The 13th Gift Read online

  I am terrified of the growing cache of bills stowed out of sight in the kitchen drawer. The electric company has demanded a deposit, even though Rick and I have had an account with them for twenty years. The account, of course, was in his name. My name was unknown to most of our creditors, but they are learning it now.

  My friend Kate tells me Rick is at peace. He is in a place where there is no pain, no worry, no angst, but I imagine Rick crazy angry with God. That steel-melting emotion burns in me, too. I can’t explain to the kids why this has happened, why other families have fathers and theirs doesn’t. I can’t tell them that I wish it had been me who died because Rick would know how to help them through this.

  A driver hardly old enough to have a license lays on his horn, and I realize my car is straddling the dotted line between two lanes.

  “Jesus, Jo, pay attention,” I say to myself, then mouth “sorry” to the kid, who responds with a flash of his middle finger. I consider returning the gesture, but my heart isn’t in it. I am grateful to him for riveting my attention back to the road.

  By now I can feel warm air shooting from the vents of the car heater, but I am still shivering.

  What would happen to the kids if something happened to me?

  Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to fear every pain and sore muscle. Sometimes, I get nervous just walking the dog.

  “You’re being paranoid,” I say out loud, and then realize I am still talking to myself. I think the driver in the tan truck in the lane to the left notices.

  “I’m not nuts,” I shout at the window. The driver speeds up.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Get outta my way.”

  Behind the closed car window I feel a pinch of bravado until I realize I am doing that talking-to-myself thing again.

  Music. Turn on the radio.

  I tune into 99.9 FM, hoping for a happy song.

  “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire …” Anne Murray’s voice fills the car.

  “Not helping,” I tell the radio.

  So I switch the station, then again, and again, finally just turning it off two miles down the road. Every song, even ones I’ve never heard before, reminds me of Rick.

  It’s a relief to find the parking lot empty in front of the Dayton Daily News bureau, where I work. I grab a tissue from a stash in the glove box and try to repair my eye makeup. I have time to close my eyes and recuperate from the drive, time enough to get rid of my red eyes and reapply makeup before going inside.

  Despite the chaos of the morning, I am still one of the first people to arrive. One by one, coworkers fill the office. We are a busy group, especially with the holidays approaching and everyone hoping to finish their work quickly and head out to holiday shop for their loved ones. I wonder if someone in the office thought to shop for my family this year and might be behind the poinsettia. I mention the mysterious morning gift, but no one seems interested. That makes me suspicious. In the newsroom, there’s no such thing as a question that doesn’t have an answer. My reporter brain immediately suspects that there must be a reason that nobody else seems curious about my mystery flower. Is it because they already know who left it?

  Joann Rouse, a fellow reporter, is the last to arrive. She had hovered around me at Rick’s funeral, standing close, offering tissues when needed. In the weeks since, she has coerced me out of the office several times for lunch on the pretext of brainstorming story ideas. She always guides the conversation back to my family. I never know how to answer her queries about the kids, the house, how I’m doing. The meal usually ends in tears, both hers and mine.

  At least she cares enough to ask.

  Leaving an anonymous gift seems like something she might do. As I tell her about the poinsettia, I watch closely for her reaction.

  “Maybe whoever sent it will own up on Christmas,” she says, punching in the telephone number to retrieve her voice mail.

  Not the reaction I expected from a coworker presented with a Christmas mystery.

  She’s a reporter.

  We’re nosey.

  “She must be behind that stupid flower,” I tell myself.

  Coaxing her to fess up to leaving the gift will take finesse. I ease into the interrogation after she hangs up the phone.

  “Started your Christmas shopping yet?” I ask.

  Joann winces and rolls her eyes.

  “Not yet. Maybe this weekend,” she says casually, glancing at her computer as she watches it boot up.

  My coworker seems suspiciously anxious to attack a story assignment. She’s thumbing through a notepad that I am pretty sure is blank. I press on with an additional question.

