Are You Sitting Down?, Page 24

  He opened the lid and admired the medal in front of us. The look in his eyes was of sincere appreciation. I meant it when I told him Justin would have wanted him to have it. Manny fidgeted next to me like a jealous kid brother who had wanted the shiny coin instead. I realized this was the closest I’d sat next to Manny in years. I wanted to get up and move to the chair across from him, but kept my seat on the sofa to avoid embarrassing him in front of our guest.

  Justin put the medal back in its box, not lifting the cotton to find the receipt. I knew he wouldn’t throw the box away, so I decided not to tell him about it. Some day, sooner or later, he’d find it and I knew it would be a pleasant surprise for him. He’d wonder if I had put it there. Or maybe he’d think I never knew the receipt was there at all. He would remove the piece of paper and unfold it, and his mind would race with an array of memories from that night with Justin at the coffee shop.

  Travis would imagine Justin had put the receipt there in its safe place. I found solace in knowing that although Travis would never suspect I put the receipt there for him, it would be me who was ultimately responsible for his fond reminiscence, just as I had felt when I found Justin’s awards in the basement.

  Perhaps he’d place the receipt in a frame or in a memory album, or maybe he’d put it back in the box under the medal and tuck it away in a special place. Travis might not ever remove the complete contents at all to find the receipt.

  It didn’t matter.

  That minuscule piece of paper, which had obviously been important to Justin for some reason, was now with Travis. And as I told him when I gave it to him, Justin would have wanted him to have it.

  It was my gift now to the both of them.

  Lorraine

  A holiday, especially Christmas, makes it easier to forget about the problems in life from the day before. We celebrate the birth of Christ, and yet we also celebrate the birth of our family traditions. A smoked ham, a pecan pie, a strand of colored lights on the outside of the house, stockings on the mantel, greeting cards adorning the doorway, or a tree for each of the kids’ rooms are all things we hold close. They are all physical things, but unlike people, they are the things that have been there year after year. They help us to remember.

  Having all of my kids here was most important of all. It rarely happens, at any time of the year much less during the holidays. To think this year could have been the best year of all was just selfish of me. There has always been a broken toy, tears to dry, fights to break up, or in-laws to visit instead. Then, Frank left us and I never thought another Christmas could feel complete without him. I wondered if things might have been any different had I already told the kids about the cancer.

  Ellen called and told me her and Mark had made amends. Who could ask for a better gift for her and her family than that? They came and got Robbie and Rachel a few hours after she had left. Santa had already come to their house, so the kids were anxious to get home. I was almost jealous that Ellen got to spend the night with her family tonight.

  Sebastian kissed me good-bye on the cheek, eager to go back to his apartment or wherever young men go after visiting with their family on Christmas. Martin and Marline eventually retired to their home up the street with the kids. Calvin said his good-bye and wished me a Merry Christmas, thanking me and apologizing for the evening. I told him no apology was necessary.

  I expected Clare to leave too, but she and Jake stayed. I was glad because I wasn’t ready to be all alone again. We sat down on the floor beneath the amber glow of the lights on the tree and entertained Jake with his new toys. He soon grew tired and was ready for bed. Clare took him upstairs and decided to turn in too.

  I tidied the kitchen, storing away the leftovers and taking out the trash. A mother can never relax until the kitchen is clean. Marcus greeted me at the back porch, hoping for a plate of scraps. I didn’t want to disappoint twice in one evening, so I fixed him a plate.

  “Merry Christmas, Kitty,” I said as I stroked the back of his neck.

  He purred loudly, devouring the bits of ham on the plate in front of him.

  Back inside, I retrieved a large black plastic bag from under the kitchen sink and took it into the living room. I filled it with the torn paper and ribbon from the opened gifts. Like a hobo digging through a dumpster, I salvaged gift bags and bows from the paper which I could store away and use again next year. I found a sparkly gold gift bag which had been used again and again for at least three or four years, nearly another tradition of my own that no one else was aware of. It was now torn down one side. I hesitated, but placed it in the bag with the other trash anyway. Everyone had offered to help clean up before they left, but I urged them to just leave it. By now I was quite accustomed to picking up the pieces of the holiday at the end of the night.

