PART 3: The Shoebox
“Volunteering,” I said. “This is where Walter used to work.”
She stared at me. She looked down at her plate. At the turkey and the stuffing and the scoop of potatoes. She looked at the line of people waiting behind her. She looked at the door.
I thought she was going to bolt.
“Pat,” I said. “Go sit down. Eat your dinner. I’m off the line at one. Will you wait for me?”
She looked at me a long moment.
Then she nodded, walked to a table in the far corner, and sat down alone with her back to the room.
At one o’clock, Clare took over the potatoes. I took off my apron. I filled two cups of coffee from the big silver urn and carried them to the table in the corner.
Pat had barely touched her food. She sat with her hands wrapped around a paper cup of water, staring at the plastic Christmas tree on the table.
I sat down across from her and set a coffee in front of her.
“Thank you,” she said. She didn’t look at me.
We sat for a while. All around us the room was loud with Christmas. Kids shrieking at Santa. Gus telling a joke to a table of old men. Harold singing “O Holy Night” in the kitchen.
“Renee doesn’t know I’m here,” Pat said finally. Very quietly.
“I figured.”
“I’m supposed to be at her house at three. For dinner. I told her I’d bring the turkey.” Her voice wobbled. “I told her I’d cook it at my place and bring it over. Like I always do. Like when she was little.”
I said nothing.
“I don’t have a turkey, Joanne,” Pat said. “I couldn’t afford one. I’ve got forty-one dollars in my checking account until my unemployment comes on the second.” She pressed her lips together. “They give out holiday food boxes here. At the end of the dinner. With a turkey breast. And some sides. I was going to take one. And cook it real quick at my apartment. And bring it to Renee’s like I’d done it myself.” She looked down at her hands. “I was going to lie to my own daughter on Christmas.”
“Oh, Pat.”
“I’ve been lying to her for three months,” Pat said. “About everything. My job. My savings. My rent. I told her I had money put away. I don’t. I told her the plant gave me a severance. They didn’t. I told her my landlord was being patient.” She laughed, a horrible broken little laugh. “He filed for eviction on November eighteenth. I’ve got until January fifth.”
“Adam told me,” I said gently.
Pat looked up sharply.
“Adam told you? When?”
“Sunday morning. On my front porch.” I took a breath. “He told me they’d found a house. A ranch with a finished basement. He said they wanted it so you could move in with them.”
Pat’s face crumpled.
“Renee told me about that house,” she said. “She showed me pictures. The bedroom in the basement. The little bathroom. She said, ‘Mom, you’ll have your own space. You’ll be right there with the kids.’” Pat wiped her eyes. “I told her no. I told her I’d never be a burden. I told her I was fine.” She looked at me. “I wasn’t fine.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“And then I saw the Facebook post,” Pat said. “Sunday. About your donation. Thirty-one thousand dollars.” She looked down at her cup. “Renee called me crying. She said you’d done it on purpose. Because she told you not to come to Christmas. She said you’d done it to hurt her. She said that money was supposed to be for the house. For me.” Pat swallowed. “She said you’d always looked down on us.”
“I’ve never looked down on you, Pat,” I said. “Never once.”
“I know,” Pat said quietly. “I know that. I told her that. I told her she was wrong.” She took a shaky breath. “And then on Monday morning, my phone rang.”
I looked at her.
“It was a woman from here,” Pat said. “From Westdale. Clare. She said my application had been approved. For the housing fund. I’d applied in November. When I got the eviction notice. I was on the waiting list. Number nineteen.” Her voice broke. “Clare said they’d had a big donation over the weekend. She said they could pay all three months of my back rent. And January. Four thousand two hundred dollars. She said the check went to my landlord that morning.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“She didn’t tell me who,” Pat said. “She said the donor was a widow. Giving in her husband’s memory.” She looked at me across the table. Her eyes were overflowing. “I didn’t put it together. Not until I saw you standing there with the mashed potatoes.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“Your money is paying my rent, Joanne,” Pat whispered. “Walter’s money. Your husband’s hockey cards. They’re keeping me in my apartment.”
I sat across the table from my daughter-in-law’s mother and couldn’t say anything at all.
Neither could she.
We sat in the corner of the old stockroom with the paper snowflakes turning above us on their fishing lines, both of us crying, while two hundred people ate Christmas dinner around us and Harold sang about a weary world rejoicing.
After a long time, Pat wiped her face with a paper napkin.
“I haven’t told Renee,” she said. “About the call. About the rent. I didn’t know how. I was so ashamed. And then I saw the post, and I knew it was your money, and I thought, if she finds out, she’ll think I’m a charity case. She’ll think I took money from her mother-in-law. From the woman she told not to come to Christmas.”
