The Christmas Shoes (Christmas Hope) Read online

  We were just about to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary when Kate got pregnant. I had imagined that we would wait a couple more years to start a family. A few months into the pregnancy, I wanted to put the house on the market to move to a neighborhood with better schools.

  “Robert, the baby won’t be in school for years,” Kate protested.

  “Once the baby comes, we’ll have twice as much stuff, and the move will be twice the headache,” I said. “This is the right time.”

  We put our place on the market and began the search for a new house. Several of my colleagues lived in what was called the Adams Hill section of town, an older neighborhood that boasted of even older money. The area was named for Thomas Adams, one of the area’s founding residents, who claimed to be related to President John Quincy Adams, though none of the locals had ever bothered to research his genealogy.

  People of affluence and influence have lived in Adams Hill since before the turn of the twentieth century. The streets were lined with red maple and giant oak trees older than the oldest resident of Adams Hill. The lawns were professionally manicured; the shrubs were trimmed and clipped. The well-kept homes were all built of brick, wood, and stone, with not a panel of vinyl siding in sight. Great Victorian homes with enormous wraparound porches nestled among the oak trees, next to brick colonials with huge antebellum columns out front. Each home had a story. Many even had placards positioned next to the front door stating the year the home was built and any other information deemed worthy of sharing with those fortunate enough to ring the doorbell. Finding a residence that was actually for sale, as opposed to handed down from one generation to the next, was nearly impossible.

  When the new listing popped up on our real-estate agent’s computer, she couldn’t reach for the phone quickly enough to call us. My palms began to sweat as I anticipated walking through what could be my dream home. Even Kate couldn’t suppress a smile when the Realtor led us into the drive. The front was gray stone and yellow wood, with a beautiful double-tiered wraparound deck. It was a big house and, of course, that meant a big mortgage, but I wanted Kate to have lots of space to create a lovely home for our family. A home, like my mother’s, that would come alive at Christmas with a roaring fire and a tall, sparkling tree.

  Though the firm was pleased with my work, there were times I wished I’d opened a private practice, the way so many of my law-school buddies did, hiring two or three associates, their names painted in gold letters on doors (Gerald Greenlaw & Associates), on lawn signs, (Curtis Howard & Associates), or on parking-garage walls (Thomas Michelson & Associates). Instead of working eighty hours a week for someone else, I could have been working for myself—Robert Layton & Associates. It was too late to start over now, however, and our brandnew mortgage confirmed it. What I lost in freedom, I made up for in the security of working for a larger firm.

  In the seventh year of my service with them, the partners at Mathers, Williams & Hurst unanimously made me a partner. They called me into the conference room, each partner seated in a leather chair at the cherry table that ran the length of the room. They made their announcement, clapped me on the back with congratulations, promised to get together with the wives very soon, and went back to work. The celebration lasted all of two minutes. I sat alone at the table as they filed out, thinking that this moment hadn’t lived up to my expectations. Then I slowly walked back to my office, shut the door, and began sifting through the bankruptcy files Gwen had placed on my desk that morning.

  I was so busy for the rest of the day that I completely forgot to call Kate and tell her the news. By the time I pulled into the driveway, the house was dark. Kate, in her seventh month of her second pregnancy, was no doubt exhausted chasing after our two-year-old daughter, Hannah. Like the first, this pregnancy was unplanned. To be honest, I had wanted to wait a few years before we had another child. I was so busy, I hardly had time to see Hannah. I worried that I would not be able to be a proper father to baby number two…and if I was, would it be at Hannah’s expense?

  Kate, of course, was ecstatic. Hannah had brought a joy into her life that I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I knew this baby would do the same. Kate loved being a mother. I can admit that she was much more adept at being a mom than I was at being a dad. I had to work to understand what my daughter was saying, whereas Kate could carry on a full conversation with her without missing a beat.

