Christmas Jars Page 7

  All that evening, Hope tightly gripped her cordless phone. Twice she dialed Adam and Lauren’s first three numbers, but dread and guilt kept her from dialing the last four. Instead, she paced through her apartment, picturing the wreckage of her break-in just six months earlier, and acknowledging having done to Adam and Lauren precisely what intruders had done to her. She had entered their lives and their personal space. She had violated them. She had robbed them blind.

  Tomorrow. Hope spent the night on the couch, staring at a photo of her and her mother strapping on matching helmets for a bike ride when Hope was an innocent fourth-grader.

  The next morning Hope ate oatmeal and spun the phone on the table. She prayed it would ring, knew it wouldn’t, and left for work an hour late.

  One week turned into two, then three, and four Mondays later the paper was featuring another all-star member of the Daily Record family. Hope immersed herself in work, even volunteering to attend an out-of-town conference: “Achieving Circulation Growth through Better Writing.” Five days later she returned to work and the same empty feeling of betrayed trust.

  A second month passed without a phone call either to or from the Maxwells. With no conscious effort, Hope’s smoldering remorse became indignation. Why haven’t they called? Hannah, at least Hannah should have called by now, checked on me. Have they forgotten?

  Twelve weeks ticked by, and a historically hot summer mercifully gave way to Labor Day. Then, on a late-September fall afternoon, Hope drove down the Maxwells’ street, stopped just past their house, and watched in the rearview mirror as two men gingerly unloaded from a truck an obviously heavy armoire with one badly damaged door. Lauren observed from the driveway, like a nervous mother, camera in hand to record its condition on arrival. Hope imagined Adam inside his shop, preparing a space, sweeping away the remnants of their last success. With the deliberation of a heart surgeon, he would choose his instruments, arrange the lights, and say a silent prayer.

  Hope pulled away and watched in her rearview mirror until trees and other houses obstructed Restored, Inc. from view. She knew that the Maxwells were long over their sure disappointment. She’d not hurt them, damaged their business, or left them scarred in any tangible way. It had been a simple breach of trust—nothing more.

  Meandering through light weekend traffic, Hope realized that as difficult as reappearing would be, she could not hide forever. Not only did she need the Maxwells back in her life, but her conscience ached for their forgiveness.

  After deliberating over much less dramatic scenarios, Hope chose a grand holiday homecoming. The prodigal daughter would return on Christmas Eve, just after her early annual dinner at Chuck’s Chicken ’n’ Biscuits. She would come with her own full jar, her symbolic peace offering. Standing bravely on the porch, she would look Adam in the eye and ask for forgiveness. Then one by one she’d apologize to Lauren, who’d offered such warmth and kindness; then to the twins, who accepted her with genuine friendship; and finally to Hannah, who in such a short time became the sister the orphan from Chuck’s never had.

  She would also present a professionally framed copy of her first front-page feature. They would read it. They would finally understand.

  ~

  Thanksgiving approached, and Hope rebuffed a deluge of dinner invitations. They came from her Uncle Bob, her mother’s only sibling; Lyle and his wife; and a few single friends from the paper. But the poster child workaholic trudged straight through the holiday without a sniff of turkey and stuffing. Instead, she stayed on top of deadlines and immersed herself in work.

  December delivered the first significant snowfall and the red, green, and gold glows of holiday décor that always followed. Though her own Christmas spirit was dampened by another year without her mother and the mounting anxiety of a reunion with the family she’d left behind, Hope’s own Christmas Jar was filling fast. She sincerely looked forward to giving away her very first. In her never-resting conscience, her jar was set to play an important role in the process of forgiveness and starting over.

  Fourteen

  ~

  The loud ring just inches from her ear startled Hope and sent her just-toasted plain bagel toppling to the desktop. It was fifteen minutes to eight on a bitterly cold December morning. She was treasure hunting for a strawberry jam packet through the desk of a former community page coworker, Janelle Roberts.

