The 13th Gift Read online

  “He was sicker than I realized,” I finally say. “This is our first Christmas without him.”

  John places his hand over mine and says, “That’s tough, but I can see you’re strong. My dad died the year I graduated high school. I wanted to kick the whole world that first Christmas. Mom wouldn’t let me. She told me to remember the good times.”

  Ben, Nick, and Megan file back into their seats with bowls of chocolate pudding, ice cream smothered in hot fudge, and a variety of cobblers, which Megan declares is a healthy dish because it contains fruit. I have my doubts.

  “Somebody’s going to be sick.”

  “Not a chance,” Nick says. “I could eat a ton of this stuff.”

  Megan eats about half of her cobbler, then pushes it away and looks at us expectantly.

  “We should get going. We might have a gift waiting at home for us.”

  We tell John about the anonymous gifts and our hope to pass on Christmas cheer to others this year.

  “That’s why I invited you to join us,” Nick says. “You were alone. We weren’t.”

  “Thank you,” John says. “It’s been fun, a night to remember.”

  Nick holds his stomach and grimaces. “I’d like to forget some of those chicken wings.”

  Our dinner ends quickly with my son’s next announcement.

  “I’m going to explode,” he declares. “Better get me home.”

  We offer John a ride.

  “I’ve got to walk off these wings,” he says. “It’s just a few blocks.”

  “What if your mom’s not home?” Ben asks.

  “I have a key. If she doesn’t show up soon, I’ll call her.”

  We turn toward the car, but John holds me back.

  “Remember the good times,” he says. “Merry Christmas.”

  We’re nearly home when I notice a car pulling away from the curb just past our driveway.

  “Follow it,” Nick shouts from the backseat. “It’s gotta be them.”

  Ben speeds up, but I caution him not to get too close.

  “We don’t want to give ourselves away.”

  Nick and Megan order me to slump down in the front seat, so I won’t be recognized. They do the same in the back. Nick tosses a crumb-coated knit cap from his coat pocket to Ben to wear as camouflage.

  “Dude, where has this thing been?” Ben asks, refusing to wear it. “It smells like cereal.”

  Nick grabs a handful of the crud from his pocket and sniffs it, then tastes a sliver.

  “Cinnamon Toast Crunch,” he says.

  Ben reminds Nick that he’s supposed to be sick.

  “Take a right. Take a right,” Nick hollers inches from Ben’s ears. “They’re turning.”

  “Looks like a Chevy, older model,” I say, but Ben thinks it’s a Ford. Neither of us is sure.

  “It’s blue,” Megan whispers through the gap between my seat and the headrest. “Or maybe black or dark purple.”

  “Or maybe it’s just dark outside,” Ben says. “Put your seat belt back on.”

  “Go left. Go left.” Nick again shouts driving directions, but he’s been slumped behind the driver’s seat and has missed the Volkswagen that turned in front of us, blocking our prey. He’s watching the wrong vehicle.

  We follow the car through Bellbrook neighborhoods, down Kensington Drive on to Clarkston, then Possum Run. We lose it, or maybe it loses us, at the stop sign on Little Sugarcreek Road. We drive around for half an hour but never spot the car again.

  Finally, Megan calls off the search.

  “Can’t we just go home and see what they left us?”

  “I should have kept my foot on the gas. We could have had them,” Ben says.

  I laugh off his comment.

  “You’re lucky to be driving at all.”

  Ben latches the safety locks on the car doors before we pull into the driveway, to prevent his brother and sister from bailing out before him. Once he releases the locks, all three run for the porch and the gift bag waiting there.

  Megan reaches it first.

  “Cookie cutters! Eight of them.”

  “Really,” Ben says. “I mention our lack of cookies to Dad’s friend, and we end up with a set of Christmas cookie cutters. That’s no coincidence.”

  The card is different from the others; there are no fancy letters, no holly leaves or red-booted snowmen, just the words of the carol written in a neat cursive hand.

