The Christmas Note

by Donna VanLiere

  I begin to say, “I don’t really know anyone and—”

  “Now don’t make a lot of ballyhoo out of nothing,” Gloria says, “because you know Gretchen and now you know us. And you can plainly see that we’re about as simple as people come.”

  “I wish you would speak for yourself, Gloria,” Miriam says.

  I twist the napkin in my hand, glancing at Gloria. “Okay.” I can’t believe I’ve accepted an invitation to eat with strangers. “I’ll be baking a difference, by the way.”

  She throws her arms in the air. “Gretchen asked you! Good girl!” She grabs her head as if a lightning bolt just struck her. “Did she tell you about Robert Layton?”

  “I work for him, actually.”

  She bangs the table again, and Miriam grabs her head this time. “Would you please stop making that confounded noise, Gloria!”

  “Well, this is just downright providential! Of all the people to work for in this town and you’re working for somebody who can help you find your family.”

  Family. The word lodges in my throat and heat breaks out on my back. The search sounds so easy when Gloria talks about it, and she makes me smile. “It all still seems so crazy,” I say. They’re looking at me, waiting for more. “All these years I thought it was just Ramona and me. Now … someone else is out there who may not even want to know about me. It’s a strange way to piece a family together.”

  “What?” Gloria says. “It means that your siblings were adopted, and that’s the most powerful, beautiful story of love there is, isn’t that right, Miriam?” Miriam smiles. “Both of Miriam’s children are adopted, and they are two of the most loved kids I’ve ever met. Love is learned, you know, and your two siblings were loved long before they were even born and have grown up in families of love. I just know it. And that means they will only have love for you, too.”

  I look at Miriam. “It’s true,” she says.

  “For all I know, it’s going to be hard to track them down,” I say.

  Gloria leans close to me. “Just keep a little faith, babe.” I don’t even react to that because I’ve never had any faith to begin with, let alone even a little of it. I wanted faith; the kind that Mrs. Schweiger had that just spilled over and out of her as natural as a breath, but I’ve never known what that’s like. Gloria seems to read my mind and moves her hand to mine, patting it. “When you say ‘I believe,’ it has the same power as letting a tiger out of its cage.”

  Sometimes you meet people, total strangers, who feel like home. Even if that home is filled with noise and dysfunction and silence that is beyond bearing, it’s still home, with its secondhand furniture, worn comforters, and smiles from people who love you despite your lopsided personality and crooked moods. Gloria and Miriam make me feel like I’m home. “I’ll talk to Jodi when I get to work in a few minutes.”

  Gloria lifts her fists into the air as if she just won a race. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  She nods, looking at me. “For thirty-nine years you never knew you had family out there. Now everything has changed just like that,” she says, snapping her fingers.

  * * *

  The wind is sharp as I walk the few blocks to the law office, but I don’t feel it against my face. My mind is crackling with what will happen in the days ahead. Somewhere there is a woman in this world who is my sister and a man who is my brother. I shake my head, still not believing that Ramona lived with that secret her entire life. My siblings could be wasting their days like Ramona did, living from bottle to bottle or they could be like Gretchen and Gloria and Miriam. I know how my luck runs, and I hold little hope that my siblings won’t be like Ramona.

  When I walk into the office I notice that Jodi isn’t in her office, and I wave at Susan at the front desk as I walk to the room at the back, where I work. I sit at the computer and type in the name Kay Hart. It’s a long shot, but I’m hoping to find Ramona’s sister still alive so she can tell me if I have a sister. A two-year-old obituary for a Gene Riggins in San Antonio pops up and I read through it, spotting Kay’s name, “survived by his wife, Kay Hart Riggins.” I have no idea if it’s her. I never knew she was married, and Ramona never said anything. I do a search of the white pages in San Antonio for Gene Riggins and find a number. My cell phone is in my backpack, and I reach for it but realize that if Kay has caller ID she’ll recognize my name. I decide to use the office phone and dial the number. It rings, but I can barely hear it over the sound my heart is making in my ears.

  “Hello.” Sweat sits on my lip. Is that Kay’s voice? “Hello?”

  I’m hoping that Ramona shared secrets with her sister and that Kay can tell me whether Louanne, whoever Louanne is, is my sister.

  “Hello,” she says again, sounding like Ramona.

  I try to find my voice. Kay could be the key to letting the tiger out of its cage.

  Eight

  Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

  —WILLA CATHER

  GRETCHEN

  I like distractions. Some people can’t handle them. If something distracts them from their already planned day, it drives them bonkers. Not me. I like busyness because it keeps my mind from slipping here or there. Gloria’s Bake a Difference project and helping Melissa find her siblings are great mind occupiers for me. Since Mom and Melissa met on Monday, I decided to strike while that iron was hot and invited them to come over Friday afternoon to start baking. Mom insisted we come to her house since she has the bigger kitchen. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday looking for a job and recipes online and found great ones for turtle candies, German chocolate cake, hummingbird cake, chocolate raspberry cake, and caramel candy. (I didn’t find any job postings.) I don’t know which ones we’ll end up making, but all the recipes were supposed to freeze well and Mom said we could store whatever we made in her freezer until the bake sale.