  “Have you checked out any of the Christmas tree lots in town? Megan has been bugging me to buy one.”

  Joann’s attitude transforms.

  “The lot up the street has gorgeous trees. I stopped there last night to buy a wreath. They had the largest poinsettias I have ever seen.”

  “Poinsettias, really?” I ask. “And did you happen to buy one for a coworker?”

  But instead of confessing, Joann laughs.

  “Just enjoy the flower, Jo. Doesn’t matter who left it.”

  Oh, but it does. And I have figured it out.

  Confident that I have discovered the identity of our “true friends,” I set aside worries about the kids, and all thought of Christmas, to tackle a school-funding story. For a few hours, I am not a widow or a mother. I gratefully surrender those roles, even if only for a while.

  Just after three thirty, the kids start calling. Megan is the first. She is home and has washed the red foil wrapping on the poinsettia with an old washcloth and dish soap.

  “Looks tie-dyed,” she announces. “I like it.”

  “What looks tie-dyed, the wrapping or the washcloth?” I ask.

  “Both,” she giggles. “I’ve got Girl Scouts today. Can you pick me up at six thirty?”

  Ten minutes later, Nick is on the phone.

  “Wrestling practice until seven thirty. Don’t forget, it’s in the school gym.”

  “I’ll be there. I promise.”

  Forty-five minutes pass before I hear from Ben.

  “Megan said we’re getting a Christmas tree this weekend. I’m busy.”

  “I’m not sure when we’ll do it.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ben says. “I’m busy all weekend.”

  I begin to worry about getting my story edited and myself out of the office in time to pick up all the kids and get dinner ready. I finally wrap up at work at six twenty, leaving ten minutes to make the half-hour trip back to Bellbrook. I drive home at a much faster pace than the trip to the office this morning, but I start to panic as I shave the clock close. I have never left a kid waiting in the cold.

  Megan is standing outside the school with several friends when I drive up. She is smiling. I am not the last mom to arrive.

  “Look what we made at Girl Scouts.”

  From a piece of red yarn, she dangles a Christmas tree ornament fashioned from construction paper and wooden sticks: a poinsettia.

  “It’s for our Christmas tree,” she says, as if I needed to be reminded.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Second Day of Christmas

  FOR WEEKS, MY sister-in-law Charlotte has been chiding me to hustle up my holiday preparations.

  “You have got to give those kids a Christmas,” has become her latest trope.

  This morning, she calls before six a.m., offering to pick up Nick and Megan from their sports practices to provide me with a few hours of shopping time after work.

  “Just get it over with,” she insists. “You love Christmas shopping. Getting out there might cheer you up.”

  I have no confidence in her logic, but I agree to give it a try.

  That is how I find myself waiting with my turn signal on for a mom and a toddler to move past an open parking space in the shopping plaza, when a gray-haired grandpa type whips his Lexus around them and nabs my spot. The mom jerks her cart back to avoid a collision
.

  “Asshole,” she shouts, covering her daughter’s ears with gloved hands.

  “Merry Christmas,” the old guy hollers as he steps from his car. He winks at me as he passes. I want to shove his smug expression somewhere distinctly un-Christmasy, but he’s already vaulting through the store doors. I’ve never been much of a musician, but I imagine rewriting the lyrics to “Silver Bells.” In my more realistic version, people are meeting “scowl after scowl” instead of “smile after smile.”

  I abandon my search for a primo parking place, and drive to the adjacent shopping center where most of the businesses are closed for the day.

  As I enter the store, strains of “Frosty the Snowman” blasting over the sound system weaken my resolve. Though my intent is to buy a mountain bike for Nick, I veer first into Rick’s favorite department, hardware. The layout of the aisles here is as familiar to me as housewares. Before Rick tackled a home repair—turning our concrete-walled basement into a playroom, building a deck on the back of the house, or crafting a ceramic-tiled counter for the kitchen—he would drag the whole family with him to the hardware department to select supplies. I am struck with the idea of buying some sort of useful tool that I can donate in Rick’s name to the Salvation Army or Habitat for Humanity.

