The Christmas Note (8 page)

“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 stares 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.

—
J
OSEPH
A
DDISON

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.

“I saw on the Internet that your husband died two years ago. Sorry. I never knew you were married, but that’s … sorry.”

“We were married twenty-three years. I have two children. How are you, Melissa? Where do you live and—”

I don’t let her finish. “I thought you should know that Ramona died a few days ago.”

There’s no noise on her end. “It’s been a lot of years since I’ve seen her. I sent her Christmas cards, but a few years ago they started to come back to me and I knew she had moved again and didn’t tell me. She always was such an odd—” She stops. “How’d she die?”

“Heart.” She makes a sound in her throat. “Kay? Years ago … years ago you said I looked like a girl named Louanne. Do you remember that?”

“Louanne Delgado. Sure. You looked like sisters.”

My heart speeds up when she says that. “Is she my sister?”

There’s no sound. “What?”

“Is Louanne my sister? Is she Ramona’s daughter?”

“Louanne is Jake and Adele’s girl.”

I’m not convinced. “Jake was one of Ramona’s men, right?”

She laughs. “No! They worked together at the factory and Ramona tried every which way to get to him, but that man was married for keeps. Drove your mom nuts.”

“How do you know nothing happened? Why do Louanne and I look so much alike?”

“I don’t know! It’s just one of them weird things when strangers look alike.”

I’m getting angry, disappointed, or frustrated; I can’t tell. “You know Ramona had two other kids, right?”

“No, I never knew that. How do you know?”

“She left a note, telling me. I thought maybe Louanne was my sister because you said something years ago and Ramona got angry.”

“Bit my head off. I remember. She always was short-tempered. Wouldn’t talk to me for a year or more after that.”

“Maybe she thought you found her out. Louanne could be my sister.”

“No.” Her voice is soft. “It was a stupid thing of me to say. I was just teasing Ramona because I knew how much she wanted to get at Jake, and I thought it was so strange that Louanne and you looked so much alike, but she’s not your sister.”

“She could be. She—”

Kay cuts me off. “Jake and Adele moved to Florida when Louanne was ten. He never even met Ramona until Louanne was twelve or so and he started working at the factory.”

Air is squeezed out of my lungs and I hold the phone limp in my hand, hoping for something to say. In a desperate way, I was hoping Louanne would be the end of my search.

“I stay in touch with Jake and Adele,” Kay says. “I’ve seen pictures of Louanne over the years and now you don’t look anything alike. Isn’t that funny?” I don’t respond. “I’m sorry about your mom. There’ll never be another Ramona.”

“Let’s hope,” I say.

“Will you let me know if you find your siblings?”

I tell her I will and hang up, worn-out from it all.

*   *   *

Josh is clocking in at Wilson’s as I’m getting off work. He’s so different from the other teenagers Wilson’s has hired every year around this time. He shows up several minutes before his scheduled time, and if he owns a cell phone, I’ve never seen it. One teenage girl texted as she sorted the mail until Mr. Wilson saw her one afternoon. Her mail room career ended that day. She was crushed.

“Hi, Melissa,” he says, hanging his coat.

“You’re in time for the shipment,” I say, grabbing the shipping manifest.

“My grandma’s better, so I won’t be bolting out of here one day after all.” I’m ready to go but can tell he wants to tell me more so I wait. “She got out of the hospital, and my mom flew to New Mexico to bring her and Gramps to stay with us for a while.”

I open the door so he doesn’t draw this conversation out. “That’s great. What was wrong with her?”

“She had a mild heart attack. She blames all the German food she’s eaten all her life.” He sees that I’m ready to go and reaches for the shipment manifest. “See you around.”