By early November, Claud had still not proposed, and Leta wondered if he would. Even her daughter Vivian, always so unintrusive, began to question the future of this relationship, asking as politely as she could one morning while they were making themselves new dresses for Christmas. Leta had found a pattern she particularly liked, a style that she believed would flatter her daughter’s curvy figure. Vivian was so pleased that she decided to adapt the pattern to make a similar dress for her mother. Subsequently, they got together twice a week for fittings and to sew. Both enjoyed the time together.
“How is Claud?” Vivian asked, tacking a sleeve.
“Fine,” Leta answered, pinning on a bit of lace to the bodice. “Do you like this?”
Vivian took a good look at the dress and the final product of the future. “Pretty.”
Vivian had a couple of pins in her mouth, so Leta hoped this would be the end of the conversation. A few moments later, Vivian spoke again.
“You two have been courting for how many months now?” she asked.
“Since May,” she answered. Clearly, they were going to have some kind of conversation, in spite of her covert distraction from the subject.
“And you see each other…?”
“Two or three times a week is all.”
“And you like him?”
“He makes me laugh.”
Having said this, Leta remembered a perfectly good joke and chortled to herself. It was too salacious to share with her more prudent daughter.
“Is that what you want in your life, Mom?” Vivian questioned. “Someone to make you laugh?”
Leta paused a moment, realizing that, yes, this is what she needed in her life at the time—a few smiles, jokes, laughter and simple friendliness from a man.
“Now that I think about it,” she answered, “yes, dear, I think that a little laughter, a walk in the park and a pleasant meal companion every now and then is exactly what I want right now.”
Vivian stopped sewing and looked hard at her, finally taking a deep breath and returning to her work. “If that’s what you want.”
“It’s what I want,” Leta repeated firmly. “Are you finished with the sewing machine?”
Vivian never brought the subject up again. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to, for only a week later, Leta’s four-year old grandson, the second child of her son and daughter-in-law, took ill quite suddenly and died on the day before Thanksgiving.
They were all devastated, most notably, of course, her daughter-in-law Kathryn. While the immediate days were spent on the funeral with family and friends about offering their sympathies, presence and food, by the beginning of December the reality set in.
Although Leta and Vivian spent time with Kathryn, who was still mother to two other children, one in kindergarten and the other a toddler, they found themselves pushed aside in favor of Kathryn’s own sisters and omnipresent mother. Truthfully, Leta felt uncomfortable around her daughter-in-law’s family. Staunch Roman Catholics, they seemed extremely judgmental of her, as a divorced woman with two additional late husbands. And Leta also knew that there was still a lingering disapproval that Kathryn married her son Dale, even after he converted to Roman Catholicism.
Baby-sitting and child-care duties fell on Kathryn’s sisters and companionship to the grieving mother was taken up by her own mother. For their part, Leta and Vivian prepared meals and helped keep the house clean, but they always seemed to be, at least to Leta, interlopers. If she had her druthers, she would have become simply a more frequent visitor, rather than a caregiver, but Vivian’s natural inclination was to take care of others, and so they were there.
One mid-December evening, when Dale was home, the three of them were sitting in his barren living room. Kathryn had put the children to bed and taken to her own, professing a headache. They sipped coffee and nibbled a few early cookies Vivian made—sugar walnut cookies, her specialty. Dale picked up a cookie, and sighed with great melancholy.
“Here it is,” he pronounced, “the only hint in this entire house that Christmas is only two weeks away.”
Leta herself was surprised by the comment. She had barely noticed the growing Christmas festivities herself. Sure, she had been shopping with Vivian and even purchased most of the gifts she would be sharing with her children and grandchildren, but she had done all this in a kind of stupor, without fully registering that they were well into the holiday season. Vivian, of course, was in the midst of decorating her home, but Leta had not removed one box of decorations from the closet for her own, and she hadn’t once considered her holiday baking.
“I don’t know how we’re going to do this,” Dale continued. “Kathryn hasn’t even acknowledged the season, and today, Connie asked me if Santa Claus would come to a house without a Christmas tree.”
Having said this, he dropped more deeply into his seat.
Vivian looked at her mother then turned to her brother.
“We can do the shopping for you,” she offered. She paused a moment to gauge his reaction; he didn’t recoil. “That is, if you think it can help, right Mom?”
“Of course. Definitely, We can do that,” Leta agreed, quite surprised herself.
“Buy the gifts, wrap them, and then you can pick them up from Mom’s on Christmas Eve,” Vivian continued. “We can take care of all of it.”
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