  “It looks like one of your shopping lists,” Megan says to me, then points out two misspelled words in the missive.

  On the eigth day of Christmas …

  your true friends give to you,

  8 cookie cutters

  7 golden apples

  6 holiday cups

  5 angel note cards

  4 gift boxes

  3 rolls of gift wrap

  2 bags of bows

  and …

  1 Pointsettia

  for all of you.

  “I’ll bet Terry rewrote the card after he left here,” Ben says. “He probably had another gift in mind for today but bought the cookie cutters instead after he dropped off the envelope.”

  “That would explain why the card is so plain, no art,” Nick agrees. “Didn’t have time or art supplies to fancy it up.”

  We look for patterns in the cards and check for similar handwriting styles.

  “It’s funny when you think about it,” Megan says. “We’ve been trying to figure out this mystery for eight days, and we never even asked Terry about the gifts. I think it’s a sign.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” Ben says. “A sign of what?”

  “That we’re not supposed to know who they are.”

  “Hogwash.”

  All three kids look at me.

  “Hog what?” Megan wants to know.

  “If it takes me ’til Christmas, I’ll find out who they are.”

  It takes me less than two minutes to stash all of the homemade cards in my desk, so they don’t disappear overnight, and add our new cookie cutters shaped like Santa boots, angels, evergreens, and ornaments to my already extensive collection in the kitchen. When I return to the living room, it’s empty.

  I hear the bass of Ben’s stereo vibrating the walls of the basement stairwell and Super Mario music rings out from under the bathroom door. What I think is a Muppet singing a Christmas song wafts up from the television in the family room.

  My children have gone their separate ways for the evening. Their disappearance is a letdown after the day we’ve spent together. I’m sitting on the couch alone when I get the idea.

  Five minutes later, all the lights in the house go out at the same time.

  “Looks like a power outage,” I tell the kids when they join me in the living room. “Christmas lights must be putting a strain on the electric company.”

  “Do we have batteries so I can play my Game Boy?”

  “Haven’t bought any recently.”

  “Anybody seen my cell phone?” Ben feels around the dining room table where he remembers last seeing it, but it’s not there.

  We light lots of candles, but even reading is difficult in the dim light.

  “How about we tell Christmas stories?” I suggest.

  Ben groans. Megan is thrilled. Nick wants to go buy batteries.

  “Did I ever tell you about the Christmas Dad bought me a typewriter?”

  More groans. I ignore them.

  “I had dreamed of becoming a writer since I was a little girl, and the gift was a show of support from your dad. He also told me that he feared success would change us, change me.”

  “He gave it to you anyway. That’s a big deal,” Ben says.

  “It was a very big deal, but not in the way you might think. The P key on the machine was broken off. He told me, ‘It’s kind of a handicap, but I have confidence in you.’

  “I was annoyed, but I took it as a challenge. And it was fun, you know, almost like a game that we played together while I was writing. A few months later, I fou
nd that broken P key in the lock box under the bed.”

  “I bet you were angry,” Nick says. “What did you do?”

  “I bought him a set of left-handed golf clubs at a garage sale the following year.”

  Their dad was right-handed, and he had laughed heartily when he opened the clubs and realized what I’d done. In the golf bag’s special compartment for balls, he found my missing P key and a gift certificate for a set of right-handed clubs.

  “I don’t remember Dad buying a lot of Christmas presents, but the ones he gave were special, like my electric train set,”

  Nick remembers. “He ‘tested it out’ for two days before he let me handle the controls.”

  He had tried doing the same when Ben got his first ten-speed bike, but his eldest hadn’t fallen for it.

  “He looked silly riding that bike. His knees hit the handlebars,” Ben says. “He crashed it into a trash can on New Year’s Day.”

  “Remember the butterfly clips he gave me last Christmas?” Megan asks. “He let me try them out in his hair.”