  “Good morning, the Daily Record.” It was déjà vu, taking her back to her days downstairs as a lowly ad writer.

  “And to you. I have an obituary to run. Have I reached the right department?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No one answered the main number, so I followed the auto-attendant to this extension.” The man’s voice was pleasant, quiet—but confident.

  “I am sorry for the trouble, but I don’t believe the operator is in until eight. I can take a message, though, if you—”

  “Not necessary. I have something prepared. I can quickly read it—”

  “Gotcha,” Hope said, discovering a packet of jam under a replacement roll of Scotch tape.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry.” She recovered. “I meant yes, I’d be happy to take it down.”

  “Appreciate it. Whenever you’re ready.”

  Hope set aside her bagel and jam packet, reached for a pad and pencil, and sat on the edge of the desk.

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  “‘On December eighteenth,’” the man began, “‘devoted father, husband, and successful area businessman Adam Maxwell died of a heart attack while working on his latest antique furniture restoration project at his home studio.’”

  Hope’s own heart stopped. “I’m sorry, who?” Hope stood, and her heart took off again, jumping to her throat.

  “Adam Maxwell, an area businessman and my father-in-law.” Hope finally recognized the voice. It was Hannah’s husband, Dustin.

  Hope grasped for the chair and sat. She looked around the room for a sign that this was just another inexplicable dream being played out at four a.m. from the couch in her apartment.

  “Miss?” the man called. “Are you there?”

  She took four quick bursts of air into her lungs. “Yes, yes,” she answered.

  “You knew him?”

  She heard the words, but her churning mind ground them into sounds she could not understand. She stared at the notepad and saw tears bypassing her face and falling straight to the yellow page below.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m sorry, Dustin,” she whispered and hung up the phone.

  The fiercely independent and never unprepared young woman sat broken in a lump of disbelief, tears running down both cheeks to the corners of her mouth. She left the bagel and jam where they sat on Janelle’s desk, slowly took her feet, and walked toward the front door and to her car. Whether she passed anyone, whether they greeted her or expressed any concern, Hope would never know.

  She opened the back door to her vehicle, climbed in, and lay in the back seat. Her body heaved and shook as she cried the deep, scarring tears that only death brings.

  It took the better part of an hour for Hope to regain her equilibrium and feel confident enough to step from the vehicle and walk back across the parking lot without losing her way and collapsing. She successfully navigated her way to the first-floor restroom, rinsed her face with cool tap water, and stared at the picture of grief in the dirty mirror. The woman she saw was familiar. She was the woman who’d lost a parent before.

  Hope left the empty women’s restroom, fetched her purse, told a colleague upstairs she needed to run a quick errand, and disappeared for the day. From her apartment she phoned Janelle at her desk and asked if a gentleman had called that morning with an obituary.

  “Hey, Hope,” Janelle greeted her. “Yes, there was a message from a guy on my phone saying he’d started to dictate a family obit and someone hung up on him. That was you?”

  “Sort of. Sorry ’bout that. I’ll explain later.”

  “You okay
? You sound a little roughed up.”

  “I feel a little roughed up.” She thought the phrase a perfect fit. “Could you read it to me?”

  “Sure, Hope. One sec.”

  She stopped pacing and sat on the futon couch in her living room.

  “‘On December eighteenth, devoted father, husband, and successful area businessman Adam Maxwell died of a heart attack while working on his latest antique furniture restoration project at his home studio. He was fifty-eight. Together with his wife of thirty-six years, Lauren Chapin Maxwell, they operated Restored, Incorporated, a highly respected local company known to many readers. Mr. Maxwell founded the enterprise during college and has never held any other jobs, many times forgoing expansion to keep the operation small and home based. In addition to his involvement with his church and many local charities, Mr. Maxwell has sponsored his daughter’s softball teams long since the end of their playing days. Mr. Maxwell was a loving and witty husband, a brother, and a wonderful father. He is survived by his wife; three daughters, Hannah (Dustin) and twins Clara and Julie; and three siblings, Steven, Terri, and Jeff. Funeral services will be held at noon, December twenty-fourth, at Wood and Hill Mortuary at 104 South Main Street.’”

