Page 45 of Meet Me at Christmas
She gazed into his blue eyes, formulating her opinion of how to approach this. Being with her was proving helpful for him, and while she didn’t know if she was ready for Henry to remembereverything, she had to do what she could to help him.
“Look, I could tell you, but I’m afraid that if you know things because I’ve told you it might muddy the waters of your actual memories. Already, you remembered a note on the front door of the house—that really happened. And I do have a connection to this door—you’re right about that too. But I’d rather you get to know me in real time and remember our past on your own and not based on a handful of memories that only one of us can recall.”
He stared at the door, looking dejected, clearly trying to work out whether he agreed with her approach.
Unable to handle the sight of his disappointment on her account, she decided to tell him about the study from her email, praying she was doing the right thing. “I learned about a new form of therapy that uses magnetic brain stimulation to improve memory.”
He slowly turned to her, his face aghast. “What? You’re not putting magnets in my brain.”
“I think it uses pulse-technology, but even still, what’s the alternative?”
“Hanging out with you seems to be working pretty well.”
Just then, her phone pinged with a text. And then with a second. So she checked it to be sure everything was okay.
“It’s my mom, reminding me we have a leak in the ceiling. She says she called and left messages with a few repair companies, but she’s not getting any answers.” Stella responded to Mama that she’d help her out when she got home and returned her phone to her pocket.
“Where’s the leak exactly?” Henry asked.
“In the main entryway. We think it’s coming from the roof.”
“I have a ladder. I could take a look. At the very least, I could put a tarp on it until after Christmas.”
“You’d do that?”
“Sure.”
She couldn’t deny the little thrill that coursed through her as he looked at her, and she wondered what the coming days would hold for them.
Fourteen
“Ifound you a roofer,” Stella said when she walked into the house, nodding to the truck parked outside their front window.
Mama peered through the glass as Henry leaned over the tailgate and pulled a ladder from the truck bed. His breath billowed out around him in the cold as he strained to carry the massive ladder to the porch and lean it against the roofline.
“It feels off not to see Pop climbing up to check things out,” Mama said. “He’d have gotten up there and fixed it before any of us even knew it was leaking. He spent so many days working on this house.”
“He loved doing it,” Stella said.
When her father finally told them he had cancer, it was already too late. Stella had been angry with him for that. He’d waited on purpose, so as not to spend his days grieving. For eight months, he dealt with the business of dying without sharing it with a soul. During the day, he spent time with Mama, called Stella and Lily for long chats, and did things around the house. At night, he worked on getting his affairs in order, made files of investments and bank statements, and wrote down all his passwords.
“Life isn’t about dying. That’s just one day. It’s what we do with all the other days that matters most,”he’d said in his last moments, the words echoing in her mind now.
Seeing Henry outside made her wonder what Pop had been like at their age. The son of two lawyers, Pop had grown up wealthy, but he’d chosen a simpler life, working with his hands and living out in the countryside. He jumped right into life as if he couldn’t wait to live it. By the time Pop was thirty, he had children already. With the right person, Henry could’ve been like Pop and had kids by now. Henry would’ve made an amazing father. Before she’d left, he’d been so patient. Once, when they were at church on Sunday morning, the Sunday school teacher had burst into the hallway in a panic, unable to find a little preschooler named Matthew. She could recall every detail of that moment.
* * *
“I’ll look for him,” Henry had said.
“He didn’t want to be left in Sunday school. He’s afraid of strangers,” the woman called after him as he took Stella’s hand and scoured the hallways.
They finally located the little boy outside in the churchyard. Henry dropped Stella’s hand and paced slowly over to him. “Wow, you’re so lucky,” Henry said, walking beside the boy, his attention on the ground as he moved slowly around.
The little boy looked up at him. “Why?”
“Well, you’re standing in a patch of clover. If you find one with four leaves, do you know what it means?”
Matthew’s eyes rounded. “Good luck?”