“Pat,” I said. “You didn’t take anything from me. You applied for help. You got it. That’s what the fund is for. That’s what Walter would have wanted.” I reached across the table and took her hand. “And you’re not a charity case. You’re a woman who worked at a plant for twenty-two years and lost her job and got left by her husband and kept going anyway. That’s not charity. That’s courage.”
Pat stared at me.
“Twenty-two years,” she said. “Making plastic bottle caps.” She almost laughed. “Nobody’s ever called it courage before.”
“Well,” I said. “I’m calling it that.”
She kept hold of my hand.
“Come with me,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“To Renee’s. At three. Come with me.” She squeezed my hand. “I can’t do it alone. I can’t walk in there and tell her. Not by myself. Please, Joanne.”
“Pat. She told me not to come.”
“I know she did. She was wrong.” Pat looked at me. “And so was I. For letting her. I’m her mother. I should have told her you were family too. I should have said, Renee, you invite Joanne. That woman just lost her husband. You don’t leave her alone on Christmas.” She shook her head. “I didn’t say anything. Because I was too busy hiding.”
I sat there a long moment.
I thought about Lily’s text. I can’t reach the high ones under the tree.
“I’ll need to go home first,” I said. “I’ve got a pie in the refrigerator.”
Pat laughed. Through her tears. A real laugh.
“What kind?”
“Pecan.”
“Renee’s favorite,” said Pat. “Did you know that? Ever since she was a little girl. She’d never tell you. She’s too proud.” She stood. “Bring the pie, Joanne.”
Before we left Westdale, Clare stopped me at the door.
She was holding a cardboard box. One of the holiday food boxes. Turkey breast, stuffing mix, a can of green beans, a can of cranberry sauce. Whole-berry. My whole-berry. From my shopping cart.
“For Mrs. Gorski,” Clare said quietly. “Everybody gets one.”
Pat looked at the box. She looked at me.
“Take it, Pat,” I said. “It’s yours. You earned it.”
She took it.
We stopped at Pat’s apartment first. A second-floor walk-up in a brick building on the east side, with a bent metal mailbox and a wreath on the door that looked as if it had hung there ten years. Her kitchen was very small and very clean. We cooked the turkey breast together in her little oven. I made the stuffing. She opened the green beans. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t need to.
Then we stopped at my house. I took the pecan pie from the refrigerator. I took the can of whole-berry cranberry sauce I’d kept back, the one Adam liked. And on my way out, I went down to the basement.
I’d told Adam the truth on Sunday. I’d sold almost everything. Every binder. Every program. Every puck.
Almost.
There was one thing I’d kept. In a shoebox on the shelf above the washing machine. I’d forgotten about it until three o’clock that morning, lying awake.
I took down the shoebox and tucked it under my arm.
Then Pat and I drove to Fairfield.
Adam and Renee’s house is a gray split-level with white shutters and a basketball hoop over the garage. Their minivan sat in the driveway. Every light was on. Through the front window, I could see the Christmas tree. And the kids, in their pajamas, sitting on the floor.
It was three ten. We were late.
Pat stood on the front step holding the turkey in its aluminum pan, covered in foil. I stood behind her with the pecan pie and the shoebox.
She rang the doorbell.
Renee opened the door.
She wore an apron over a red sweater. Her dark hair was pulled back. She had a wooden spoon in one hand. She was smiling.
“Mom! You’re late, I was getting worried, I…”
She saw me.
The smile vanished.
She looked at me on her front step. At the pie. At the shoebox. Then at her mother. Then back at me.
“What is she doing here?” Renee said.
“Renee,” said Pat. “Let us in, honey. We need to talk.”
“Mom, I told you. I told everybody. I don’t want…”
“Renee Marie,” said Pat. In a voice I’d never heard her use. A mother’s voice. “Let us in. Now. It’s cold.”
Renee stared at her mother.
Then she stepped aside.
We went in. The house smelled of ham and rolls and the vanilla candle Renee always burns at Christmas. Adam came around the corner from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He stopped dead when he saw me.
“Mom?”
“Hi, Adam.”
Then a shriek rang out from the living room.
“GRANDMA!”
Lily came flying around the couch in her pajamas, Noah right behind her. They hit me at the same moment. I nearly dropped the pie.
“You came! You came! Dad said you were busy! I told him you’d come! I told him!”
“I told him too!” said Noah. “I said Grandma always comes!”
I held my grandchildren with one arm and the pecan pie with the other and couldn’t speak.
Over their heads, I saw Renee’s face.
She was watching her children. Hugging me. Shrieking.
And something in her face cracked.
We didn’t talk right away. Pat wouldn’t allow it. She took over the kitchen like a general. She put the turkey in the oven to warm. She set my pecan pie on the counter next to Renee’s sugar cookies. She spooned the whole-berry cranberry sauce into a bowl. She sent the kids back to the living room. She sent Adam to set another place at the table.
