Dwight and I still needed to wrap the odds and ends that we’re giving Cal.
My family is so large that everyone’s name—children and adults alike—goes into a hat and we draw them out at Thanksgiving amid much secrecy. If you draw the name of someone in your own immediate family, you put it back or exchange with someone else.
I had drawn Will’s name this year. For years, he’s run his auction and antiques business by the seat of his pants, aided by nothing more than an eye for quality and some avaricious common sense, and yeah, okay, maybe a few cut corners. His shabby old building, a former tobacco warehouse, burned down last year. He used the insurance money to replace it with a slightly smaller, slightly nicer place, and he’s become more interested in learning to identify what passes through his hands. Will is never going to go so upscale that other dealers quit coming around, hoping to find unexpected bargains, but his wife Amy told me that he’d actually started reading up on some of his finds. I called a bookstore in Raleigh and a clerk recommended an encyclopedia of silver manufacturers with detailed illustrations of hallmarks, reduced to $19.99.
I immediately gave her my credit card number. Even with postage and tax, it was under the family’s twenty-five dollar limit.
Theoretically, we can’t exceed that, and we are not supposed to gift anyone else, but of course there are always exceptions to any rule. Every year, Daddy sits with a pile of presents heaped up around his chair, and every year he says, “Now I
And there’s no way that Zach and Haywood aren’t going to exchange little tokens with Adam and Herman. Twinship trumps ordinary siblings, but those are the only family-sanctioned exceptions.
Up until last year, though, I had no spouse and no child, so nothing was said when I gave my nieces and nephews funny Christmas cards with money tucked inside—a single bill whose value depended on their ages. Cal and Dwight’s names had both gone into the hat last year, but I still sneaked and gave the kids their cards. Happily, my brothers and sisters-in-law were so accustomed to my ritual that only Barbara called me on it.
“If you must give them something, just give them the cards,” she’d said, and then added somewhat sourly, “They get a bigger kick out of your cards than the money anyhow.”
That was nice to hear, because I don’t give one-size-fits-all cards. I aim for a funny zinger geared to each kid’s personality or interest and then doctor them up. Reese, for instance. He found a wounded buck by the side of the road one year, someone else’s trophy animal, and tried to hide it in the van of his truck. The buck revived and tore Reese and the interior of his truck to bloody shreds. I got him a card that featured an inebriated stag with an eight-point rack that read, “Buck up, deer! It’s Christmas!” and glued a tiny strip of his tattered upholstery to one of the antlers.
I can waste as much time on picking out the perfect card as I would on picking out something more conventional. I still didn’t have one to celebrate Annie Sue’s new electrician’s license or Jackson’s athletic scholarship, but for Robert’s grandson Bert, whose incisors hadn’t grown back in yet, I lucked into a musical card that played “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.”
With forty minutes of my lunch recess gone, I spotted a card that featured an elaborately decorated Christmas tree. I pressed on a little bulge at the base of the tree and tiny LEDs began to twinkle. Perfect for Annie Sue.
Still nothing for Jackson, though. I finally gave up and bought a baseball-themed birthday card that had potential if nothing else presented itself in the next couple of days.
Precious time was eaten up waiting in line to pay and then more waiting in the sporting goods store, where I bought paper targets for Cal and a box of cartridges for Dwight. When I hiked back to my car, my watch read 1:18.
Lunch was a hasty forkful of my ham salad whenever I had to stop at a traffic light on my way back through town.
I convened the afternoon session at exactly 1:33. Not too bad considering that I’d had to freshen my lipstick and got stopped in the hallway to accept congratulations from Judge Luther Parker for making it through a full year of marriage.
“You do know, don’t you, that some people here were betting it wouldn’t last that long?”
“So how much did you win?” I asked.
He grinned. “Lucky for me, betting’s against my religion. I’d’ve lost big-time.”
Between last-minute settlements and plea arrangements, I had finished everything on the day’s calendar by four o’clock and was ready to call it a day when I was asked to sign a final document. After twenty-three years of marriage, Marian Louise Bledsoe-Jernigan and Frederick Spencer Bledsoe-Jernigan had decided to give each other a divorce for Christmas.
All the paperwork had been completed. The division of marital property had already taken place. No alimony was requested and their children were grown, so there was no question of child support.
“Your Honor,” said Mrs. Bledsoe-Jernigan, “please note that I am asking to legally resume my maiden name.”
I read through her application to change her name back to Marian Louise Bledsoe.
“Granted,” I said.
“Hey!” said Mr. Bledsoe-Jernigan. “What about
To his relief, I told him that he had the right to resume his former surname, too, and that I would incorporate the changes in the decree.
