The Christmas Promise (Christmas Hope) (7 page)

He couldn’t let her come. He just couldn’t do it this time. “No.”

She fumbled for something to say. “Well, what do you want me to—”

“I don’t care,” he said.

She was quiet on the other end; then the line went dead.

Carla crept to the door and opened it, keeping an eye on Thomas as she pulled it closed. “Where are you going?” Thomas said.

She jumped at his voice. “I need to check on Donovan,” she said.

He rolled over, watching her. “He’s fine. Get back in bed.”

“He’s been alone a long time,” Carla said, whispering. “I’ll be right back.”

“Two minutes,” Thomas said, leaning up on his elbow.

She stepped across the hall to Donovan’s room and locked his door behind her. She knew a lock wouldn’t keep Thomas out, but it was all she could do. Donovan was watching TV like she’d asked him to do when Thomas arrived. She sat down next to him and he jumped in her lap, making her flinch. The bruises on her legs were tender. “I need you to get dressed,” she whispered, pulling a pair of pants off the end of his bed.

“Why?”

“Shh,” she said, helping him into the pants. “I need to take you to Miss Glory’s tonight.”

“Why?” he said, struggling to get a sweatshirt over his head.

“Because you shouldn’t stay here tonight,” she said, tying his sneakers.

“Why not?”

She held his hand and put her finger to her lips. “Stop asking questions and be quiet.” She turned the doorknob and slowly pulled back the door, creeping into the hallway with Donovan. She grabbed her coat off the rack by the front door and dragged Donovan to her car.

Dalton, Heddy, Erin, and I dumped out several garbage bags and sorted through the clothing inside. Each winter I found bags of clothing sitting on the porch, but this year there seemed to be more than ever. We threw away the clothing that was too tattered to be usable and made piles of nice, warm clothes we could include in some of the packages we were making. Miriam never offered to help. She sat at the kitchen window, staring at the huge construction Dumpster that was sitting in her driveway.

The doorbell rang at eight thirty. I took huge steps over the piles of clothing and opened the door a crack, smiling when I saw Donovan.
“Hola!”
I said, un-latching the chain lock.

“Hola!”
he said, marching past me.

Carla stood on the porch with her back to the door. “Carla?” I said, stepping outside.

She wiped her face, turning to me. “I’m in a bind tonight, Miss Glory. I’m going to work but don’t have anyone to watch Donovan. I know you have all these people staying with you, but is it okay if he stays over?”

“Sure.” I studied Carla’s face. “Are you all right?”

Carla nodded. “I’m just cold and worried that I wouldn’t have a place for him, you know. I need to run or I’ll be late.” She leaned her head inside the doorway, kissing Donovan. “Be a good boy for Miss Glory. Yes?” He nodded and she walked past me down the steps. I watched her get inside the car and then shut the front door behind me.

“Who’s this?” Miriam asked as I hung Donovan’s coat on the hall tree.

“This,” I said, proudly, “is Donovan, a longtime friend of mine. Isn’t that right?” I held up my hand and he gave me a high five.

Miriam eyed the small suitcase. “Is he staying here?”

“For the night.”

“There isn’t any more room,” she said. “Look at this place. It’s an absolute mess. This rubbish needs to be taken to the street for the rag and bone man, but you’re bringing another person in on top of all of it!”

I jerked straight and felt the curls bounce around on top of my head. “Go to your room, Miriam.” Dalton, Heddy, and Erin pretended to be knee-deep in clothes.

“I am not a child, Gloria!”

“Then stop acting like one.”

Miriam slammed the door to her room and I sighed. There was just no way to bridge the gap between us.

Chaz packed an extra sandwich and showed up for work at nine, just as Ray was leaving. “Has anybody heard anything about Mike?” he asked.

“I haven’t heard anything,” Ray said, glancing at him. “You don’t look so good. Why don’t you just go home? The store can go one night without somebody on duty.”

Chaz set the plastic grocery bag that contained his dinner on the desk. “I need the money,” he said.

“I hear that.” Ray zipped up his coat. “I talked with my wife and we’d like to have you over for Christmas dinner. You up for that?”

Chaz hung up his coat and closed the locker. Ray needed to get out before Donovan came racing through the door. “I’m eating with some relatives that day.”

“I didn’t think you had any family,” Ray said.

“I have an aunt about ninety minutes from here.”

Ray threw a backpack over his shoulder. “Just making sure. Didn’t want you to spend Christmas alone.” He clapped Chaz on the back and left.