  What she had prayed was a dream, a joke, or a simple misunderstanding now crushed her already fragile psyche.

  “Someone you know?”

  “You might say that.”

  “Sorry to hear. Anything I can do?”

  “Actually, yes. Connect me to Lyle upstairs, could you please?”

  “You got it. Hang on.”

  After the usual series of clicks and pops, Hope spent several mostly composed minutes conveying the sad news.

  “That’s a tough one, Hope.” Lyle had been long aware of her relationship with the family and her consternation at his running the surprise profile on her in the paper. “I’m sorry for you.”

  For me? Hope reeled. She thought of the family gathering in their humble home and preparing to bury their patriarch. For me? The unspoken question and answer were obvious to everyone else. Hope’s Christmas Eve homecoming had been canceled.

  Fifteen

  ~

  Hope spent the afternoon driving circles around the suburbs, debating, deciding, and reconsidering whether to stop at the Maxwell home. She drove by, and seven or eight unfamiliar cars lined the street. The garage door, usually open to reveal a storm of sawdust and energy, was closed tight.

  She drove by a second time, parking four houses away on the opposite side of the street. She laid her seat down as far as it could go and lost herself looking up into the sagging gray fabric above. Then she turned her head to the right and saw a healthy image of her mother, also lying back in her passenger seat and staring up. The view was familiar.

  Hope’s high school graduation gift had been a years-in-the-making road trip to Washington, D.C., and a tour of the Post arranged by her high school senior English teacher. Hope and her mother were wowed by the size and scope of the newspaper’s headquarters and the controlled chaos that buzzed from room to room. The starstruck visitors breathed in a thousand memories and after three nonstop days headed home. But Hope knew one day she’d be back for more than just sightseeing.

  After a half day on the road, Louise suggested the two pull off at a rest stop. They laid their seats back as far as they could go, and Hope told her mother dazzlingly vivid stories of her road ahead until Louise pulled a coat over herself and dozed off.

  After a few more minutes of gazing across the front seat, in a car now parked on the Maxwells’ street, Hope finally conceded her mother wasn’t really there. The seat was empty. And instead of an eighteen-year-old young woman with limitless and untapped potential grinning from the driver’s seat, there lay a lost mid-twenties reporter still weighted by mostly untapped potential and two gaping holes in her soul.

  Hope repositioned her seat, took the wheel in her hands, and felt an unmistakable urge to recompose the surreal scenes of her life. She started her car and, as she pulled away, watched the shrinking pictures in her rearview mirror. “Time for one more story.”

  Within an hour she was sitting at her kitchen table writing in longhand. Each sentence exploded off the page, expanding and filling space until the story felt whole. She once would have traded everything to have her masterpiece plant her firmly on journalism’s front lines and on the Daily Record’s front page. But now she cared only that it planted her back on the muted burgundy Persian rug on the floor of the Maxwells’ living room. And she’d trade everything for that.

  Three days later, on Christmas Eve, Hope arose early and retrieved the special Christmas edition of the paper from a box in the parking lot of her apartment complex. Dressed in baggy flannel shorts and a sweatshirt, Hope unfolded the paper to view the front page, holding it tightly with both hands and standing in the glow of a streetlight.

  “Christmas Jars and Hope.” The byline put goose bumps on the back of her neck: “by Hope Jensen.” The long-awaited moment, one dreamt of since her years as a bubbly middle schooler, the one she’d lived in her mind a million times since her mother left, was finally at her doorstep. But it was nothing like what she had imagined. Missing was the beaming woman and her sheet cake, thoughtful embraces, and the hurrahs that accompany such achievement. In their place sat a lonely girl on a yellow curb, oblivious to the cold and the wind whipping her bare legs. The brightest moment in her brief but stellar career was passing not in triumph but as painful redemption.

