The Christmas Sweater Page 5

  I had been staring at the ceiling, unable to look at her when she came in. I knew my face would betray me. But after a few seconds of silence I sat up on the bed to see what was going on. Mom was staring at the floor by my dresser. “Is that your sweater?” she asked quietly. I had dropped it there without even thinking. It was rolled up like a ball, like something that belonged in the trash can.

  “Sorry. I should have put it away,” I said meekly as I started to get up from the bed.

  “It looks like you already have,” she replied. The pain in her voice and the disappointment on her face shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. After a few moments of silence, she looked up from the sweater and directly into my eyes. “Please don’t treat your sweater that way.”

  I knew that we didn’t have much money, but until that moment I never realized how heavily that weighed on my mother. In my mind I saw my mom walking by the new bikes in Sears every day at work, knowing which one I wanted and knowing she couldn’t afford it. I saw her looking at the sweaters I didn’t want, and she couldn’t afford, picking out yarn and knitting every night while trying to convince herself that somehow I would understand and love that sweater just as much as a new bike. Knowing in her heart I never could.

  I sat there awkwardly, watching in silence as Mom picked up the sweater as gently as if it had been an injured kitten. She slowly folded it and neatly placed it on top of my dresser. She lingered there for a moment, her hands pressing the sweater down as if to flatten out wrinkles that didn’t exist.

  I really didn’t know how much my mother believed in the magic of Christmas until I saw it die for her in a rumpled ball on my bedroom floor.

  Mom gently pulled my bedroom door closed without another word. My eyes began to burn again. I went back to the window, hoping the snow would cheer me up. I pressed my head up against the cold glass again. The girl across the street was gone, and so was the snow. One final flurry danced slowly toward the ground. It looked as sad and alone as I felt.

  Then it started to rain.

  When Dad first started to get sick, Mom, along with some of our close family friends, tried to keep City Bakery going. They did the best they could, but it quickly became obvious just how good a baker Dad really was. A recipe might seem like a simple list of ingredients and instructions, but there was obviously a lot more that went into his creations than just what was handwritten on a bunch of old grease-stained pages.

  When Dad passed away, Mom quickly sold the business. I guess it was probably inevitable anyway. Our downtown, like my father, had been slowly dying for years. I don’t know how much money she got, but I do know that it couldn’t have been much, because even after she got the check I still wasn’t allowed to order milk when we went out to eat. I think she used most of it to pay off Dad’s medical bills.

  I never thought I’d miss the bakery, but the truth was that I did. I missed it a lot. I didn’t miss cleaning the pans or sweeping the floor, but I missed being together. Even though we’d all been working, we’d all been working together. Somehow that had escaped me until it was gone.

  For a long time, Mom avoided driving by the bakery after she sold it, but someone told me it had been turned into a shoe store. I took their word for it; it was too hard to picture someone trying on a pair of high heels in the same place my father used to crack eggs or knead dough.

  Right around the time Mom sold the bakery, she also sold our car and house. I guess she was trying to make a clean break. The Impala got traded in for our Pinto wagon, and our house was downsized to a white one so small that our one-car garage basically doubled the size of the whole interior.

  I didn’t like all of the new stuff, but at least the Pinto didn’t have the smell of Dad’s Old Spice cologne trapped in the fabric of its headrests, and the new house didn’t constantly smell like Dad’s German chocolate cake.

  Thinking about all the changes that had happened so quickly in my life only added to my misery. If Dad had still been alive and still had the bakery, then he would’ve had enough money to buy my bike. It just wasn’t fair. Why was I being punished?

  After about an hour of watching the rain I went back downstairs. Mom was in the kitchen. “Is there anything left for lunch?” I asked, hoping that we could pretend the sweater incident had never happened.

  “We don’t have time now. We’re going to head over to Grandma and Grandpa’s house a little early. Go put on your sweater—your grandmother helped me pick out the yarn and pattern, and she’s very excited to see you in it.” She spoke without any joy. Like me, she had apparently decided to pretend that the sweater incident had never happened.