  I haven’t seen Melissa this week. She’s worked late the last three days at the law office, but at eight twenty, as I finish packing the kids’ lunches for tomorrow, I notice her car pull into her driveway. I creep down the hall to check on Ethan and Em and see that they’re asleep. This first week of school has worn them out. I pull their door closed and walk to the sofa, falling into it. This is always the worst part of my day. Just sitting alone with everything quiet except my thoughts that make a tremendous racket. A knock startles me and I jump to my feet, peering through the peephole in the door. Melissa is standing on my dark stoop, and I flick on the outside light, opening the door.

  “Your mail was put in my box today,” she says.

  I take it and step aside. “Thanks. Come on in.” I’m not sure if I’m inviting her because it’s the neighborly thing to do or if I want to drown out the noise inside my head. She stands as if glued to the front stoop, and I motion with the mail. “Come in! Have you eaten?”

  “I was going to have some cereal.”

  I lead her to the kitchen. “I have spaghetti.” I open the fridge and take out the bowls of noodles and sauce I’d put in there a couple of hours ago. “It seems like I always have spaghetti because my kids love it.” She looks uncomfortable just standing there, and I look at the table. “Have a seat. Would you like iced tea or water? Those are my only choices right now.”

  “Water’s fine,” she says, looking around. “Looks like you’re all moved in.”

  I cover the plate of spaghetti and put it in the microwave. “For the most part. Still need to hang things, but my dad’s coming to help with them.” I reach for a glass and fill it with ice and water and set it in front of Melissa.

  “Thanks.” She moves the glass back and forth in front of her, watching the ice. I don’t know if something’s on her mind or if she’s tired or doesn’t want to be here or a combination of all three. The microwave dings, and I set the spaghetti on the table. She stare
s down at it. “I haven’t eaten spaghetti in years.”

  Her voice always sounds so tired or uninterested. “Years!” I say, getting a cup of hot tea ready.

  “The fast-food restaurants I eat at don’t serve it, and I never go out at night and I can’t make it so, yeah, it’s been years.”

  When the water’s hot, I sit across from her and dunk the tea bag up and down in my cup. “You can make it. It’s easy.”

  She takes a bite and I can tell she enjoys it. “No, I can’t. I can’t make anything, really. If it doesn’t come in a box, I can’t make it.”

  “Did your mom cook from a box?”

  She makes a noise in the back of her throat. “Ramona cooked from a can and ate out of a box. Growing up, I thought my dad must have worked for either Campbell’s or Kellogg’s.” She’s quiet, but I can tell she’s angry.

  “You never knew him?”

  Melissa laughs while taking another bite. “I doubt Ramona knew him!” She moves the meatballs around on her plate and talks into one. “Your mom is great.”

  I reach for the Tupperware container of cookies behind me on the counter and open it, pulling one out for my tea. “My mom can’t cook, either!”

  “But she was there, wasn’t she?” Melissa asks, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “She looked at your homework and sat across from you at the dinner table and showed up when you had a part in the sixth-grade play and searched the house for your stuffed bunny at bedtime. She did that, right?”

  “Yeah, she did.”

  She’s cutting a meatball into tiny pieces with her fork. “When I met her and Gloria, it was like being with a family I knew when I was a kid. That mom held on to my hand the same way that Gloria did. Like I meant something. That’s the way your mom looked at me, and I knew that she and Gloria were great moms.”

  “Oh, Mom has her quirks, believe me,” I say.

  “And the only reason you know her quirks is because she was there,” she says, sounding tired.

  We use the silence to eat. My mother never could cook and she was terrible at crafts and spent way too much time thinking about what to wear or how she looked, but she has been a great mom. I can’t look at her and think any of the things that Melissa must think of her mother. I finish the cookie and look at her. “When I was a teenager my mom and dad divorced. We went from all of us under one roof to three of us and Dad across town in an apartment. He eventually met another woman and moved to Arizona and became part of her family. Her kids called him Dad because they were so young when he married Liz. I’d sit in tenth grade math class and think about those snotty-nosed kids calling my father Dad while I went home to a house without him in it.” Melissa is quiet, awkward is more like it. It seems she doesn’t know how to carry on a conversation so I carry on without her. “I blamed Mom for everything. She was married briefly before Dad, when she was young. I brought that up and told her she didn’t know how to be married. It just seemed to me that she could have done more to keep Dad in our lives. I hated her, I think. I wouldn’t talk to her for months. It was awful. I loved my dad. I loved them together. I thought they were good, that everything was fine. I didn’t know what was wrong about them. I still don’t know.”

