Christmas Jars Page 2
“I have cancer.”
Louise held her sobbing daughter on the couch until dawn.
Two
~
The devastating reality of Louise’s ovarian cancer was assuaged in time by Hope’s delight at her new position. Hope’s responsibilities included occasional one-on-one briefings from one of several senior editors. They spelled out the newspaper’s position on important political issues, and, armed with a framework for why the paper leaned one way or another, Hope was tasked with punching out first drafts of political editorials. “The Paper Endorses George A. Lee for Governor.” “The Paper Calls for a Full Investigation of Mayor Caren Floresca.” “The Paper Supports the Aggressive Methods of Sheriff Eugene Jones.” Hope spent hours massaging her four hundred words, only to see them slashed down by someone upstairs. But Hope wanted to work upstairs, too. I belong upstairs, she convinced herself.
For months Hope toiled away, and, in time, more of her own words made the printed page. Six times her editorials ran untouched. Her mother had each professionally framed. They filled a wall in their cozy apartment.
Persistent pain forced Louise to stop working not long after her diagnosis. She bade farewell to her clients and reluctantly sold her cleaning contracts to a company that had what seemed like an army of bright white-and-blue cars with “Clean Police” splattered in neon paint on both sides. Hope never fully understood why cleaning up other people’s messes brought her mother such satisfaction. And though she had no idea how her modest income would support them both for long, she felt relief the first day Louise didn’t head off to care for someone else’s home. “You’re all mine now,” Hope told her.
Each morning Hope made two servings of oatmeal topped with blueberries, always blueberries, and kissed her mother good-bye. During Hope’s daily absence, Louise spent hours creating elaborate pages for their near-endless library of scrapbooks. Evenings were spent reading aloud to one another or playing a specialized Jensen family version of Rummy. Hope loved the evenings.
Saturdays often included very short shopping trips downtown or a quick lunch at Chuck’s. “Should we go cruisin’ for boys?” Hope teased on the way home late one afternoon.
“Not this week, sweetie, maybe next.”
“Ah, now. One of these days we got to find you a man, Momma!” Hope’s voice twanged to her mother’s delight.
“Next week, remind me, and maybe I’ll wear some makeup.”
Hope turned to her mother. “Miss Louise Jensen, some women don’t need makeup.” She tickled her mother’s knee. “You couldn’t get more beautiful if you swallowed last month’s edition of Cosmo.”
~
Because Louise’s cancer was not detected earlier, her disease was well advanced by the time doctors finally diagnosed it. After unsuccessfully experimenting with less-invasive treatments, Louise relented and scheduled the surgery her doctors long insisted was her best chance. Hope was at her bedside when she finally awoke, twelve hours after bidding good-bye at the patients-only elevator.
“Hello there,” Hope said, holding one of her mother’s hands with both of her own.
“You’re here,” her mother’s voice cracked.
“Of course I am, crazy woman.”
“The good crazy?” Louise struggled to whisper.
“Yes, Mom, the goodcrazy. Now, shhh.”
Louise breathed heavily. “How did we do?”
“The news is not good.” Hope paused. “They say you’ll never have any children of your own.”
A pained chuckle turned to a cough, and Hope gently put a straw between her mother’s lips. Louise took a long drink and reopened her eyes. “I have a child of my own.” She smiled as broadly as her face allowed.
Three
~
Having no idea what day Hope was actually born, Louise was allowed to choose—within reason—her daughter’s birthday for the state birth certificate. She chose January first, believing the date, like her name, emblematized new chances and new beginnings. On her twenty-third such birthday, Hope sat beside her mother in an oversized recliner in their living room. She ripped open a delicately wrapped self-help book from her mother. “You know if I actually took the time to read all these books I’d have to quit my job, right, Mom?”
“Hope! Show some—”
“Gratitude! I know,” she interrupted. “Oh, you know I loovve your books. It’s just that I love you more.” From just six inches away she blew her mother a kiss and returned with zeal to her second piece of carrot cake.