  Satisfied with the living room, I carried the trash bag full of paper outside. Marcus’s plate was empty so I picked it up and slid it into the dishwasher when I came back inside. Marcus ran under my feet to come inside too. He didn’t usually like to come inside much, but I guess he had had enough of the snow. I sat down to rest my feet and admire the tree. It looked so bare without any gifts under it. It was like coming home and finding a piece of furniture someone has moved across the room. Your mind refuses to settle on the changes that have been made.

  With the cat on my lap, I guess I had dozed off for a bit. I was dreaming of Travis. He was in his car and headed back to Memphis. I could see him as if I was a passenger sitting next to him, but he didn’t know I was there. He looked like he was crying. I called out to him, but he couldn’t hear me. I was not really there.

  Suddenly, a small knock at the door woke me from the dream. I checked my watch and it was just thirty minutes before midnight. I stood up to go to the door, picking up Marcus from my lap and putting him in the chair behind me. I checked the peep hole to see who could possibly be at the door this late. It was Travis. I quickly unlocked the door and opened it for him as if he was a long lost relative who’d come home at last.

  “Sorry, couldn’t find my key,” he said with a shrug.

  “It’s okay. Want to come in?” I asked.

  “I thought maybe you’d want to go looking at Christmas lights,” he said in a stutter.

  “Now? It’s late. Do you think people will still have their lights on?”

  “Yours are on.”

  “Only because I fell asleep and forgot to turn them off.”

  “Well, if we don’t see any, we’ll just keep driving around the block and going by your house.”

  “Let me get my coat.”

  Travis stayed at the door like some polite delivery person who was just dropping something off, even the smile on his face seemed a bit unnatural. I thought he might still be mad at me, but when I returned to the door with my coat on he offered me his arm. I took it and let him lead me outside and down the steps of the porch. He opened the passenger’s door to his car for me and closed it once I was in. It was still warm inside from his drive back from wherever he’d gone. I watched him walk around and get in behind the wheel. He looked at me and smiled. I raised my eyebrows and smiled back, still unsure of his true intentions. He started the car and turned down the radio.

  “I guess I owe you an apology, don’t I?”

  “I think I owe you one too,” I said.

  “No, it was all my fault. I blew up at Calvin for no reason at all.”

  “Well, it was my fault for not telling you about Calvin before today.”

  “I would have liked to have known you were seeing someone. Everyone else knew, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, everyone knew,” I said after some hesitation.

  “Why didn’t you tell him about me?” Travis asked.

  “I guess I forgot.”

  “Forgot?”

  “Well, I didn’t forget, and I didn’t intentionally forget to tell Calvin about you, Travis. It’s just one of those things I felt didn’t matter. I didn’t feel the need to explain to him the personal lives of all my
children before inviting him over.”

  It broke my heart to hear Travis ask if I was ashamed of him. He starred blankly across the steering wheel as if waiting for something or someone to appear in the distance, when actually both of us were just facing the back of my car parked in front of him as we sat there in the driveway. Yet, I knew his mind was looking at something else. I wasn’t ashamed of him. I wasn’t ashamed of any of my children. I had yet to explain most of my own faults to Calvin in the little time I had known him much less those of my kids, but I knew Travis wouldn’t understand that.

  “I’m not ashamed of you Travis. I’m proud of you because of who you are. Not just that. That’s just a part of you that doesn’t make me feel any different about you as a person.”

  “It just seems like you were hiding it, even hiding him from me,” he said.

  “I barely know Calvin. Do you think he sat down the first day we met and told me all about his life? Your sexuality shouldn’t be an instigator on who I choose to see, just like Jake, or your brother’s drug use, or what happened to Ellen shouldn’t be either. Those things are all just a part of life. And as far as hiding Calvin from you, that’s not why I hadn’t told you about him. Your opinion means the most to me, so I wanted him to be a surprise I guess.”