  Rick had come to Christmas breakfast wearing his new bathrobe with a dozen tiny braids in his short black hair. Megan had fastened a colorful clip to the end of each one.

  “Not many dads would do that,” she says.

  We keep talking—about Rick, about Christmases and presents from the past. It is cozy, and even with the lights out I can feel a sense of being both merry and bright creeping into the house. Then Ben’s cell phone rings.

  “Jig’s up,” he says, when he sees it light up in my pocket.

  “I’ll go check the breaker box,” I say, handing him the phone with a sigh. “I have a feeling the power is back on.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Ninth Day of Christmas

  MY BOSS HAS been generous giving me time off work, so I don’t argue when he turns down my request to stay home today. He wants me in the office writing “evergreens,” or stories that can run anytime during the holidays.

  “Everyone wants to be off this time of year,” he says apologetically. “Newspapers don’t close down for Christmas.”

  I’m reluctant to leave the kids, who are now on winter break, but I have little vacation time left this year. I decide to make the best of it and go in early. I stack several boxes of candy by the front door. They’ll be gifts for my coworkers.

  Ben is still sleeping, but I check in with my two younger children before leaving to hear their plans for the day.

  “Not to worry,” Nick says. “I’ve got my Game Boy and a box of cereal. I’m not getting outta bed.”

  “How about you help Megan decorate the tree.”

  “I’ll supervise … from the couch … maybe.”

  I hear gift-wrapping sounds coming from Megan’s bedroom, so I tap on her closed door and ask if she’s hungry.

  “Silly question, Momma,” she says, jumping up from the floor and following me to the kitchen. “I’m always hungry.”

  With an elbow resting on the table and her head lounging in the palm of one hand, Megan shovels in mouthfuls of oatmeal with her free hand while sizing up the tree.

  “It has potential. Just needs trimming.”

  Megan’s favorite Christmas task has always been digging through our holiday tins to unearth the glass balls and bells and angels to hang on the tree. We like to joke that there’s always an overabundance of ornaments on our tree right at her arm’s length. In her excitement to unwrap these family treasures, she carpets the floor with the old newspapers and plastic grocery bags that I use to pack them away. She also usually manages to unravel rolls of ribbon or gift wrap in her enthusiasm to fashion homemade ornaments, and glitter becomes part of the upholstery.

  The cleanup takes longer than the trimming.

  Carrying one of the trinkets at a time was never sufficient for our daughter, even though the tins were only a few feet away. She insisted on an armful, and her breakage ratio was high. Inevitably, a snow globe or snowman would slip from her fingers, and her heart would ache for the loss of such beauty. Megan’s many mishaps had led me to divide up our ornaments into precious and expendable years earlier. The really special ones she’s not allowed to hang until she is older.

  When she’d been much younger, Megan had convinced Rick to dig a grave in the backyard to bury a fallen angel ornament. She could not bear to see the delicate creature spending eternity in the trash.

  From the kitchen window I had watched them standing together, saying a prayer over the tiny mound of earth next to the gym set. I was both envious of the moment they were sharing and filled with gratitude for my good luck.

  He would have done anything for her, for all of us.

  The incident touched him, too. He came back into the house changed.

  Rick made it his parental mission to devise ways for our daughter to carry more than one ornament at a time. It was like the egg-drop experiment Ben did for science class, where students are asked to devise packaging to protect an egg from a one-story drop. Before tree-trimming night, I would buy a box of very plain and cheap plastic ornaments for each year’s experiment. We tried loading up a basket with ornaments, but it tipped when Megan stood on her tiptoes to reach high branches. Folding up the bottom of Megan’s sweatshirt like a basket worked fairly well, until she needed two hands to fasten a baby Jesus to a branch.

  We lost two ornaments that year. After that, the ideas kept getting sillier and sillier.