Chaz watched the monitors and saw the janitorial team working in Menswear, Juniors’, and the housewares department. The two outside monitors showed Carla getting out of her car at the loading dock entrance. Chaz spread out the sandwich and chips for Donovan. After several minutes Chaz walked up the stairs to the main floor, looking for him. Carla was pushing her cart outside the ladies’ restroom and he caught her before she went inside. She was wearing small headphones on her ears and didn’t see him. He touched her arm and she flinched. She looked terrible. “Hey!” he said. “Where’s Donovan?”

She took one headphone away from her ear. “Miss Glory could watch him tonight.” She snapped the headphones back on and heaved the cart into the restroom. Chaz felt lost. Donovan had become a regular part of his night, and as he looked out over the empty store buzzing with vacuums, he was as lonely as he’d ever been.

He went down to the mailroom and turned on the lights. High on the top shelf, below the air return, sat a large white envelope. He climbed up on the counter and pulled it down; it was from GKD Systems and was addressed to Judy Luitweiler. He walked down the hall to the back entrance and pushed through the door. The Dumpster was at the far end of the loading dock. He ripped the envelope to shreds before tossing it up into the Dumpster. In the rush of the season, he knew that no one would be wondering where the results of those prints were. He slammed the Dumpster lid shut. Now he could collect his last paycheck without any problems, and no one would ever know.

Miriam turned the lights on in the kitchen at one thirty. She jumped when she saw me sitting at the table in the dark, my hands wrapped around a cup of tea. A red notebook sat opened on the table in front of me.

“I’m sorry, Miriam,” I said. “Did I wake you?”

She squinted in the light and moved to a chair, sitting down. “I just seemed to jump awake and couldn’t go back to sleep.”

I swirled the last of the tea around in the cup and watched it slosh up and down the sides. “Another case of the jump-awakes,” I said. “I jumped awake at twelve forty-two, the same time I always wake up on this day.”

“Why is that?” she said.

I drank the last of the tea and stared at the empty bottom. “It’s the time Walt died.”

Miriam was quiet. “I lost Lynn at three oh-seven in the afternoon, and no matter what I’m doing on that day I just know what time it is and everything stops.”

I nodded, cinching my robe tighter. “Lynn was a very kind man. He was good to you. I could tell.”

She laughed. “He
was
a kind man. People loved Lynn. His students admired him and I adored him. He had a goodness in him that attracted people. Although we were a couple, everyone just naturally took to him over me. He was very affable with people. I’ve never been that way.”

“I never noticed,” I said.

She shook her head and smiled. “I can be an opinionated snob.” I didn’t say anything. “You know it’s true, Gloria!”

“Well, I might have phrased it differently,” I said.

She brushed her hand in the air. “However you phrase it, it’s all the same. I’ve said things that I’ve regretted. I’ve let the door close on relationships and I’ve regretted it. Lynn never did that.” She leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms. “What was your husband like?”

I looked up at the ceiling and sighed, smiling at the thought of him. “He was a tall and splendid man. I met Walt when I was eighteen years old. He was thirty-four and my mother begged me not to get involved with him, but he was so different from the boys in our small Georgia town. He had a mind and a soul that I just loved being around. We married and my mother thought I’d lost my mind. You know when I got married no one, not even my mother, explained the lifetime of commitment that it would take to make our marriage work. Nobody told me that during that first year or two you just kind of muddle your way through.”

“Lynn and I managed to muddle through twenty-five years together,” she said.

“Thirty-five for us.”

“And how many children?”

I stood and walked into the dark living room, picking up an eight-by-ten photo from the mantel. I handed the family picture to Miriam. It had been taken when I was in my thirties and still had curves in the right places. Walt stood beside me, along with our three older children, and our toddler sat on my lap. “That’s Andrew, our oldest. He was seventeen there. He has three children and is a computer programmer now.” I pointed to our daughter with long, brown hair. “That’s Stephanie. She lives just about ten minutes from here and has two children. She’s a medical transcriber and is able to work at home. That’s Daniel,” I said, pointing to our son with reddish brown hair. “He was thirteen in that picture but now has two children and works for a land-development company in Georgia.” I pointed to the toddler on my lap. “And that’s Matthew, our youngest.”

Miriam looked at him. “What does he do now?”

I shook my head, staring at his face. “I’m not sure.”

“Is he married?”

“No one knows,” I said, taking the picture and wiping the dust off with my sleeve. “He left home when he was seventeen, right before his father died, and we haven’t seen him since.”

Miriam was speechless. I could see the wheels turning in her head. All this time, and we knew so little about each other. “Why, Gloria?”