  There must have been some magic

  in that old silk hat they found.

  I don’t ever remember hearing Christmas music in this section of the store before, but the lines of “Frosty” are loud enough to rattle the light fixtures. I imagine ending the iceman’s romp through town with a blowtorch, or at the very least barbecuing the store’s sound system. It’s cruel, but the thought makes me laugh at myself.

  “Do you carry acetylene torches?” I ask a clerk.

  Thumpity, thump, thump. Thumpity, thump, thump,

  look at Frosty go.

  I load the torch into my shopping cart, thinking that this could be a useful donation or perhaps a Christmas gift for my brother-in-law Tom. Maybe I’ll keep it for myself. A more likely scenario, there won’t be presents or a tree to put them under at our house on December 25.

  Just buy a bike. One step at a time.

  On my trek to the toy department, I toss wrapping paper, gift cards, and tape into the cart. My holiday purchases, so far, are limited to bags of athletic socks and underwear for each of the kids—the only two items Rick ever asked for on his Christmas list. When we first met, Rick didn’t understand my need to ferret out the perfect gift for each loved one. His mother had died when he was three years old, and the holidays never took on much significance in his family. The Christmas gifts he received thereafter had been mostly functional … until he met me. It took time for him to catch my enthusiasm for the holidays. Maybe I just wore him down. The year I bought him a video camera, he waited two full days to open it as a protest over the expense. I caught him reading the manual the next day, and by New Year’s Eve he threatened to leave the tool-and-die industry to make movies. He gave me a nightgown that year, a twin to one I already owned. The following year, he bought me a sterling silver necklace and matching bracelet.

  I understand now why his dad was not a fan of holiday shopping. It feels as if I’m betraying my husband to even think about celebrating the holidays. All I want for Christmas is him, and the idea of making new holiday memories without Rick just makes me miss him more. I just can’t operate under the same modus operandi as past years, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to behave.

  “I need a damn rule book.”

  My lament is loud enough to summon a clerk.

  “In the video department,” she responds, pointing to the rear of the store, apparently ignoring my profanity in a way that my daughter does not. “Books are back by the videos.”

  I move in that direction, embarrassed to have been caught talking to myself. I hope the clerk will chalk my behavior up to temporary holiday insanity and not a more general affliction. I glance backward to see if she is occupied with another customer. That’s when I really do get into an accident. I smack into a life-sized, blow-up lawn Santa with my shopping cart; he doesn’t deflate, but he is wobbling close to a display of glass candle globes.

  “Can I help you?”

  Now I have the clerk’s undivided attention, and she is looking none too surprised to see that I am the cause of the near display disaster.

  “My daughter would love him,” I say weakly.

  “Then buy one.”

  Abashed, I grab a blow-up Santa and toss him in my cart next to the torch.

  I know our house looks cheerless compared to others on the block dressed in white lights, nativity scenes, and grazing wire reindeer. Trimming the outside of the house was Rick’s bailiwick, not mine. I am not going to buy this blow-up, but I don’t want to put the Santa back on the shelf with the clerk now stalking my every move. Under her now watchful eye, I pretend to consider buying hand-painted ornaments, a quilted Christmas tree skirt, metal tins with snowy scenes on the lids, and others filled with assortments of chocolates.

  None of the items appeal to me.

  I do want to feel the Christmas tug that usually consumes me this time of year. I have always begun holiday shopping before Thanksgiving and usually have a trove of presents purchased long before the onslaught of the holiday stampede. Then I purposefully forget how much I have spent and buy more just to be part of the holiday rush. I used to love crowded shopping malls, wrapping presents, baking cookies, the swarm of family visiting on Christmas Eve.

  Not anymore.

  For the first time in nearly twenty years, my husband isn’t standing beside me mentally calculating our seasonal checkbook damage, and I have no will to spend.

  Wouldn’t Rick find this ironic.

