“Something I want,” her mother mused. “Well, actually, there is something.” She shook her head. “And I’m not trying to let you off the hook either. It’s something you could do for me that would be hard for me to do myself, in all kinds of ways.” She got up from the table and carried the big bowl of sliced apples over to the sink, began to mix them with brown sugar, white sugar, and cinnamon.
“You know my grandmother’s house?” she said.
It was an old house, way out past the tunnels, boarded up. Too old now to be any good to anyone. Part of a farm that no one farmed anymore, bought up by the coal company but never mined. “They’re going to be tearing it down any day now,” Rachel’s mother said. “Or burning it, maybe. So I called up and asked if anyone would mind if I went back to look for a memento of some kind.” When she turned the apples over with her big spoon, a lazy cloud of cinnamon dust lifted and settled above the bowl. “My mother never took anything with her when she married. Her parents—my grandparents—were terribly upset with her for getting married so young, I suppose for leaving them all alone, and so abruptly, to marry a man they barely knew and didn’t much like.” She began to roll out pie dough with a fat pin. “Anyway, I spent quite a lot of time there when I was a kid. Usually without my parents along. It was a long walk for me, but I didn’t care. I loved going over there. I loved the house. I loved the garden. My grandparents were wonderful to me. And then they died when I was still little. And then my own parents died before you were born. And I haven’t been inside that house for thirty years—it’s been empty for the last five anyway—but, I don’t know, maybe a scrap of wallpaper, or one of the old porcelain sinks. I used to play at the kitchen sink all the time, got all wet, went home wrinkled. Take your father over there, Rachel, and bring me back something. That’s what I want for Christmas.”
And Rachel sat there at the table, paring apples, aghast. For she had begun the conversation with only one thing on her mind—the guitar she had seen on their last trip to Randall. For herself. For Christmas. It was the thing she had planned to name when the conversation came back her way, when her mother finally said, “And so what do you want this year, Rachel?”
But the conversation never turned, and here was her mother with tears in her eyes and a whole peck of apples still to peel.
A week later, when Rachel and her father arrived at the house where her great-grandparents had lived, they found the ground around it so overgrown with frozen vines that they could barely reach the front door. The windows were all boarded up. The doors were nailed shut. The window boxes had long since fallen off and apart. There were chimney bricks lying about, but they seemed an inadequate keepsake, the daffodils bottled up underground too fragile to move, the cornerstone simply impossible. But then, while her father waited, Rachel took a screwdriver and, from the heavy front door, removed the old, weathered handle and a knocker that someone had fashioned from the head of an ancient hammer. In the grass around back of the house she found a cast-iron ring on a hinge welded to a small iron plate, for tying up a horse, perhaps, or pulling open some sort of hatch.
The cold metal made her hands hurt as she carried these treasures away, but she thought of all the other hands that had touched them over the decades and promised herself they would not be neglected again.
On Christmas morning, when Rachel heard her mother on the stairs, she lay in her bed, listening. Heard her mother go into the kitchen, saw a bit of light in the hallway when her mother switched on the kitchen light, heard the water running for coffee, the radio softly giving the weather, the scrape of a chair. Rachel hugged herself beneath her quilt, smiling, until she heard her mother open a cupboard, shut it, turn on the tap once again, and then nothing. Silence. And then feet on the stairs again, quickly, and her mother in her doorway, at her bed.
“I’m up,” Rachel said, and her mother was next to her in an instant, grabbing her in her arms. “I had forgotten,” she was saying. “I had forgotten all about that old thing, and I never even thought to tell you where to look for it, but you found it. And it’s absolutely worthless, but, oh, Rachel, my grandfather made that hitch for me. It was on the wall right next to the back door. I used to tie up Sam there, my dog, when I was inside having lunch, so he wouldn’t run off. And now it’s down in my kitchen with a dish towel hanging on it, and I just couldn’t be happier.”
And then Rachel had taken her mother’s hand and led her to the front door, opened it, and was right there when her mother saw the handle and the knocker, all cleaned up and really quite nice. She would never forget how she felt standing there on the front step in the December cold, watching her mother’s face.
She had made a scroll for her father. Head rubs all week, it read, upon demand.
“You’ll put me into a coma,” he said, smiling. “You know me too well, Rachel. Couldn’t have picked a better gift.”
“And your bike’s ready for spring,” she said. “Oiled, polished, with a new seat and new reflectors, front and back. I replaced that missing spoke and the one grip on the handlebar.”
“This I gotta see,” he said, on his feet, so