  “A surprise?”

  “Yeah, after you met him tonight I couldn’t wait to sit down with you after everyone was gone and hear what you thought about him. That would have meant a lot to me.”

  “I’m sorry I ruined it for you.”

  “Oh, Travis, you didn’t ruin anything. It was my fault for thinking the outcome of all of this could never possibly be unpleasant.”

  You think you know your kids. You raise them and try not to make the same mistakes your parents made. You think you’ve taught them right from wrong, and you pray as they grow older that they were listening. But none of that can change who they become. None of it changes the path they choose when you aren’t standing there next to them. Travis always said this was never a choice for him; he was born that way. I blamed myself for the longest, wondering what I had done wrong.

  Those types of wounds never heal completely, but time helps to fix the things we can’t change. If I could have Travis any other way, of course, I’d want him to be different than he is now. But who’s to say he’d be any happier? Who’s to say I would be? There are things I’d like to go back and change about all my kids, but I know I can’t. So, as a mother, I have to accept it. Getting Travis to believe in my acceptance is the hard part.

  After both speaking our apologies and working things out as only a mom and her son can, I reached across the seat to hug him. He turned off the car, and we got out to go back inside the house.

  “I’ll apologize to Calvin if you’d like,” Travis said pausing on the steps.

  “Don’t worry about it for now. Let it all blow over. Besides, I think your choice of words on what you do in the bedroom was quite an eye opener for him,” I said with a laugh.

  Travis blushed.

  “Did Clare spend the night?” he asked, quickly changing the subject.

  “Yes, she and Jake went up to bed a few hours ago,” I said opening the front door.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, Travis.”

  “If it means anything to you, I think you and Calvin make a nice couple.”

  “Thanks, Travis. That actually means a lot to me.”

  Just as we stepped back into the house, the grandfather clock chimed midnight. Christmas had arrived. Travis and I hugged again and wished each other Merry Christmas. Then, he went up the stairs to take a hot bath before bed. I hung my coat on the wall and then wandered through the house looking for things to pass the time. I almost asked Travis if he felt like staying downstairs to sit and chat with me for a while, but I knew he was tired. Besides, I liked the idea of having the first hours of the birth to Christmas morn all to myself while two of my beloved children and one grandchild were sleeping soundly upstairs in their beds.

  After finding nothing else to clean or pick up, I decided to sit down again in the recliner and talk to Frank. He had always been a good listener. And although I considered myself a quiet woman, always willing to lend an ear to those who needed it, I always had gentle words to share with my husband at the end of each day in life and in death.

  Travis

  I arrived at the cemetery just as the caretaker was unlocking the gate. He was a wobbly old man that limped out of my way as I pulled my car in. Last night at the gas station, I had spotted fresh flowers for sale sticking out of tubs on a stand near the front. They were sprays of white lilies, holly branches, and red roses. Happy to find any filling station even open, I stopped in this morning and bought two of the bouquets, one for my father’s grave and one for Justin’s. Peggy was already gone. A small bubbly blond girl greeted me from behind the counter with a friendly smile, despite being at work on Christmas Day.

  “Did you forget somebody special today?” she asked out of politeness.

  “Nah, I didn’t forget.”

  I never liked fake silk flowers. I looked across the highway at the small flower shop where I thought I’d bought flowers from the mysterious old lady before. The windows were boarded up and the tiny house still looked deserted. There were black patches on the shingles where the snow had encircled holes in the roof. The quaint little shop looked like it had been condemned for quite some time, as if no one had lived there in years. I could remember being inside the warm cottage, inhaling its sweet candle aromas, and talking to the kind black woman. It was all quite vivid to me, but the illumination of my memory told me it might have just been a brilliant dream.