  With the way things were going, I did not want to go to my grandparents’ farm, and I definitely did not want to wear what I was sure was an itchy, hot, uncomfortable, not-a-bicycle sweater.

  I went back upstairs and put on the sweater. The full-length mirror hanging on the back of my door caught my attention. I stared into my own eyes. What was I doing? I looked at myself in the sweater that I knew my mother had worked so hard on and was so proud of. I wanted to like it, but I couldn’t.

  I left my bedroom, slammed the door shut, and not too quietly stormed around the house. Remembering the lessons from my grandfather, I tried to create just enough of a ruckus to make a point, but not so much as to get into trouble.

  It didn’t work.

  Mom handed me two bread bags and glared at me with eyes that I dared not try to read. It never dawned on me that Mom knew her father’s tricks far better than I ever would.

  Six

  I’m only going to say this once, Edward Lee. When we get to the farm, you will be a boy having a merry Christmas. Is that clear?”

  Mom using my full first name was always a bad sign, but Mom using my full first name and my middle name was almost unprecedented. This was a code-red alert.

  “Clear,” I answered curtly as I stared out the back window of our Pinto. I could never figure out why Mom would spend as much time driving to see my grandparents as we actually spent visiting with them. The drive was an hour and a half each way and we rarely stayed much longer than two hours unless we were sleeping over.

  Except for the sound of heavy rain battering the roof and spraying up from the tires, the ride was spent mostly in silence. Mom stared straight ahead. She didn’t even look at me in the mirror.

  The radio was playing a Christmas song by the Carpenters, but it felt as out of place as if it had been July. Mom reached over and rolled the front passenger window down partway, letting cold, wet air rush into the car. The Pinto’s heater only had two settings: Off and Furnace. I didn’t know if she was getting sleepy or if she was just taking pity on me in my heavy wool sweater.

  As we drove, the houses got further and further apart, until finally I saw the first in a series of small farms that lined my grandparents’ street. One of them was obviously vacant. There were big gaps in the wooden fencing, an overgrown front lawn, and an old farmhouse that looked empty and unsteady. I thought I saw a flash of light in one of its broken windows.

  No. It must be a reflection. Who would live in a place like that?

  Less than a minute later, I saw Grandma’s hydrangea bushes and the old plow that Grandpa had put at the end of the drive to mark his small raspberry and chicken farm. Mom turned in, and the sound of our tires crunching through the wet gravel floated in through the window.

  The Pinto’s engine always ran for a couple of seconds every time it was shut off. I usually made a game of getting out of the car before the rumbling stopped, but this time I waited for Mom to get out before I reluctantly followed her.

  “Merry Christmas, Mary!”

  “Merry Christmas, Mom,” she answered. Her voice seemed to have softened a little since she’d last spoken to me.

  “Merry Christmas, Mr. Eddie,” Grandpa teased. He laughed whenever he called me that. I didn’t understand why until Mom sat me down in front of a rerun of an old show with a guy who talked to his horse. But did Wilbur ever ca
ll Mr. Ed “Mr. Eddie”? I don’t think so.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” I mumbled. I was trying hard to maintain my sour attitude, but he always made that hard.

  “Look at that beautiful sweater,” Grandma said as she took me by the shoulders. Luckily, she wasn’t a cheek-pincher. “And such fine knitting.” She gave my mother a quick look of approval. “How do you like it, Eddie?”

  I looked over at Mom. She was watching me, expressionless, waiting to see what I was going to say. After quickly considering all possible answers, I said, “It’s fine. Maybe a little scratchy…or itchy…or whatever. But it’s fine. I like it.”

  Mom’s icy stare made the short walk to the front door seem like a mile. Her eyes were lecturing me again.

  My grandfather was a big man with snow-colored hair. It was more white than gray, but not like an old person’s. For years I thought he was Santa. He and Grandma were the same age, but she had beautiful brown hair with just a hint of gray in it. “A miracle of modern science,” Grandpa liked to say.