  I pushed open Hannah’s door, her Winnie the Pooh night-light smiling at me from across the room. I walked softly to her bed. She looked so much like Kate when she was asleep, but when her eyes were open they blazed, as my mother said, with the same fire she’d seen in mine when I was young. I kissed her on the head, picking Bobo, her one-eyed stuffed bunny, off the floor, and put him back under the blankets before leaving the room. Peeking into our bedroom I saw that Kate was asleep. I heard her slight snoring, which had gotten louder as her pregnancy progressed, one of the side effects, as was fatigue, but even so, during the first pregnancy, she used to wait up for me. I closed the door and made my way down the stairs into the kitchen for something to eat.

  In the refrigerator I found a cold, wrapped hamburger patty and some macaroni and cheese. As I put the plate in the microwave, I wondered when we would ever be able to eat food again that didn’t come in colors, shapes, numbers, or that wasn’t smothered in processed cheese. I’d come too far to be eating macaroni again, the way I did when I was single. Finding a hamburger bun or condiments was too much hassle, so when my food popped and splattered in the microwave, I took it out and let it cool as I poured myself a glass of milk. The recessed lighting I had had installed under the kitchen cabinets burned dimly as I sat down at the kitchen counter and toasted myself, “To Partner Layton,” I said, raising the glass. And as the clock struck ten, I ate my rubbery hamburger and my macaroni and cheese, alone.

  One night, shortly before Christmas, I came home to find the house dark, save a blue light glowing in the livingroom window. Hannah, now eight, and her six-year-old sister, Lily, were long asleep. It was the third time that week I’d gotten home late, though the holiday season was always busy. Everyone was putting in eighty-hour weeks, and I couldn’t expect special treatment. To top it off, Gwen had been crying in my office that morning. The long hours were “ripping her apart” and “wearing her down.” She threatened to quit, as she had for the last eight holiday seasons, so I gave her the rest of the day off, with pay, knowing she would be back the next morning good as new and telling me how relieved she was to have gotten her shopping done.

  I put the Mercedes in the garage, dropped my briefcase heavily on the dining-room table, and went to the living room, expecting to find Kate asleep in front of an I Love Lucy rerun. Instead, she was awake.

  “Girls asleep?” I asked, flipping through the stack of bills.

  “Yep.”

  “Everybody have a good day?” I asked, uninterested.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Busy. You know. I let Gwen have the day off. Had her holiday cry,” I said as I walked into the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator door and began my nightly rummaging for dinner leftovers.

  Kate moved to the dining-room table and watched for a long time before she finally spoke.

  “I’m tired, Robert,” she said evenly.

  “Go to bed. You didn’t have to wait up for me,” I told her halfheartedly.

  “No, Robert. I’m tired of this. Of us.”

  I stood frozen, my head still in the refrigerator. In my heart, I’d known the marriage had been over for nearly a year, but I had never imagined either one of us would have the courage to bring it up. I should have known it would be Kate. She’d always been the stronger one. The year before she had accused me of having an affair. I wasn’t. She never believed me, but there had never been another woman. Frankly, there’d never been enough time for Kate, let alone another woman. Some nights, I knew, I worked late because it was the one thing I knew I could do for my family, one concrete step I could take to make su
re that they had the things that they needed, that the girls’ college tuitions were taken care of, that there was a roof over their heads. Some nights I worked late because I didn’t know what else to do, and because I didn’t want to go home and face the fact that we were in trouble.

  I dragged some sort of casserole from the top shelf of the refrigerator and silently pulled a plate down from the cabinet. I couldn’t seem to find the words I wanted to say.

  “I’m sorry, Robert, but I just can’t do this anymore,” Kate continued. “I can’t go on pretending that everything’s all right. It’s not all right. It hasn’t been for some time. Living under the same roof doesn’t mean we’re living together. I need more than this.”