Then she took her daughter by the hand, led her into the laundry room, and closed the door.
Adam and I stood in the kitchen. Neither of us spoke.
Through the laundry room door I could hear Pat’s voice. Low. Steady. And then, after a few minutes, I heard Renee.
“Mom, why didn’t you tell me?”
And then I heard her crying.
Adam looked at me.
“What’s going on?” he said quietly.
I told him. All of it. Westdale. The serving line. Pat with her tray. The eviction. The forty-one dollars. The housing fund. Number nineteen on the waiting list. The phone call on Monday morning. Four thousand two hundred dollars.
When I reached the part about the turkey in the food box, Adam put his hand over his mouth.
“Your money,” he said. “Dad’s money. It paid her rent.”
“It did.”
“We were going to buy a house,” he said. “To save her. And you saved her anyway. With the money we thought we were losing.”
“I didn’t know, Adam. I didn’t know any of it.”
“I know you didn’t.” He sat down hard at the kitchen table and put his face in his hands. “God. Mom. Everything Renee said to me on Sunday. Everything I said to you. On your porch. At seven in the morning.” He looked up. “I called you spiteful.”
“I was a little spiteful,” I said.
He stared at me.
“I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t,” I said. I sat down across from him. “I was hurt, Adam. I was hurt that you didn’t tell me yourself. That I found out in the produce aisle from Renee. That I’d already bought the cranberry sauce you like and the clementines for Lily and the mustard for Noah.” My voice wobbled. “And when Clare asked if she could put the amount on Facebook, I paused. Because I knew Renee would see it. And some part of me wanted her to.”
Adam said nothing.
“That’s not a part of me I’m proud of,” I said. “But it was there. And I’m sorry for it.”
My son looked at me across his kitchen table for a long time.
“I should have asked,” he said finally. “In October. When you told me about the check. I should have just said, Mom, we need help. Renee’s mom is in trouble. Can we talk about it?” He shook his head. “Why couldn’t I just say that?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Dad would have,” said Adam. “Dad would have just asked. He asked for help all the time. From the neighbors. From his buddies. From strangers at the hardware store.” He laughed, a wet laugh. “He asked a guy at a flea market once to help him carry a bench he didn’t even buy.”
“He did,” I said.
“I never learned how,” said Adam. “I always thought asking meant you’d failed.”
The laundry room door opened.
Renee came out first. Her face was red and swollen. Her apron hung crooked. Pat followed with one hand on her daughter’s back.
Renee crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of me.
For a long moment she said nothing. She just stood with her arms wrapped around herself, looking at the floor.
“I told you not to come,” she said finally. “On the phone. In the grocery store. I was so rude to you.”
“You were,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Joanne.” She looked up. Her eyes were overflowing. “I was so scared. About my mom. I didn’t want you to see. I didn’t want you to know my family was falling apart. You’ve always had everything so together. Your paid-off house. Your perfect pie. Walter’s collection. And my dad left, and my mom was about to lose her apartment, and I was so ashamed.” She wiped her face. “So I pushed you out. I thought if you weren’t here, nobody would have to know.”
“Renee,” I said. “My house is paid off because Walter and I ate a lot of tuna casserole for thirty years. My pie is my mother’s recipe. And Walter’s collection was thirty years of flea markets and other people’s junk.” I took a breath. “I’m not together, honey. I’ve been falling apart for two years. I just do it quietly. In my kitchen. By myself.”
Renee stared at me.
“I didn’t know that,” she whispered.
“Nobody does,” I said. “Nobody asked.”
She stood there a moment. Then she did something she had never done in twelve years of being my daughter-in-law.
She hugged me.
Not a polite hug. Not a quick holiday hug. A real one. Her arms around my neck. Her face in my shoulder. Holding on.
“Thank you,” she said into my shoulder. “For my mom. For the rent. For bringing her here. For the pie.” She was crying. “Mom told me. About the turkey in the food box. She was going to lie to me. On Christmas. Because she was too ashamed to tell me she couldn’t afford a turkey.” She pulled back. “And you sat with her. And you brought her home.”
“She brought me,” I said. “She made me come.”
Renee looked at her mother. Pat shrugged.
“I’m her mother,” Pat said. “Somebody had to tell you you were wrong.”
We ate Christmas dinner at four thirty. Ham and turkey both. Pat’s stuffing and Renee’s green bean casserole. Rolls from the bakery. Whole-berry cranberry sauce, which Adam ate straight from the bowl with a spoon when he thought nobody was watching. Noah put mustard on his turkey and his ham and his roll and, briefly, his green beans.
And pecan pie. Renee had two pieces. She didn’t say a word about it. She didn’t have to. Pat caught my eye across the table and winked.
After dinner, it was time for presents.
Lily dragged the old Walgreens Santa hat out from under the tree. Faded red, its pom-pom having lost most of its fluff.