I poured another cup of hot water over a fresh tea bag and fetched a cup for Miriam. “So many reasons, I guess. He hated school and did poorly in it. Of course, we said he had to go to school and he hated it even more. Daniel also struggled through every subject, but he liked school and all my kids got involved in sports and music, but Matt was just so different. He could never find a place for himself at school, or anywhere else for that matter. If there was a rule he was set on breaking it, and if we told him he had to do something he did the opposite. Seems everything was an effort for him.” I put the cup of tea in front of Miriam, along with cream and sugar. “For years after he left, I just kept replaying everything over and over in my mind, wondering what Walt and I had done wrong, what we should have done differently, because we made mistakes. I know we did.” I reached for a napkin in the middle of the table and handed it to Miriam. “But I know I made so many more than Walt. When he got sick I focused all my energy on him; I was so involved with every breath, that I couldn’t pay attention to…” I stopped. “I don’t know. If I could go back. We always say that, don’t we?”

Miriam rested her chin in her hand, shaking her head. “You can raise all your children in the same house, with the same rules, the same parents, the same patterns, but they all come away with a different outlook. My own two did. Gretchen calls all the time. Jerrod never has time. Gretchen is full of life. Jerrod can suck the life out of a room in a matter of minutes.”

I propped my elbows up on the table, holding the cup. “I had a baby girl when Matthew was ten, and he was so excited, but we knew that Anna was very sick and the doctors didn’t give us any hope. Every day Matt prayed for his sister and Walt and I tried to explain that sometimes people don’t get well, but he never believed it. He never believed that God would allow a child to die. But she did, and something changed in him.”

“Was he angry?”

“It wasn’t anger but disappointment, I think. He was disappointed in God and in the rest of us. Matthew was never mouthy to us. He was quiet, which in a lot of ways was worse. When Walt got sick, Matt just turned everything inward. Couldn’t take it. Walter was sick for only about six weeks. That’s it. Matt ran off two weeks before Walt died. The thought of his father dying was just more than he could handle. I was a mess and Walt kept saying, ‘He’ll be back, Gloria. He’ll come home. I’m praying that God won’t let him rest until he comes home.’” I ran my hand back and forth over the notebook. “Even as he was dying, Walt was the strong one.”

I opened the notebook. “This was Matthew’s journal. I didn’t even know he had been keeping a journal over the years, but there are pages and pages of his thoughts in here.” I turned to a page and started reading. “Today some doctors told Dad that he’s sick. He and Mom have been quiet all day.” I flipped the page. “Dad is dying and nobody’s doing anything about it. He and Mom went to some office today and made sure the will was in place and insurance was taken care of. In the meantime, while they’re filling out paperwork, Dad keeps dying.” I sipped some tea and cleared my throat, turning the page. “I’m watching Mom love Dad right now. She’s curled up next to him on the couch and holding his hand.” My throat tightened and a tear rolled down my cheek; I flicked it away with my finger. I took a moment, finding my voice. “Dad was in bed all day today. I watched Mom take care of him and she talked to him like it was just a regular day, but her face is sad. He reached for her hand and she sat on the edge of the bed looking at him. I think she’s memorizing his face now.” I covered my mouth and paused. Miriam sat in the silence, waiting. “I can’t watch Dad die anymore. This shouldn’t happen to him or Mom. He always had faith, but how is that helping him now? God doesn’t care. I’m not even sure God knows what’s happening down here. If he did he’d step in a lot more and help people.” I closed the notebook, wiping my nose. “And that was his last entry.”

“I’m so sorry, Gloria. I had no idea,” she said. I used a napkin to wipe my face and wadded it up in my hand. “And you’ve had no word from him…ever?”

“Nothing. We don’t know anything, but keep praying that something will get through to him.”

“But what if your prayers aren’t helping?” she asked.

I snapped my head up. “Of course they are!”

“But what if they aren’t?”

“What if they
are
?”

Her voice was soft. “But Matthew hasn’t come home.”

“It has to be his choice,” I said. “We’re not God’s pawns. We’re free to do whatever we want.” We were both quiet.

I disappeared into the living room and took an envelope from the branches of the Christmas tree, showing it to Miriam. “Twenty or so years ago we went to one of Andrew’s basketball games. They were playing a team from some little town in Georgia, a real depressed area, and the boys on the team were playing in jeans and shorts and anything they could get their hands on. You could tell they just didn’t believe in themselves and they played pitifully that night. At one time Walt said, ‘I wish I could buy those boys some uniforms.’ I didn’t say anything but I figured out where I could buy some uniforms, and at Christmas I put an envelope in the branches of the tree for Walt. It was his Christmas present and it read, ‘A gift of uniforms has been given to the Fighting Eagles in your name.’ I even included a picture of the team wearing their brand-new uniforms. Every year Walt and I tried to outdo each other with those envelopes in the branches.” I tapped the envelope in my palm. “This is the last one I put on the tree for him. It’s a promise that I’d never stop looking for Matthew.”