  When the sales clerk starts humming along to “Winter Wonderland,” I leave the Christmas displays and head over to toys, taking the blow-up Santa with me.

  Just buy the bike and get out of here, I tell myself.

  The toy aisles are humming with dads and moms and grandparents flitting from Barbie dolls to board games. I pause near the video games, looking for anything to jump out at me.

  Rick and I had decided years ago we weren’t bringing a video-game system into the house. We wanted our kids to fill their free time with more educational activities, like reading. Then I had gone on a weekend trip to Christmas shop in Frankenmuth, Michigan, with my mom and sisters.

  I was only gone three days, but when I returned, we owned a Nintendo. With controller in hand, Rick was seated on the family room floor, gyrating right, then left, sitting up tall, slouching, unconsciously mimicking the movements of Super Mario on the television screen. The kids were gathered around him like little apostles, moving as he moved in a choreographed dance.

  They never heard me walk in the door.

  “It’s a science experiment,” Rick insisted before I flicked the back of his head with an American Girl book I had purchased for Megan.

  Now, three years later, our collection of video-game systems also includes a Nintendo Game Boy, Sega Game Gear, and numerous computer games that the kids play together. Since his father’s death, Nick has become completely immersed in these escape pods that draw him into video worlds where beaten and bloodied avatars spring back to life with each new game. I don’t want to encourage the habit, but I can see that the games are helping him cope.

  I venture into the video-game aisle, where I find the old guy who stole my parking space in a spat over a game with the mom and toddler he nearly hit.

  “I saw it first,” the old guy shouts.

  “I just went to get someone to unlock the display case,” the mother fires back. “They’re paging a clerk for me.”

  I should keep walking, but I don’t.

  “Let her have it, you old grump.”

  The two turn and look at me. The old guy’s face glows Christmas red, and the mom stands with fists balled like she’s ready to duke it out, either with him or with me. Another voice joins in the fray.

  “You ag
ain.”

  I don’t have to turn around to identify its owner. It’s that same sales clerk. Instead of defusing the fighters, she’s coming at me.

  “I thought you were looking for books.”

  “Well … a bike actually.”

  “Three aisles down. On the left. How about you go have a look.”

  I flash my best mean face at the old guy and leave the aisle with a final, menacing remark.

  “Give the game to the girl.”

  My legs are shaking by the time I reach the bicycle racks. There is less foot traffic here; bikes aren’t a big seller in the Midwest in winter. I am grateful for the quiet, but it doesn’t last long.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” a stock boy asks as I browse ten-speeds.

  “Yes,” I say, gesturing between a trendy yellow and a traditional blue mountain bike. “I just can’t decide on the color.”

  I want to buy the bike. I intend to buy the bike, but before I make a decision, Bing Crosby is crooning the opening lines of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and my mind erases every thought except that Rick will not be with me to assemble the bicycle on Christmas Eve. When the stock boy clears his throat to get my attention, I jump.

  “I’m sick of Christmas music,” I bark at the young man, who is not much older than my Ben. I am ashamed as soon as the words leap off my tongue, but it’s too late to take them back.

  “Yeah, Christmas sucks,” he says mildly, reversing down the aisle. A couple dressed in matching holiday sweatshirts glare at me.

  “Just kidding,” I mumble at them, and I flee.

  I abandon my cart with the blow-up Santa, wrapping paper, tape, and the torch, and seek the privacy of the public restroom. I feel safe behind the hollow metal walls of the stall, where flushing toilets and humming hand dryers muffle the store music. But they don’t silence the memories inside my head. I lean against the door and close my eyes, willing the accusations to stop.

  Looking back, I know Rick’s body tried to warn me. The tightening of his belt by two notches, the change in his complexion from olive to ashen, and his hands, especially his hands. Hands that had held mine since age nineteen, that balanced our newborns in their massive palms, built dies and decks and repaired kids’ toys. Those hands were trying to tell me something was wrong with their thin, loose skin. I just didn’t want to hear it.