  “Your mom never remarried?”

  Finally, she speaks! I wasn’t sure if she was even listening. I reach for another cookie. “She did. After divorcing Dad, she married a college professor named Len and he was a good man. They were great together, but…” I think about it. “But I missed her with Dad. I wanted my kids to know them as grandparents together, not apart. Dad’s marriage failed several years ago but he still lives in Arizona. He has grandchildren there. His life is there and Mom’s was with Len. Len was good to Mom and he was good for her. He kept her grounded. Maybe that was Dad’s problem. Maybe he let Mom get the best of him. I don’t know.”

  Melissa finishes and twists the napkin around her index finger. “What happened to Len?”

  “He died a few years ago, and then Mom and Gloria became best friends. She’s done more for Mom than anybody in this world,” I say, laughing.

  “Ramona never had anybody.” She says it with such gavel-rap finality.

  “No one?”

  She untwists the napkin and starts wrapping it around another finger. “She had lots of men—good-looking men, some of them married, and she’d use them for money and booze, something to eat, you know. They were after one thing but she didn’t care. She played that game for a long time. Sometimes a guy would wise up and leave her alone but she could always find another idiot and string him along. Even when her looks started to fade she could still find some desperate fool. She never had one of them who stayed. Not one staying man or one staying friend.”

  “Do you hate her?” I’m surprised I asked that but watch her.

  She drums her fingers on the table, the napkin looking like a poorly wrapped bandage around her middle finger. “I can’t hate her. I hate everything she did and everything she didn’t do. I hate everything she was, but I can’t hate her. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Sure it does.”

  She slides her plate away from her and pushes her chair back. I can tell that Melissa thinks she’s uncovered too much.

  “Thanks for this.”

  I reach for the plate. “Hey!” I say, remembering. “Did you talk to your boss about finding your siblings?”

  She looks small and sunken now. “He and Jodi weren’t in on Friday when I wanted to talk to them.” She twists her mouth and rattles the bottom of the glass on the table. “And then I lost my nerve after that.”

  “Why?”

  She looks exhausted and defeated. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to call my aunt and ask her about a girl she told me about years ago … a girl she said looked so much like me she could be my sister.”

  “Have you called her?”

  “I did, but I hung up.”

  I’m not good at pep talks or encouraging people to buck up, but I give it my best shot. “So there’s a chance your aunt knows something?” She nods. “Then that’s a simple call. If the trail stops with your aunt, then what?”

  Melissa looks at me with a look that says I know the answer as well as she does. “I look at Ramona’s Social Security number every day,” she says. “And I know she wrote that number down at each hospital she gave birth in. Those numbers are the key.”

  “So if it’s that easy then … you know what? I’ll do it.” She looks at me. “Get the papers, fill them out, and I’ll turn them in for you.”

  She looks shocked and confused. “No, no. I’ll do it.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll…”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  Her eyes begin to twinkle and her mouth turns up. “I will do it myself.”

  “No, you won’t. Let me have the papers.”

  “I am not going to give you the papers. I will do it.”

  I cross my arms over my chest. “When?” She starts to open her mouth. “If I call the law office tomorrow and ask Robert Lawton if you turned the papers in, what will he say?”

  “First of all, he won’t take your call because you will have called him Robert Lawton and not Layton.”

  “He’ll take my call. I can sound very convincing on the phone.”

  “Second of all, you don’t even know Ramona’s full name. Thirdly—”

  “Three strikes. You’re out! I’m calling and getting the papers tomorrow.”

  She stands and walks to the door. “No, you’re not. I am getting the papers.”

  “So when I call and ask—”

  She opens the door and walks to the stoop. “You are not calling.”

  “You just watch me, sister! I will call so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

  I can tell she’s laughing as she walks on the sidewalk to her condo. “You are a nosy neighbor,” she says, her back to me.

  “You’re still baking a difference tomorrow, right?” I yell into the blackness.


  “I don’t bake!”

  “Okay! Be at my mom’s right after work. I left her address in an envelope in your mailbox.”

  Maybe it’s because she’s a good distraction or that my life doesn’t seem so sad compared to hers or maybe it’s because she’s so different from me, but for whatever reason, I think I’m really starting to like that woman.

  Nine

  Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.

  —JOSEPH ADDISON

  MELISSA

  I sink into the sofa and stare at the phone. Before I talk with Jodi at the office I really want to clear up this Kay thing. If I don’t get this over with, I really believe that Gretchen will show up at the law office and ask for the papers. I dig through my backpack for the number and dial Kay’s number again. The phone clicks on the other end. “Hello.”

  I’m nervous and my breath is short. “Kay?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Melissa.” She’s quiet. “Ramona’s daughter.”

  “Sure. Oh!” She’s surprised and doesn’t know what to say. That makes two of us.