town in the early morning hours. Kyle and his parents and brother leaped from their beds, his mother in her nightgown and the men of the house in their underwear, and ran to the cellar as the twister tore off the roof of their home. When the winds died down and his father cracked open the cellar door, the sky was jagged with splintered trees and their truck was missing along with the living room and Kyle’s bedroom. The henhouse was razed and the chickens stripped of feathers and lying dead, but the barn was standing so they walked toward it to check on the horses. Kyle heard a noise, something like scratching, and stepped toward the boards of the henhouse. He yelled for his family, and each of them stepped closer, listening for the sound. As the sun rose, the noise became more frantic and they watched as the featherless head of the rooster pushed his way through the boards. He lifted his naked body from the rubble and stumbled to the top of the boards, crowing with what strength he had left.

Kyle told that story several times in our marriage. “He had to crow,” Kyle always said. “It was in his DNA.”

One night during my senior year in high school, I was driving home from a waitressing job and was pulled over for speeding. The officer flashed his light in my face and the streetlight illuminated him. I tried not to smile but couldn’t help it. He took my license and car registration to his vehicle and was gone for just a minute, not long enough to issue a ticket, when he walked back to the car and let me go. “Slow down, Gretchen,” he said, making me smile.

Days later I was at a pancake house eating with a friend when a yummy-looking guy walked in wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and I thought he looked familiar but couldn’t place him. He walked to the table, and when I looked up at him, just as I’d done out my car window a few nights earlier, I recognized him. “Taking it slower?” he asked. I laughed and felt so high schoolish but realized a guy his age (he looked twenty-something) wouldn’t be interested in me. He sat with us and we all talked for two hours, but I still didn’t think he liked me. He was seven years older than me, five years with the police department, and he’d just joined the army. Somehow, I knew that was in his DNA. He was born to help and protect. You just know that about some people. I never saw myself as an army wife, but when Kyle and I started dating I suddenly couldn’t see myself being anything else. We married after I graduated from college. My parents were adamant that I wait. I think they fully expected Kyle to lose interest, but he didn’t. Kyle had been in the army four years when we married; he wore his dress blues at our wedding and we began hanging a sign outside the door of our home at each military post that said,
HOME IS WHEREVER THE ARMY SENDS YOU!
The sign is hanging in my new kitchen now. I just couldn’t get rid of it.

Ethan and Em are chattering away over their bowls when I hear a knock at the door. A sweatshirt is crumpled on the sofa, and I slip it over my head before reaching for the door. A man’s bald head is all I can see through the peephole and I open the door. He’s fiftyish, I guess, with dark bags under his eyes and heavy lines on each side of his mouth. He looks cold and aggravated. “Hi,” I say, making it sound more like a question than a greeting.

“Sorry to bother you so early,” he says, pulling his coat collar up to cover his neck. “I’m looking for Ramona’s daughter.”

“Nope. I’m Miriam’s daughter,” I say, smiling.

His chest deflates, pushing a huge gust of air out of his mouth. “Do you know Ramona?”

“I’ve never heard of her. I’m brand-new here as of yesterday.”

He looks behind him, at what I don’t know. “Great!” He scratches his head and sighs again. “I need to find Ramona’s daughter. Another tenant in my building said she lives on this street, but he couldn’t remember her name and I can’t either.”

I cross my arms to keep warm. “I have no idea. Did he say if she’s married or has children? That could narrow it down.”

“She’s single.”

“I think the woman who lives on the other side of me is single, but I’m not sure. I can’t even remember her name.”

“Her name’s Melissa,” Ethan says, wedging in next to me.

“That’s her!” the man says. “Ramona’s daughter is Melissa.”

“Then that’s her place,” I say. He turns to step off the porch. “She’s not home right now. I saw her leave a few minutes ago.”

If it’s even possible, his chest shrinks even more. “Do you know how to contact her?” I shake my head. “Okay, this has been a”—he sees Ethan and stops—“rotten morning. When she gets home, would you tell her that her mom died and I need her to come clean out her mom’s place?”

Ethan snaps his head to look up at me, and I feel letters burbling up, but none of them are coming out as words. “What? No! I only met her for the first time yesterday. Don’t the police make that sort of notification?”

“The police came late last night when Ramona wouldn’t answer her phone. The old dame’s hand turned the stereo up blasting loud when she keeled over and died. Had every tenant calling me to take care of it. She wouldn’t answer the phone or the door so the police went in and found her.”

“So why can’t they notify her daughter?”

He popped a cigarette into his mouth like it was an M&M. “I told you,” he says, lighting the cigarette and puffing. “Nobody knows Ramona’s kid. Hard to contact next of kin when the dead woman never said she had kin. If I hadn’t heard them screaming at each other a few times I wouldn’t even know it.” He turns to leave. “Tell her I’m giving her one week to go through her mother’s things and then I’m dumping all of it.”

“I’m not going to tell her,” I say to his back.

He turns to look at me. “Tell her I’m being nice. I could just rummage through that junk and keep what I like.”

I nudge Ethan to get back into the house and I stand out on the porch, closing the door. “I can’t tell her that. You need to leave a note on her door.”

He won’t turn back to look at me. “I’ve been out here for an hour knocking on doors.” He tosses his hand in the air. “I’m done.”

Ethan is staring up at me when I step back inside. “Who was that guy, Mom?”

“A landlord,” I say, busying myself by putting away the cereal.

He picks up his football and tosses it from hand to hand. “Who died?”

Emma looks up from her soggy bowl of cereal, frightened. “Somebody died? Who died?”

I cross to her and kiss her head. “Our neighbor’s mom.”

“Oh.” Ethan tosses the ball up and down now, and I try to ignore it as I go back to work in the kitchen. I’m not in the mood for the whole football-in-the-house argument. “You don’t like her very much, do you, Mom?”

Great! Caught not liking someone by my own child! I stop my work to look at him. “What makes you say that? She seems fine.”

He tosses that confounded ball higher into the air. “You don’t talk as much to her as you do other people.”

“I just don’t know her very well yet.”

The ball goes up again. “You talk long with other strangers.”

“Please take that ball out of the house, Ethan.” He tosses it back and forth all the way to the front door before tossing it out into the yard.

All the big kitchen items have a cupboard to call their own, but the counter space is littered with things that will eventually wind up crammed into a drawer or shoe box: rubber bands, pens, old address book, two small picture frames, sticky pads, cow-shaped eraser, handful of magnets, Magic Markers, a whistle, two batteries, a tube of ChapStick, a purse-size package of tissues, a ruler, and a stack of cards we received after Kyle’s accident. I fan them out in my hand, not knowing what to do with them. I see a small, empty box and stack them in a corner of it, pushing the rest of the stuff from the counter on top of them. I sigh, setting the box on the table. There’s so much to do, but I know Kyle’s accident and the move have been a lot to take in for the kids. I wander through the hall to their bedroom and peek inside. Emma is using one of her baby blankets to make a bed for Sugar, and Ethan is pulling children’s books out of a box.