  I stopped first at my father’s stone. With no disrespect to my father, I hoped the spot next to him stayed vacant for a long time. I felt like I needed to say something but kept all my words inside. I knelt and laid one of the bouquets in front of the headstone.

  When I turned to walk back to the car, I stepped carefully back through the footprints I’d made in the snow. From the car, I looked back out at my tracks which led to Dad’s grave and stopped like some person had been standing there and then just disappeared. The cellophane wrapped around the flowers reflected the dancing light against the snow.

  I drove deeper into the yard to Justin’s marker. I pulled up behind it. The flecks in the marble glistened like diamonds. I was stunned to find a set of snow prints already there, as if someone had just been here before me to visit him. It is possible they were left from someone visiting yesterday. I wondered who it could have been. Seeing the snow disturbed around his headstone bothered me for some strange reason. I wanted to be the first one traipsing through the clean frosty blanket of white to visit him. I walked around to the front of his headstone, leaving my own set of prints.

  “JB,” I whispered under my breath.

  The wind answered and I turned around to see if anyone was watching. I was all alone in the garden of granite and marble, slabs of stone jutting out of the white hills like the teeth of sleeping giants. Brushing the cap of snow from the top of the stone, I laid the bunch of flowers across the top. The petals of one of the roses got lost in the wind, pouring across the frosty snow like droplets of blood. My nose started to run and I couldn’t tell if it was from tears or from the chillful air.

  I knelt for a moment close to the ground, steadying myself with a hand on the rim of Justin’s headstone. There were no words I could speak out loud that he had not heard before, so I let my mind wander to every picnic we’d taken in the park, every movie night at home with microwave popcorn, every late night kiss in bed we shared, every early cup of coffee on the balcony. Those were the most meaningful things I kept close to me now. And so, I reached into my pocket and took out the small box that Helen had given to me last night. I opened it, revealing the yellow ribbon like a ray of sunshine. I took the medal from its pillow of cotton and draped the ribbon around the edge of the stone, crowning my hero.

  I stood up, slipping the empty box back in
to my coat pocket, and stepped back to admire the ornament hanging there. It clanged against his stone like a wind chime. I smiled and thought I heard angels singing. Someone was singing. A chorale of holiday music was coming from behind me. I turned to see Mom’s car pulling up behind me. Clare and Jake were in the back seat. She had the window down and I could hear her radio playing.

  “Mind if we join you?” Mom called out.

  I shook my head no and smiled, waving at them like they were on a float in a parade passing by. Clare held Jake up to the window and waved his tiny hand back at me as she pulled the hood of his coat up over his head. They both got out of the car, pulling their boots through the snow to come stand next to me.

  “I’ve never seen Justin’s stone before. It’s nice,” Clare said.

  “Thanks, Sis.”

  Another car pulled up behind Mom’s. Martin, Ellen, and Sebastian all stepped out of the car. Ellen was carrying a bouquet of red and white roses.

  “Merry Christmas, Bub,” Sebastian said walking up to me and hugging my neck.

  “What are all of you guys doing here?” I asked.

  “Mom invited us,” Ellen said, kneeling to place her flowers next to Justin’s stone.

  She reached for the medal and turned it around in her hand to read its engraving.

  “Have you been to Dad’s grave yet?” Martin asked.

  “I stopped there first, but we can go back there if you guys haven’t been,” I answered.

  “You done here?” Mom asked, winking at me.

  “Yeah. I think I am done here.”

  We all got back into our cars and drove back to Dad’s marker. Ellen rode with me and quickly told me how she and Mark had made up last night. I told her how happy I was for her, and I really was. Each of us had had enough tragedy in our lives. It was nice to hear that at least one of us had one less obstacle to overcome. She’d no longer have to find that odd middle age balance in life of trying to start over after you’ve spent a better part of your life with someone, but woke up suddenly to find them gone. I was tired of denying myself the opportunity to start over. I was going to have to do it whether I wanted to or not. It might as well be now.