  Hope read the piece silently. As she finished reading, she leaned back, allowing in deep, cleansing breaths of thin morning air that filled and stung her lungs. She folded the paper neatly and walked with a forgotten bounce back up the stairs to her warm apartment. She prepared and ate a bowl of oatmeal with blueberries, her mother’s favorite.

  She dressed warmly, picked up her change-filled jar, and set off to experience for the first time the miracle of blessing someone other than herself.

  With tender care, as if it were an unwitting baby, Hope wrapped the jar and belted it into the passenger seat next to her. She drove first around the edge and then through the middle of town, at last settling on a well-used downtown park. She stood in front of her car, positioned between her headlights, scanning dawn’s landscape for a worthy yet safe target. Coming across and into the light from her left was a middle-aged man struggling to push a metal shopping cart across the loose-gravel path. Hope thought him too young to be living on the street.

  She waited until he was exactly in front of her, some fifteen feet ahead, and very well lit by the bright beams of light from behind. “Sir, Merry Christmas.”

  The man didn’t respond, and for the first time she questioned the wisdom of a young woman stopping a vagrant on a dark gray morning in a public park.

  “Merry Christmas,” she repeated. He nodded his head and worked to maneuver his cart around her. She thrust the jar at him as he tried to pass. He stopped.

  “I’d like you to have this,” she blurted.

  His eyes found the jar but his hands stayed firmly on the cart’s handle. “Really, for you.” She gestured with it, placing it against his chest. “I’m sorry it’s not more.”

  “Thank you very much, miss,” he said meekly. “But I can’t.”

  Hope was frustrated and unprepared. This is not what I planned for. “Please, sir, I know it’s not very much, but I’d like you to have it.”

  The man placed both hands around the jar and lifted it up to examine. “Goodness, it’s over half full. You should move on. There are certainly others in the park who need this more. Try beyond the bridge . . .”

  “Please?” Hope put her hands in front of her, not meaning to beg but at once realizing it might have looked that way.

  The man stood motionless, staring at her, warmed at the first person not to avoid his eyes in as long as he could remember. “Thank you. Thank you for this.” With care the man placed the jar in the cart and draped it with a thin flannel shirt.

  “Yo
u’re so welcome,” Hope answered, fighting a frog in her throat.

  Then in a moment Hope would replay for the rest of her life, the homeless man reached out to hug her. She hesitated just a second too long. First his arms dropped, then his head, and he sheepishly backed away.

  “Wait, wait. . . . You’re welcome.” She stepped in and returned the gesture, wrapping her arms around his broad shoulders. She breathed in deeply, almost choking at the wet smell of mold. It was a smell she hoped never to forget.

  Sixteen

  ~

  Hope spent the morning ignoring a dozen phone calls, no doubt from congratulatory and curious friends. Then when her hair, makeup, and muted gray skirt-and-sweater combination were in perfect order, she drove to the funeral of Adam Maxwell.

  She arrived earlier than expected and avoided tension by walking a few city blocks around the stately funeral home. Only when she could clearly hear “Amazing Grace” from the mourners inside did she swallow hard, triple-check her purse for tissue, and pull open the giant wooden door. The moment took her back to the first time she had met Adam, one year before.

  It was as if someone had known she would arrive late and not wish to be seen. To her relief, a single folding chair sat deep in the back, half-hidden by long black curtains extending from a track high on the beige ceiling. She settled in, buried her tissue in her trembling lap, and listened to those who loved—and had been loved by—Adam Maxwell.

  One after another the children spoke of a greatness defined not by a singular moment or trait but by time. At her mother’s request, Hannah, the eldest, delivered the eulogy. She spoke with elegance of her father’s love of sanding rough, damaged wood. Slowly he worked at the edges and imperfections. “Dad used to say every morning when he brought the studio to life that no one can rush the process of perfection.” She smiled at the twins sitting as statues on the front row on either side of their mother. Lauren spread her arms wide around them, pulling them into her. Just a few feet to their left rested the man they had come to bury.