That was the last birthday Louise and Hope Jensen celebrated together. Fifty-one weeks later, though in unspeakable pain and in spite of everyone’s best efforts to convince her otherwise, Louise insisted on their traditional dinner at Chuck’s. They sat on the same side of the only booth they’d ever known. Louise sat on two hospital pillows, with three thin blankets draping her frail shoulders. Chuck, his wife, plus a handful of other regulars surrounded them, wishing the Jensens a happy holiday and pretending it was just another Christmas Eve. For the last time, Hope and Louise played tic-tac-toe with cooling tater tots.
Four days later Louise Jensen passed on more peacefully than even Hope could have prayed for. Lying on the couch, she rested her head on her daughter’s lap, comfortably atop her favorite Christmas pillow. Hour after hour, Hope spoke in reverent whispers—at times her voice barely brushing the air—sharing stories from their years of a truly unique sisterhood. The pastel dawn sky cast healthy tones on Louise’s once pale face. Hope ran her hand over her mother’s thin, sparse hair and marveled at how beautiful—even in death—her heroic mother looked.
“It’s all right, Mother,” Hope said, wiping a fallen tear from her own eyes across her mother’s wrinkled chin. “Go.” Their souls bid silent farewells, the ever-slowing rhythm of Louise’s fragile chest ceased, and Hope watched her mother slip painlessly from one side of the veil to the next.
For the first time in many sore months, Hope smiled at the face of the vibrant woman who had rescued her one lifetime ago at Chuck’s Chicken ’n’ Biscuits.
~
Two weeks of overdue vacation, her boss reasoned, was exactly what Hope needed to recharge. But after just three days of sweatpants and talk shows, she’d had enough grieving. Life has taken my mother, she thought, but it cannot take my collection of words.
On Monday, Hope returned to her desk, which was still covered with a thin, pencil-yellow rubber mat, and reminded herself that the desks upstairs had leather. The waiting game was over. It’s time to move.
“Good morning, Mr. Butler!” So began the campaign for her promotion upstairs.
“Morning, kid,” the mid-sixties man answered.
“Actually, it’s Hope.”
“Good to see you.” He talked as he moved through a tight pattern of cheap desks toward the staircase at the back of the sports department bullpen. “Your first day?”
“What? No. No, Mr. Butler, I’ve been here a while. I write some of the drafts for the paper’s opinion page.”
“Oh, yes, good, then.” He was halfway up the stairs now. “Enjoy Monday.”
“You, too! Enjoy!” She would’ve sucked the words back in if she could have. Good grief, she thought, my schmooze needs a tune-up.
Hope honed her writing and punched out some of the most crisp, colorful editorials the paper had ever seen. At every opportunity she peppered her new friend, Lyle Butler, with questions on the industry, writing, and getting ahead. Appreciative of her energy and zest, he introduced her to the other senior editors, the department heads, and even the classifieds manager, someone she’d previously worked with for almost six months. Through it all, Lyle recognized enormous talent in the former intern.
Then came the call. “Can you come up?”
“I’m halfway there.” Hope fast-walked from her desk downstairs through the mouse maze and up the staircase.
He wasted no time. “You ready to move your things?”
“Where to, Boss?”
&n
bsp; “Up the stairs to a full-size editorial desk. Still an associate, of course, but out of the trap down there.” He gestured out his window to the floor below.
“I’ll be right back.” She was fully prepped to say her good-byes and fill her arms with everything she could in one trip and climb back up the stairs before someone changed his mind.
“Take your time, kid. Your desk up here is safe.”
Hope spent five minutes chatting with a few people, packed her personal items, stuck a pencil sharpener that she’d adopted a year before into her bag, and walked slowly—very slowly—back across the first floor. She thought she heard a few scattered “Congrats, Hope,” but they were probably imagined.
