On Christmas morning, my father in law Hank came up our front walk in Augusta with a pie in his hands and a smile on his face, and I knew exactly what he did not know. I am Carla Lindsey, forty one years old, and I stood in the doorway in my robe with my husband Mike beside me. The night before, Mike had stood for a long time in an empty closet. Then he had driven to the mall, which was open for two more hours, and he had come home with his arms full of bags and a look on his face I had never seen.
Our children, Ethan, nine, and Lily, six, were under the tree in their pajamas, staring at the pile. The bike, the dollhouse and the console had been replaced, every one of them, at a cost that Mike had not mentioned to me, and would not mention for a year. He had spent forty minutes in a toy aisle with a store employee who had listened to the whole story and had quietly given him a discount. On the biggest box under the tree, in his careful print, Mike had written one word. It said, “Dad.”
Hank sat down in the armchair with the pie on his knees, looked at the box, and laughed uncertainly. “For me?” he said. “Go on, Dad,” said Mike. The box was the size of a washing machine. It took Hank a minute to get the ribbon off, and the children gathered around him, breathless. When he lifted the lid, he saw that the box was nearly empty. In the bottom lay a small framed photograph and an envelope. The photograph showed Hank, thirty years younger, kneeling in the yard beside a little boy on a red bicycle.
An empty closet on Christmas Eve gave one wife the morning to bring a father in law back to her family in Augusta.
I gave my terms from the kitchen doorway, because my husband could not trust his voice. “Hank, Mike is not angry about the presents. He is hurt. The envelope in the box is a letter. In it he says that he loves you, and that he will not store another gift in your closet, ever. He says that he would like you to give Brenda and her grandchildren a Christmas out of your own pocket, as you once did for him. And he says that, if you are willing, he will help you do it.” Hank looked down at the photograph, and I saw his hands begin to shake.
“I did a wrong thing,” Hank said, in a low voice. “I saw those children with nothing, and I saw all that wrapping paper in my closet, and I thought, Mike will understand. I thought I was being a big man. I never asked.” He took out his handkerchief. “When you were seven, Mike, I could not afford that bicycle. I took a second job for four months to buy it. I never told you. I have been trying ever since to be the man who bought it.” Mike came across the room and knelt beside his chair.
At that moment the doorbell rang, and there stood Brenda herself, a small, gray haired woman in a Christmas sweater, with her daughter and four grandchildren behind her, all of them struggling under the weight of our gifts. The bike, the dollhouse and the console box were carried in like a parade. Brenda had seen the photographs on Facebook, and the comments from our friends, and had understood at once. “We are bringing these back,” she said. “I did not know they were not his.” The fifteen year old grandson, Tyler, clutching the console box, suddenly bolted off the porch toward their van, thinking he would hide it. Ethan and Lily, in their pajamas, ran out the front door and sat down in the middle of the driveway, directly behind the van, with their arms crossed. “You are not allowed to leave,” said Lily. Tyler looked at the two little children on the pavement, and began to laugh helplessly.
Brenda set down the dollhouse in the hall, took my hand in both of hers, and apologized again, with tears in her eyes. Then Mike did the thing I will never forget. He picked up the bicycle, pushed it back across the lawn, and set it in front of the smallest of the grandchildren of Brenda. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “It was always meant for somebody who needed it. I only wish I had been asked.” The little boy stared at the red bicycle. His mother put her face in her hands. Hank stood in the doorway, with the photograph held to his chest, nodding slowly.
The money consequences were modest, and they mattered. Mike had spent nine hundred and forty dollars at the mall, and Hank, on the twenty sixth of December, wrote him a check for the full amount. He went to the same mall with Brenda and bought gifts for the children who had been missing them, spending a good part of his savings, and he took a second job at the hardware store for three months to pay it back. He told me that he had never been so tired, or so happy, in thirty years. The credit card of Mike was paid off by March.
In the name of the mother of Mike, June, who passed in 2017, we started the June Lindsey Fund. It pays for Christmas gifts, holiday bicycles and warm coats for children whose families are struggling, in Richmond, Columbia and Burke counties. In the first year we delivered gifts to three hundred and ten children. One was a girl of eight from Hephzibah who had asked Santa only for a pair of boots. When the fund brought her a pair that fit, her mother cried in the hallway, and the girl wore them to bed.
The next Christmas Eve, Hank came to our house early, carrying his own gifts, wrapped in newspaper because he had run out of paper. He set them under our tree one by one, and he did not go home until every child had opened one. Brenda sat beside him on the sofa, in her Christmas sweater, with her four grandchildren in a row. When Lily climbed onto his lap, he said gruffly, “Next year I buy everything.” Mike looked at me over the heads of the children, and for the first time in two years, he laughed.