  I stared blankly at the casserole in front of me. She needs more, I thought to myself. Well, I don’t have any more. I have given everything, I reasoned. I can’t work harder. I can’t do more. But I didn’t say any of that.

  “Let’s face it, you left this family a long time ago. We’ll stay together through the holidays,” Kate explained unemotionally. This all seemed too easy for her, almost as if she’d rehearsed it several times.

  “I don’t want to ruin my family’s Christmas or your mother’s, and it’d absolutely kill the girls if we split up right now. But as soon as the holidays are over, you’ll have to find another place to live.”

  There. It was over. She paused briefly to see if I would respond in any way, but, as expected, I didn’t, so she softly wandered back upstairs and closed the bedroom door.

  Two

  The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing

  more truly artistic than to love people.

  —Vincent van Gogh

  Doris Patterson loved dressing her classroom for Christmas. She and her giggling, excited students had cut out paper snowflakes and Christmas trees, snowmen and Santas, from brightly colored construction paper, then decorated them with glitter and cotton and yarn. She brought in a four-foot artificial tree to adorn with popcorn and cranberry strands, gingerbread men, and candy canes. Her students chattered loudly as they worked, until the room reached a raucous din with the anticipation of Christmas.

  Doris always had her students prepare a Christmas wish list of the things they wanted Santa to bring them, but this year, she had broken with tradition. She knew what Nathan would wish for. She couldn’t ask him to stand up in front of his classmates to say out loud what he wanted so badly. She knew that Nathan would give back all the toys he’d ever received at Christmas if his mother could just get better. This year, Doris had asked her students to focus on their favorite Christmas memories and to write them into a story. She hoped the assignment would help Nathan concentrate on the happy times he’d shared with his mother, instead of the time that would never be.

  When Nathan’s father told her how sick Maggie was, Doris volunteered to drive the boy home from school each day. With all of the stops it made, the school bus took forty-five minutes to bring him to his driveway, and she could get there in fifteen.

  “I can’t have you do that, Mrs. Patterson,” Jack said adamantly.

  But Doris insisted. She remembered how she would have given anything for a few more moments with her mother. Other teachers felt Doris was going beyond the call of duty, but if driving five extra miles a day meant a little boy could spend thirty extra minutes with his mother, she would more than gladly make the trip.

  The car ride was usually quiet. Doris didn’t force conversation, although she often wondered what the child was thinking about. Perhaps his thoughts weren’t sorrowful at all, but were instead of his mother being miraculously healed. Doris had had the same dreams when she was young—that God would simply touch her mother and destroy the disease that had viciously eaten away at her, yet there were times, she knew, that miracles didn’t happen, that people didn’t recover. Sometimes they never get better. In the silence of the car rides Doris would pray for her small passenger. For peace…for hope…for comfort.

  Nathan slammed his teacher’s car door and ran up the gravel drive to his home. The beginnings of a snowman stood in the yard, but whoever started it had quit, leaving a single large ball with stick arms and pinecone eyes and a soda bottle for a nose. Neither the driveway nor the sidewalks had been shoveled; footpaths were beaten down in the snow. Today, Nathan and his mother were going to make Santa cookies for relatives and neighbors. Each year they worked for hours on the cookies, decorating them just right with food coloring and silver sugar balls before wrapping them and presenting them as gifts. He ran in the front door to find his grandma Evelyn preparing the butter and eggs and mixing bowls they were going to use. His mother lay propped on the hospital bed in the living room, smiling as he threw open the door.

  “Are we making them?” he shouted.

  “We’re making them,” Maggie laughed. “We’ve just been waiting for you!”

  “Well, come on!” he said, tugging on the sleeve of her bathrobe.

  “I’m watching Rachel right now,” she said, indicating the playpen, “but I’ll help in a minute.”

  Maggie’s eyes filled with tears as she watched Nathan jump into the kitchen. She wasn’t strong enough to help in a minute, and both she and her mother knew it.