Hope knew that first trip up the stairs was a seminal moment custom-made for one of her mother’s thick scrapbooks. Hope put one foot in front of the other, eyes partially closed, her mind successfully canceling most of the ambient noise from the bustle below. Beneath eyes wet with unfinished grief, she struggled to hear the whispered voice of her mother. “I knew you could do it,” Hope thought she heard Louise say.
“Thanks, Mom,” she mouthed back.
~
Hope was soon writing most of the newspaper’s political editorials, with rarely significant edits from her colleagues upstairs. Occasionally they disagreed over finer points, but she had earned ample trust and had a more-than-adequate leash on which to roam.
She pitched her first feature story on the growing skepticism behind global warming. Three weeks of research and interviews, and she had a three-thousand-word feature: “Global Warming: Legit Scare or Liberal Hot Air?” It was good, they told her, but not right for the front page. It ran on A9 but roused more phone calls and letters than she had ever received from her controversial recaps of local chess tournaments. For the first time, Hope tasted the success she had first craved as an eager middle school newsletter publisher. Soon her life of writing copy for page A9 would end.
One afternoon Lyle asked if Hope was ready to attend occasional newspaper business meetings. These were big-picture discussions about the direction of the paper: How could they boost circulation? How could they lure back subscribers that had fallen to the dreaded weekend-only status? What was the key to increasing ad revenues? Who would the paper endorse in the latest political horse race? She enjoyed seeing the machines behind the business of newspaper production. She marveled at the process that resulted in printed words—words that each morning just floated in the air around them but by press time had landed on a three-section, 36-page newspaper. They worked like crazed ants: writing, editing, trimming photos, editing more, trimming ads, and squeezing every last letter out of every word plugged into every page to meet the all-important deadline. They congratulated each other with hearty pats on the back as if they had accomplished something unprecedented. Then they did it all over again the next day.
Hope pitched a handful of other front-page articles but was sanctimoniously turned down. “Not enough general interest.” “We need to sell more papers.” “Go find a real story.” Even when she got a green light, it was usually given to another reporter, and she was assigned as editor. “You’ve got too much on your plate, Hope,” Lyle said. “Just because you’re on the team responsible for the newspaper’s content doesn’t mean you have to write it all.”
The months on Hope’s Reader’s Digest calendar flipped by without her even having time to turn the pages. She wrote less, edited more, and learned everything imaginable about newspapers. She was asked to fine-tune her skills as a newspaperwoman, but in return her love for the stories themselves began to wane.
Four
~
Hope was in a blue funk that turned royal on December twenty-fourth. Sore from crying, and desperate for her mother, Hope spent her first Christmas Eve alone at Chuck’s. With her first mother’s good-bye note resting deep in her pocket, Hope picked at her dinner and pie and answered a thousand and one “Merry Christmas” wishes.
“This was your mom’s favorite time of year,” all the women said.
“Look, Hope,” their husbands added, “you call us if you need anything. You hear me? You need a place to come tonight?”
Hope politely turned them all down and sat for three hours before Chuck and his wife said it was time to go. “Do you mind if I stay a little longer?”
“Of course not.” Chuck sent his wife home and found busywork in the kitchen. He would stay as long as she needed. Just after eight, Hope thanked Chuck and kissed him on the cheek, and drove home to sleep away the day’s final, lonely hours. Rounding the hallway corner to her apartment door, her stride froze at the sight of her front door hanging slightly open.
“Hello!” She nudged it open another foot, yelling in the most dangerous voice she could muster. “My husband and I are home. We’re coming in and we’re heavily armed.” She pushed the door the rest of the way open and took a single step in. “That’s right, I said heavily armed!” She took another step in, and found a mess she previously imagined could only be caused by a south-Texas tornado.
Hope slid cautiously into the living room, breathing in short, quick bursts that synced with her racing heart. She stood motionless, moving only her eyes and surveying the wreckage. Gone were her stereo, cheap television, and two crystal horses her uncle had sent just one year back. Toppled and broken was an inexpensive fluorescent lamp she’d been meaning to replace for months.
