“Go get Grandma!” Eli shouted, over and over, and the last thing I saw before the screen went dark was my grandson standing in the middle of the living room of the lake cabin with the letter of his grandfather held over his head like a flag. “Grandpa says go get her! Grandpa says!” I sat in my recliner with the phone in my hand and the television murmuring a carol, and my heart was beating so hard that it hurt. For a long moment, I did not know whether to laugh or cry.
I did neither. I got up, took my coat from the hook, and found my keys. I do not know why. Perhaps I knew in my bones. It was twenty minutes to the lake, over wet black roads with the Christmas lights of the houses blurring on either side. I drove in my good green sweater and my house slippers, with my purse beside me on the seat. When I pulled into the gravel drive, I saw the colored lights on the porch, shining in all their old glory. And at the door stood Eli, in his pajamas, waiting.
He ran down the steps and into my arms, so hard that my coat buttons dug into my ribs. “Grandma, you came!” he cried. “I told Dad you would. I told him Grandpa said.” Over his head I saw my son standing in the doorway, gray and silent, with his hands hanging at his sides. Brianne was behind him, her face stiff as a plank. The parents of Brianne sat at the kitchen table looking at their coffee. Nobody said merry Christmas. Eli took my hand and led me inside.
A man who knows he is dying may write ten letters for ten Christmases, and the second one may be the one that finally brings his family back to the table.
He sat me in the big chair by the fireplace, the one Roy had built from a hickory log, and put the paper in my lap. “You read it, Grandma,” he said. “I did the hard words wrong.” I put on my glasses. The first page I knew, since it was the one he had read on the phone. But the second page, headed in capital letters with the name of my son, I had never seen. I looked at Nathan. He nodded very slightly. His chin was shaking.
I read it aloud, slowly, in my steadiest voice. Nathan, it said. If you are reading this, your mother is not at this table, and I am sorry for that. I need to tell you why this cabin was never going to be yours. The summer before I got sick, I came out onto the porch one morning and found you at the little table with papers spread out and a pen. You were asking me to sign the cabin over to you. You said it was only for taxes. You had not told your mother. You had not asked.
He had known what the papers were, Roy wrote. He had known that I would not have been told, and that once the signature was dry, a loan could be taken against the cabin without me. He had said no. He had also said nothing to me, because he saw how much pressure Nathan was under from debts he could not mention. Then he had gone to a lawyer in Somerset. “The cabin belongs to your mother as long as she lives,” the letter went on. “After that, it belongs to Eli, in a trust. I did this out of love for all of you. I hope you will see it that way.”
Nathan was weeping before I reached the end. He sank onto the hearth, a forty four year old man with his face in his hands, and he said he had been so ashamed. He said it had been a boat loan, and then another loan to cover it, and then another, and he had been afraid to tell anyone, least of all his father. He said he had hoped I would never find out. And then, in the long silence of the cabin, he looked up and said, “Mom, I am so sorry. I do not even know how to say it.”
Brianne spoke next, which surprised me. She said she had known about the loans but not about the porch. She said she had pushed him to keep me from the cabin, because she thought if I were not there, the pain of the debts would be easier to bear. “I was wrong,” she said, in a small voice. “Charmaine, I was so wrong. Please stay.” Her mother, I noticed, had risen and gone to the kitchen, and was busy opening a can of cinnamon rolls. I think she was giving us room.
I stayed. We ate the ham I had mailed and the rolls her mother made, and Eli sat on my lap through the entire meal and would not be moved. Nathan gave me a gift later that afternoon, a small wrapped box. Inside was a new string of old fashioned colored lights, like the ones Roy loved. I laughed so hard I had to wipe my eyes. We went out together in the cold at dusk and strung them across the porch rail, my son and I, fumbling in the dark.
Nathan has been to a financial counselor every month since then. He has sold the boat and paid off two of the loans. Every Christmas now, the cabin belongs to all of us, and Eli reads the next letter of Roy aloud in front of the whole family at the table. The third one said that when you love someone, you have to be willing to hand them the hard truth. The fourth, he has not opened yet. He is saving it, he says, for when he turns ten.