  Evelyn had moved in the previous Thursday, the same day Sylvia, the visiting hospice nurse, arrived and the medical-supplies truck delivered the hospital bed. Evelyn had been coming in every day, but Jack asked her if she could stay around the clock, explaining that Maggie no longer had the energy to take care of Rachel.

  Evelyn was an active sixty-year-old widow, and the death of her husband four years earlier was easier for her to deal with than the impending death of her youngest child. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Parents were supposed to go first. It was the logical progression of life. Sometimes, when Evelyn was alone in the shower or in the car, she would weep until she was certain her heart would burst. She wept for her grandchildren, for Jack, for her beautiful daughter, and for the ache that was growing sharper with each passing day.

  Maggie listened as her mother cracked the eggs into the cookie batter, each flourish producing a giggle from her son. Maggie loved to hear him laugh. Nathan had grown quiet during the last few months, though they hadn’t yet told him of the severity of her illness. Evelyn craned her neck and winked at Maggie, then dabbed the end of Nathan’s nose with the gooey concoction, causing a belly laugh that shook his small frame from head to toe. Rachel stretched herself to see over the playpen and laughed with delight. Maggie struggled to sit up, listening as her mother and Nathan cut out each cookie with precision. These were the last smells of Christmas, the last smiles of her little boy, the last squeals of her baby girl, that she would ever experience. She didn’t want to commit them to memory, but, rather, she wanted to be fully present in the here and now, and love with all her soul.

  Maggie had met Jack Andrews when she was twenty-three. Her new 1974 Ford Escort, her pride and joy, was making weird braking noises, so she took it into City Auto Service. A girl she worked with in the bakery at Ferguson’s Supermarket recommended City Auto as an honest garage. A young man, wiping grease from his hands, came over as she drove into the shop. Maggie was immediately taken with his intensely blue eyes. She read the name stitched on his green overalls: Jack. A nice, hardworking name.

  “What can we do for you?” he asked, and then smiled the most genuine smile she’d ever seen. Jack seldom took notice of the people who came in to drop off their cars for repairs. When the slender Maggie stepped out of her Escort, tucked her dark bobbed hair neatly behind her ears, and smiled, he was immediately interested in more than just her car.

  “I think it’s my brakes,” she said.

  “I do,” she said six months later.

  When Nathan was born, Maggie cut her hours at Ferguson’s to part-time. She and Jack did not want to drop their kids at day care, for strangers to take care of them. If they couldn’t rearrange their schedules so one of them could watch Nathan, they’d agreed t
hat Maggie would quit working. It might mean that, on a single income, they’d never live in a big house on Adams Hill or afford better furniture, but it was worth the sacrifice to know that their child was being raised by his parents.

  Nathan was two when Maggie and Jack moved into a small, aluminum-sided ranch house on 14th Street in a quiet neighborhood of older homes. The house needed some work. The roof leaked in what would be Nathan’s bedroom, the subflooring was rotten where the sink leaked in the kitchen, there was termite damage in the foundation, the carpeting needed replacing throughout the entire house, and much of the plumbing was rusting and needed new copper pipes. The prospect of buying a home in such disrepair might have daunted other couples, but Jack was an all-around handyman, a true “Jack” of all trades, Maggie called him, and she loved helping him. She could rip up floorboards and subflooring as good as any man, or hold a flashlight lying on her stomach under the kitchen sink for hours without complaining as Jack twisted and yanked and soldered the pipes. She loved to watch Jack work, and working together on the house gave them hours of uninterrupted time together. Whereas other couples struggled to find something to talk about, Jack and Maggie never wanted for conversation. When friends wanted to go out after work, Jack went home, even though they teased him and told him he was getting soft, but if that was true he didn’t mind. He enjoyed being with Maggie more than anything else in the world. He loved to come home and find out what new improvement she’d made in the house, which gradually they had transformed from the shabbiest dwelling on the block to the nicest.