  I sat on the big, old, comfortable sofa in front of the fire, and Grandpa sat across from me in his chair while Mom and Grandma worked in the kitchen. Grandpa didn’t know it, but Mom and I called it his “storytelling chair,” because he couldn’t seem to sit in it without offering some epic tale from his past. The problem was that Grandpa was so good at mixing fact with fiction that almost no one, including him, was really sure what was true anymore. Asking him to retell a story only made things worse. “Grandpa,” I once asked, hoping he’d confirm a story I’d remembered from years earlier, “did you really help build the lunar rover?”

  He loved to answer a question with a question. “Have I ever lied to you?” he replied, making sure that if he had told the story “in fun,” he wasn’t going to lie now by confirming it. It was the perfect system. Even Grandma didn’t seem to know the truth anymore. When I would ask her to confirm one of Grandpa’s tales, she would simply say, “Could be.” She wasn’t being coy or playing along, she really just didn’t know anymore. “Could be…” was the best—no, make that the only—answer she could legitimately give.

  Sometimes Grandpa would begin weaving a story together and, after a few sentences, Grandma would show her disapproval by yelling his name: “Edward!” Grandpa would then lower his voice and tell me to move closer to his chair. The procedure would repeat itself throughout the story until finally I would be sitting at my grandfather’s feet, looking up at him in awe as he whispered lie after lie.

  “Grandpa, did you really build this whole house by yourself?”

  “Yes, in fact, without a hammer and with only two—”

  “EDWARRRRRRD!” Grandma yelled from the kitchen. I never knew how she could hear him from that far away. Mom always used to tell me that she had eyes in the back of her head, so I guess I just figured that Grandma had ears in other rooms.

  Now, as my grandfather sat across from me in his chair, stroking his chin on a rainy Christmas afternoon, I hoped that he would start in on another story. I couldn’t have cared less if he made the whole thing up; I just didn’t want to think about the sweater, bikes, or Dad anymore.

  Unfortunately, he had another idea. “So, Eddie, are you ready to try and beat me at Chinese checkers?”

  Chinese checkers? What the heck was going on? I figured that Grandpa had either taken every last dime from the people he played cards with or he was looking to test his system out on a different game. I risked pressing the issue. “Why don’t you want to play cards?”

  “Cards?” Grandpa looked away quickly, a telltale sign that he was about to make something up. “I haven’t been able to find my deck. Besides, Chinese checkers is more fun. You don’t have to do any math.”

  Math? Apparently Grandpa’s system was even more complicated than I thought. But at that point the truth was that no game sounded like very much fun. “No thanks, Grandpa.”

  “Something wrong, Eddie?”

  “Nah, it just doesn’t feel like Christmas. Maybe it’s the rain.”

  “Hmmm. Not Christmas? I’d better get rid of that tree, then,” he said with a smile much warmer than I deserved.

  I was thinking about telling him what had happened that morning, how I’d gotten a sweater instead of the bike that I deserved. If anyone would understand my disappointment, it was Grandpa. I figured if that went well, maybe I would apologize to Mom for the way I’d acted. The ninety minutes of silence in the car ride over had made the trip seem so long that the thought of enduring an equally silent ride home was almost unbearable.

  I was about to tell Grandpa the story when I caught sight of their Christmas tree. It was unlike me to not have already noticed it and done a thorough investigation. There were only a few presents under it.

  Grandpa caught me looking. “You know Grandma doesn’t put them there.”

  I was lost in thought, and I barely heard what Grandpa had said. I turned back to face him. “What?”

  “Grandma. She thinks that you and I take sneak peeks at the presents, so she won’t put them under the tree anymore. She hides them.”

  “Why would she think that?” A slight smile involuntarily took hold of my face. I wasn’t as experienced at lying as Grandpa was.

  “I have no idea.” Grandpa’s face gave nothing away. “But I do know this: If pirates hid their treasure the way Grandma hides her presents, they’d have all gone bankrupt. I’m getting socks and a new tool belt.”

