I read the note on the receipt of Woolworth four times at my folding table in the flea market, with the cold coming off the concrete and my son sitting on the cooler holding the broken box on his knees. The paper had gone soft and yellow, and the ink had faded to the color of tea. Walt had written in the small, square hand he used for grocery lists. Craig, it began. This is for you and not for your mother. She knows most of it already, but she does not know how it began.
“The year you were born was the hardest year of our lives,” the note went on. “I was laid off from the plant in the first week of December. We had thirty one dollars in the house and a baby coming any day. I walked to Woolworth because I could not stand to be at home and look at the face of your mother. I found a box of glass ornaments on the sale table, forty nine cents for the blue one. I bought it with the last of my change. I took it home and hung it on the top of a twig of a thing we called a Christmas fir, and I said to your mother, There. Now it is Christmas.”
The ink had run a little at the bottom of the page. Craig had his head bent. I could see the back of his neck, with the gray in his hair, and I thought of the small red face I had held in the hospital on the twentieth of December in 1976. “You were born on the twenty first,” Walt had written, “and by the grace of God I got my job back on the twenty seventh. That blue ornament has hung at the top of every fir we have had since, and I want you to hang it first when you have a home of your own. It is not glass. It is a promise that things come right.”
I put the note down on the table. The man in the next booth had turned off his radio. Craig sobbed once, loudly, the way he used to when he was little, and put his sleeve across his face. I did not speak. I only reached over and laid my hand on the back of his neck. We stayed that way for a good while, an old woman and a middle aged man among the dusty chairs and the glass birds, while the Saturday crowd went around us as if we were a pair of stones in a river.
What a good man hides in a box to be found by his son is not a gift of things, but the whole shape of his love.
“Mom,” he said at last, “I did not know. Dad never told me. I thought it was just the ornaments.” His voice broke. “I put them in the garbage. I carried the bag to the curb with my own hands, and I did not even look at you.” I told him that a man does not know what he has not been told, and that his father had trusted the right moment to arrive in its own time. Then I said, “It has arrived.” He laughed through his tears and wiped his nose.
Kayleigh came to the market on Sunday morning, alone, with a plain brown paper bag. She stood at the edge of my booth, shifting from one foot to the other. I had not seen her since the day of the dumping, and I was not sure what to expect. She said, “Mildred, I have no right to ask for anything.” She lifted from the bag a handful of shards of red glass, tied together with a ribbon. “I went back to the curb on the night you did,” she said. “The garbage truck had not come yet. I took these out. I wanted to keep them.”
I looked at her in astonishment. She said she had stayed awake for hours that night, listening to the sound of the glass in her head. She had been caught up in the idea of a perfect Christmas, she said, the sort she saw in pictures, and she had not seen that it was already there in the box. “I was so busy making things pretty that I forgot to ask what they meant,” she said. “I am so sorry.” I took the ribbon and the pieces and held them to my chest. “These I can mend,” I said.
We spent the last week of Advent together in the dining room of Craig and Kayleigh. I brought the forty six whole ornaments I had saved, and the sixty one that had survived, and a bottle of strong glue. Kayleigh and I sat at the table with the broken pieces and a magnifying lamp, fitting the shards back together like pieces of a puzzle. It was slow, careful work. By the fourth evening, we had mended eleven. They looked terrible, with tiny seams of glue running across them, and we agreed they were the most beautiful things on the table.
On the twenty third of December, Craig brought out the white arrangement from the corner of the living room and set it in the center of the floor. He opened the box at his feet and took out the blue ornament, the one with the dent in it from 1983. He held it up in the lamplight. Then he climbed onto the step stool and hung it, very carefully, on the topmost branch of the white fake thing, which looked silly and bare and wonderful. He turned around and said, “There. Now it is Christmas.”
Nobody said anything. The grandchildren stood in a row with their mouths open. Kayleigh took my hand. The lights came on, and the blue ornament caught them and shone, and it seemed to me that I could hear the voice of Walt in the room, soft and dry and amused. Then the daughter of Craig asked if she could hang the next one, and he handed her a red one, and soon the white arrangement was crowded with color. Every ornament we had was on it, crooked, glued, dented, and loved.
I still go to the flea market on Saturdays. People still stop at my booth, and a woman from Grand Rapids still buys eight at a time. But last month I put out a small card next to the cash box. It says: Every ornament here was saved from a trash bag. Every one has a story. Ask me. I have found that a great many people want to tell theirs, and I have more patience than I ever knew, standing in the cold, listening to strangers, and handing them a little glass piece of the Christmas of somebody.