“Is that why you asked Erin to stay here? Is that why you rummage through bags of dirty clothes and clean filthy refrigerators?” I ran the envelope back and forth in my hand and felt tears rimming my eyes. She leaned onto the table, looking at me. “Gloria, do you blame yourself for his leaving?” I didn’t answer.

I stared down at the aged envelope and ran my finger across it. “My father used to say, ‘Find what breaks your heart and get busy.’ Just thinking that Matthew was out on the street broke my heart, and every time I looked at street people I’d feel it all over again and knew I had to do something to help. I’ve always prayed that someone, somewhere would do the same for Matt.”

“He has no idea you moved here?”

I crossed into the living room and placed the envelope back among the branches. “No,” I said. “But our relatives are still in our old town. He could find me through them.” I sat at the kitchen table and folded my hands under my chin. “I was so lonely in Georgia. All our kids were gone. My husband was gone, and it was that silence, that deafening silence of widowhood, that just about drove me crazy. Walt had a recliner, an ugly green plaid one that we’d had for years, and he sat in it for as long as he could. After he died I sat in that chair all the time, wanting to be close to him. I don’t think I got out of it the first eight months after he died. But then Stephanie called and said she was having a baby, so I got out of it. Then I got out of it the next day and the next and I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ I kept thinking that Matthew would just come waltzing through the door, but that wasn’t going to happen and I knew it. So I either sold off or gave to the kids most of our things, hauled the recliner off to Goodwill, and moved up here to be close to my first grandchild. Life is stronger than death, and I knew I needed to kick death in the choppers and get back to living again. Grandchildren have a way of bringing us to our senses.”

She picked up her cup and held it in front of her. “And you keep the porch light on for Matthew,” she said. I nodded. “Well, don’t I feel foolish?”

“You didn’t know.”

“I don’t know anything, it seems. But if Lynn were still here he’d know. He always knew about people.”

“You know now,” I said.

“I have not been very kind, Gloria.”

“I have not been very kind, either, and I’m sorry for that. I even told people that your British accent was as real as the color of your hair.” She laughed and propped her elbows on the table. “It seems I can help a stranger in the street but I can’t help the stranger beside me.” I leaned back in my chair. “I took too much pride in my ability to read character.” I stopped. “In my inability, I should say.” I was anxious to change the subject. “Would you like to get married again?”

She reared her head back and laughed. “Oh my, no! Two husbands in one lifetime are enough. I do miss the companionship, though.” She danced her fingers in front of her, as if conjuring up the plan of the century. “If there was a way to join two houses together, separate them with a long breezeway of some sort, I could live in my house and a man in his house and we could share meals and good conversation together.” Her eyes lit up with the thought. “But after dinner he’d just trot off to his home and I’d stay in mine. Who wouldn’t be up for that?”

“It’s revolutionary!” I said.

She cupped her hands around the tea, staring into it. “If I could have had Lynn longer, that would have been wonderful. He was the secret to our marriage. If only I could have met him when I was twenty instead of thirty-five.”

“How long did you say you were married?” I asked.

“Twenty-five years.”

I thought for a moment, looking down at the table. “So you were a widow at sixty?”

“Yes.” She bolted upright. “I mean no! I married Lynn when I was…” Her mind raced for the numbers. “I was twenty-two when I married him!” I rested my forehead in my hands but my shoulders began to shake. Miriam jabbed her finger into the table. “What is wrong with you, Gloria? Why are…” She threw her hands in the air. “Oh, just forget it. But I
refuse
to be a member of AARP!”

I smacked the table, laughing. “Don’t you take advantage of Senior Citizens Day at Wilson’s?”

“Never!” she said. “I don’t even go downtown on Wednesdays because people look at me and automatically think I’m old. I’m not old.”

I straightened my back, saluting her. “Neither am I. As a matter of fact, I never even feel old until I go out in public. Then it’s all downhill from there.”

Miriam cackled and doubled over, holding the table for support. “Have you ever looked at yourself upside down in a mirror?”

“What?” I’d never heard of such a thing. Miriam ran for the toaster and held it low. I bent over in the chair, focusing on my reflection, and screamed. “What is that?” Miriam lost her balance and stumbled into the wall, snorting. “I looked like an alien!” I rubbed my eyes, erasing the image from my mind. “I scared myself!”