We still do the forty-dollar limit.
Shay still runs the drawing out of the same old hat.
But this year, when she stood up at Thanksgiving to explain the rule again, she added one line to it. A line that wasn’t there before.
“The limit is on what you spend,” she said. “Not on what you’re allowed to mean by it.”
Nobody argued with that either.
And I noticed that, when she said it, she looked over at me. Just for a second. Like she wanted me to know the line was mine to keep, if I wanted it.
I did.
Shay and I aren’t the kind of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law who call each other every week now. I didn’t expect that to change overnight. It hasn’t.
But she comes by on Sunday afternoons sometimes. More than she used to.
And twice this past summer, out of nowhere, she asked me to tell her something about Wendell she hadn’t heard before.
Both times, I could tell she was actually listening. Not just being polite to an old woman.
That’s more than I had before last Christmas. And I don’t take it lightly.
I think about Wendell more at Christmas than any other time of the year. I suppose that’s true for most widows.
And I think about that box, sitting on my granddaughter’s dresser. Holding nothing now but the memory of eleven lawns, and thirty-one dollars, and a boy who grew up to slip a ring on my finger before he’d even asked my father.
I didn’t need Shay to say she was sorry in front of everybody.
I didn’t need the room to turn against her.
I only needed one person in that house to open that lid far enough to find what was really inside it.
And as it turned out, I got exactly the one I was hoping for.
That’s the whole story.
Not a dramatic one, in the end.
Just a box. And a boy who used to be my husband. And a granddaughter with good hands, and better instincts than her mother gave her credit for that afternoon.
I let Shay finish her piece that day. Because I already knew mine was going to outlast it.
And this fall, watching the leaves come down outside my kitchen window the same way the snow will before long, I find I’m still glad I waited.
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