  I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was. “What about me? What am I getting?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Eddie. I do know that you have some pajamas coming, but she hasn’t even wrapped them. I think she’s just going to put them in your dresser.” Grandpa looked away. “But other than that I couldn’t find any of yours. Say, would you mind helping me bring in some more firewood?”

  “No, I don’t mind.” It was really hard to say no to my grandfather and impossible to do it twice in a row.

  We trudged through what was left of a sloppy, wet snow to a long stack of firewood. I caught myself enjoying my attempts to completely hide my footprints inside my grandfather’s. It wasn’t hard; his feet seemed to be about three times bigger than mine.

  “Grandpa,” I whispered, “what do you mean you couldn’t find my presents?”

  Grandpa ignored my question as he piled sticks of wood into my cradled arms, making sure to add one more than I could comfortably carry. He tucked a single piece under his arm, stuck his hands in his coat pockets, and followed me back to the house.

  “There you are,” Grandma said as she opened the door for me. “We were beginning to think you two got lost.”

  Grandma knew better than anyone that Grandpa never got lost. Sure, he usually wasn’t where everyone else thought he should be, but Grandpa always knew where he was and, more importantly, why he was there.

  Grandpa winked at me. “What do you mean, dear? Eddie and I were just getting some wood.”

  “I thought maybe you’d gone into town without telling us,” she said with a smile.

  Whenever I’d visit, Grandpa looked for any excuse to take me into town. He could turn the simplest errand into an adventure in finding the gray area between the letter and spirit of Grandma’s law. A few summers earlier, Grandma asked him to go to the hardware store to pick up some new bags for the vacuum cleaner, and I tagged along. Instead of going to the one that was about ten minutes away, Grandpa drove us all the way to the far end of town to another hardware store. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why: This particular store happened to have a soft-serve ice cream counter in the back.

  We got back three hours later. Grandma didn’t even have to ask what happened; our ice cream mustaches gave us away. But before she could say a word, Grandpa pulled the vacuum bags out and gave her a big hug. It was really hard for anyone ever to be mad at him.

  A smile crept across my face as I thought about that trip.

  Mom was standing behind Grandma, wearing one of her gingham aprons. She saw me smile
, and she smiled back.

  As only a twelve-year-old could, I stupidly put up another wall and acted as though I wasn’t ready to give in yet.

  I looked right past her.

  If Grandpa was the king of telling stories, the dinner table was his court. It was always fun, but since Grandma made us wait to open our presents until after dinner, Grandpa tried to keep his stories shorter than usual on Christmas. He wanted to get to the tree just as much as I did.

  This year Grandpa seemed to be in an exceptional hurry. Mom and I knew he was up to something, but neither of us could figure out what it was. Finally, about halfway through dinner, Grandma apparently had had enough of his fidgeting. She turned to him and whispered, “Tomorrow, Edward.” Grandpa’s face revealed his disappointment.

  After the coffee was poured we all filed into the family room. Grandpa sat in his storytelling chair, Mom and Grandma sat on the couch. I went right to the tree. I was given the Santa hat; as usual, I was the designated present distributor. I got right to work.

  “Here you go, Grandpa,” I said as I brought him a present that was suspiciously light. Light as socks, I thought to myself. Grandpa winked at me as I put the box by his feet.

  Each time I went back to retrieve another box from under the tree I secretly hoped to find my name written on the tag—but it happened only twice. Even Mom had three presents.

  I slowly started to unwrap my first gift when I noticed that the piece of tape sealing one of the end flaps had a slight bubble in it. Grandpa. I looked up to give him my version of the “I know what you did” look, but he ignored my glare and concentrated intently on his present.

  Given the size of my two presents, I knew that neither would contain a bike, but I still held out hope—just as I had before opening my sweater earlier that morning. What if Grandpa wrapped up a picture of a bike? I would never put anything past Grandpa’s imagination, but I had to admit that it seemed like a stretch at this point.

  “Socks!” My thoughts were interrupted by Grandpa’s overly excited scream from across the room. Gosh, he was good at this.