She examined the other rooms only after convincing herself that her intruders were not lying under her couch or still hiding behind the hanging blue jeans in the bedroom closet. Kitchen and dresser drawers hung tenuously on their tracks. Missing was a wristwatch she had received as a child from her mother but never wore for fear of breaking it or worse—losing it. Also missing was five hundred dollars in emergency cash she and her mother kept hidden in an envelope in a drawer under the plastic silverware tray.
She dialed 911, and within ten minutes three police officers arrived to search her apartment. Hope, torn somewhere between tears and a tantrum she knew no one would want to witness, slipped down two flights of stairs and outside to catch her breath. She leaned against the brick building’s side, eyes closed. The crisp night air cooled her cheeks, and though it would have been natural to cry, she didn’t. Her thoughts turned naturally to Louise. Ah, come on, Mother. These are the kinds of things that happen to other people.
She tried to keep warm by rubbing her hands together and sticking them up her sleeves to her forearms. She counted forty-plus years that her mother had cleaned homes. All those houses, all those families, and not a single break-in, ever? Couldn’t you have left me a pinch of luck?
Hope returned when she could no longer tolerate the steady chattering of her teeth. She stumbled over a brown sack sitting just inside the open apartment door. She picked it up and nearly dropped it on her foot; it was much heavier than it looked. She reached in and pulled out a large glass jar filled with money. It held silver change mostly, but three or four twenty-dollar bills also snaked through the tightly packed coins. She approached one of the officers. “Is this yours?”
“No, ma’am. It just showed up there. We figured it was takeout or something.” The officer went back to pulling prints from the inside knob of the front door.
Hope asked the other two officers who were dutifully processing her very own personal crime scene. All anyone could say was that it was definitely full of money, it hadn’t been there a half hour before, and it was probably a gift. Geniuses, Hope thought.
It was still early enough that she knocked on her neighbor’s doors to the left and right. They knew nothing of the jar but would happily take it if she decided she couldn’t. A recent move-in across the hall, a quiet but confident single woman, also hadn’t seen or heard anything but told her to enjoy it. “Use it to replace what you’ve lost, sweetie. Somebody was thinking of you. How lucky!”
“Merry Christmas,” Hope answered, thanking her and turning back to her own front door. The police were finishing and promised
to get right on “finding the perps.” They mentioned four other break-ins in nearby buildings and encouraged her not to give up. “We’ll catch these sick, disgusting creeps,” one said, stepping out the front door with his bag full of evidence. “Merry Christmas!”
Hope shook the officers’ hands, and her eyes followed them down the stairs. She stood an extra moment in her doorway, staring down, letting her eyes glaze over in imagination. She pictured a person in a rented, baggy Santa suit and fluffy beard slithering down the hallway, leaving the jar, and vanishing as quickly as he’d arrived. But it wasn’t a he. The visitor wasn’t stout with a sturdy frame and jolly eyes. It was a woman’s figure she saw. And her eyes looked just like her mother’s.
Hope shook her head quickly as if to jostle the daydream back to its place. She stepped into her apartment and shut the door behind her. In what the police estimated was only three or four minutes, Hope’s uninvited holiday guests had effectively turned over her entire life. She’d never felt so robbed—not of money or possessions, but of space and security. Someone she didn’t know, a criminal, maybe two, had broken in and rummaged through her very private history.
She took the jar and sat on the futon in the family room in front of where her television once sat. Rotating the jar with both hands, she noticed for the first time, in red and green, the words “Christmas Jar.” They were hand-painted across the center of the eight-inch tall clear glass jar. She dumped out the contents on the reading table, sorted the coins by type, and began counting. She twice totaled $154.76 in change and another $80 in cash. Why? From whom?
Hope knew this was just the sort of fabulous mystery her mother’s rainbow spirit had been made for. So I’ll solve it for us both, she thought. Her mind was already spinning theories, and her eyes settled on a photo of the two of them hanging on the wall across the room. And then I’ll write the story.