  Rick jokingly considered applying for a patent for his last invention, the sweater hanger. He lined the inside front of an oversized sweater he had bought at a used clothing store with a heavy piece of plastic, secured with black electrical tape, to create a protective barrier. Then, he and Megan attached little wire hangers to each of the ornaments and hung six of them on the front of the sweater. She looked like a human Christmas tree.

  “Economy of labor,” Rick had said. “I’m all about making life easier.”

  This year will be the first time Megan will tackle the trimming on her own.

  “Why don’t you wait until Ben wakes up and see if he’ll help?” I say.

  Neither of us believes that will happen, so I take another approach, hoping to save the house from my little hurricane.

  “How about you open one tin of ornaments at a time? Hang them, then put all the packing paper back inside when you’re done.”

  Megan rolls her eyes at me.

  “You know me, Mom.”

  “Consider that an ornament order,” I say, tapping her nose with my finger.

  Megan finishes her breakfast and returns to her room to complete a “secret project,” while I make a list of unfinished holiday chores before going to the office. Christmas Eve is approaching, and I still haven’t given my family an affirmative on hosting the celebration here like I usually do. I’ve been shopping shy ever since I abandoned my cart in the bicycle aisle the other day.

  “Tonight, you return to toy land,” I tell myself. “Or, maybe ease back into shopping at one of the stores on the outer rim of the mall.”

  Nick has wrestling practice tonight and Megan, basketball. That leaves me three hours of freedom after work. I need to buy Megan a new Christmas sweater, and I have furnishings to purchase for Nick’s new room. I leave a question mark on my list behind Ben’s name. Rick had planned to buy him seat covers for his car. Now that I’ve confiscated his keys, I think it prudent to come up with another gift idea.

  The newspaper office is quiet with only three of us working.

  I write a story about added law enforcement on the highways over the holidays. Police departments and the state highway patrol also don’t shut down for the holidays, so I easily reach post commanders and local police chiefs. I wrap up the article in under two hours hoping to go home, but my editor hands me another assignment.

  “Have fun with this one,” he says

  With the turn of the century twelve days away, he has asked me to piece together an account of Dayton on New Year’s Day 1900.

  I
find everything I need in the newspaper archives. Local celebrations were simple family gatherings, no big party where people came to cheer at 12:01 a.m. I like that idea; it seems that families haven’t changed all that much in one hundred years.

  The weather was the big news story of the day back then. Frigid temperatures had turned the Great Miami River into a thick sheet of ice that had beckoned skaters and sleighs. I imagine women with hair coiffed high in the Gibson-girl style sliding across the ice with suited gents in bowler hats.

  My siblings and I skated on that same stretch of river every winter when we were kids. I remember walking stiff-legged for days after an afternoon on the bumpy, frozen water. There were no Zambonis to smooth the surface, and I ended on my backside more often than up on my skates.

  The only time I truly enjoyed being on the ice was when Rick glided beside me, holding me upright. Secure in his arms, I could float across the ice like an Olympian. That’s how I drifted through life until his death, always leaning and holding on tight. Now I am learning to skate on my own. I know there are still bumpy patches, but I am not alone. I’m excited about the possibilities.

  I finish writing the historical piece with a feat of gallantry involving a runaway team of horses hitched to a wagon with no driver at the reins. Passersby marveled as a spectator leaped astride the galloping team and brought them under control. Reading people’s accounts of the moment, they describe it as something out of a story rather than real life. Heroes don’t jump on runaway horses anymore, I think to myself; they leave anonymous gifts on doorsteps.

  The drama reminds me of our true friends and the promise I made to the kids last night. I call Gem City trying to track down a home telephone number for Terry. The operator won’t give it out, but promises to leave him a message. I put in a call to Tom, thinking he may know how to contact our old friend. I get his answering machine.

  I stop at home to change into jeans and gym shoes before shopping. The house is dark, so I flip the switch by the door and the tree lights illuminate the room. I expect to see our pine bedazzled with tinsel, baubles, and beads, but it’s as naked as when I left this morning.