“Grandma,” she said. “It’s your turn.”
“My turn? Honey, I don’t…”
“Grandpa always did the presents,” Lily said seriously. “And last year I did it. But I can’t reach the high ones. And you’re the tallest who’s not Dad. And Dad’s bad at the voices.” She held out the hat. “You have to do the voices like Grandpa.”
I looked at the hat in her hands.
Then I took it and put it on. It came down over one eyebrow.
I picked up the first present from under the tree.
“And now,” I said, in the biggest, boomiest voice I could manage, “from Grandma Pat, number seven, the left winger, LILY ROSE KESSLER!”
Lily screamed.
Noah screamed.
Pat laughed so hard she had to grip the arm of the couch.
Adam stood in the kitchen doorway, watching. His eyes were wet.
I did the voices for every single present. Fifty-three of them. I called Renee the goalie. I called Pat the team captain. I called Adam the coach. By the end I was hoarse, the hat was crooked, and the living room floor was buried in torn wrapping paper, the kids sprawled in it like snow angels.
When the last present was gone, I sat down on the couch.
Then I picked up the shoebox I’d brought from home. I’d set it on the end table when we came in. Nobody had asked about it.
“Adam,” I said. “Come here a minute.”
He came over and sat beside me on the couch.
I placed the shoebox in his lap.
“I told you on Sunday that I sold everything,” I said. “From Dad’s collection. Every binder. Every program.”
“I know, Mom.”
“I lied,” I said. “Not on purpose. I forgot. There was one thing I kept. In a shoebox. Over the washing machine.” I nodded at the box. “The men from the auction house found it on the last day. They brought it up to me. They said it wasn’t worth anything to a collector. They said I’d probably want to keep it.”
Adam looked at the shoebox. He looked at me.
He opened it.
Inside, wrapped in a sheet of yellowed tissue paper, lay a hockey program.
Not an old professional one. A cheap one. Photocopied. Folded in half. From a peewee hockey tournament at the Hamilton Ice Arena in February of 2002.
On the cover, in clip art, a cartoon hockey player. And under it: HAMILTON HAWKS PEEWEE INVITATIONAL. Coach: Walter Kessler.
Beneath the program was a photograph. A team photo. Fifteen little boys in blue jerseys, kneeling on the ice in two rows. And at the end of the back row, in a bulky jacket with a whistle around his neck, grinning his big grin, Walter.
And in the front row, in the middle, with a missing front tooth and his helmet too big for his head, nine years old, holding a small plastic trophy, was Adam.
Under the photo lay a third thing. A puck. Black and scuffed. With white tape on it, and on the tape, in Walter’s careful block handwriting:
ADAM’S FIRST GOAL. 2/17/02. HE DIDN’T EVEN SEE IT GO IN.
Adam stared at it.
He said nothing for a long time.
“He kept this?” he said finally. His voice was very small.
“In the binder with the 1952 Barons championship program,” I said. “Right in front. The auction men said it was the first page. They said they almost threw it out. Then they saw his note.”
Adam lifted the puck. He turned it over in his hands. He read the tape.
“I quit,” he said. “Two years later. When I was eleven. I told him I hated hockey. I told him it was his thing, not mine. I said he only cared about his stupid collection.” He swallowed hard. “He didn’t talk to me for a week. Then he never brought it up again. Not once. In twenty years.”
“I know, honey.”
“I thought he never forgave me,” Adam said. “I thought that’s why we never really. Why we weren’t close. Not like other guys and their dads.” He looked at the photo. At himself with the missing tooth and the too-big helmet. “I thought he was disappointed in me.”
“He kept this in the front of his most valuable binder,” I said. “For twenty-four years. In front of the 1952 championship program. He used to take it out on Sunday nights when he was updating his spreadsheet. I’d see him in the basement. Just looking at it.” I put my hand on Adam’s arm. “He was never disappointed in you, Adam. He just never knew how to say so. You two were exactly alike that way.”
Adam held the puck in both hands. His shoulders began to shake.
Lily climbed onto the couch beside him. She looked at the photo.
“Is that you, Dad?”
“That’s me,” Adam said thickly.
“You look funny.”
“I was nine.”
“Is that Grandpa?”
“That’s Grandpa.”
Lily studied the photo seriously. Then she looked up at her father.
“He looks really happy,” she said.
Adam wrapped an arm around his daughter, pulled her against his side, and cried. Right there on the couch, in the torn wrapping paper, holding a scuffed peewee hockey puck.
Renee came over and sat on his other side. She laid her hand on his back.
Across the room, Pat stood by the Christmas tree with her hand over her mouth.
And I sat on the couch in my late husband’s red flannel shirt and his ridiculous Walgreens Santa hat, and watched my son finally understand that his father had loved him all along.
