Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [79]
No matter how many years had passed since their first son, Michael, died, every holiday had always been tinged with a secret sadness. For the first ten years every Christmas morning the two of them had gone out to his grave and decorated it with a small tree and little toys, and every Easter an Easter basket had been placed there. Every year on his birthday and on the anniversary of the day he died they missed him more. Rarely did a day go by when one or the other did not think to themselves Michael would be six or twelve or whatever the age he would be that year. Although they never discussed it with anyone, donations made in memory of Michael Smith had paid for beds and wallpaper for an entire wing of the Children’s Hospital. Most of the money to buy a Seeing Eye dog for Beatrice Woods came from a large donation to the Princess Mary Margaret Fund in his name.
Now twenty-two years had gone by. Dorothy wondered what kind of man he would have been. What young girl would have loved him and maybe even married him by now? What would his children be like, and would they look like him? Although he had been gone for many years, a picture of him as a child was always alive in Dorothy’s mind. She continued to see him standing there and waving at her, the little boy that did not live. She often thought about the bud that never bloomed, the egg that never hatched, and wondered what happened to them. Did they just disappear, never to exist, lost forever, or would they come back again some spring? For years she looked for her little boy in every small child she saw, looked for him in the eyes of every blond boy with blue eyes like his. But she never found him again.
Merry Christmas
ON THE MORNING of December twenty-fourth, Bobby could hardly wait for the night to come. Ever since Jimmy had become their boarder and lived with them, the Smiths had started to open their presents on Christmas Eve. Jimmy had to catch the 11:45 P.M. bus to Kansas City to spend Christmas Day visiting his friends at the veterans hospital. And it was a good thing, because by that time Bobby and Mother Smith, both too curious for their own good, had usually poked, shook, and rattled their presents almost to death and the gifts might not have lasted until Christmas morning. Still, it was a long wait. Once Dorothy had seen a newsreel of Joan Crawford, her favorite movie star, and her children gathered around a piano singing carols on Christmas Eve, they had to do the same thing. Now, every year after dinner she made them all go in and gather around the organ and sing. Bobby hated the custom with a passion. As far as he was concerned, it just delayed the real meaning of Christmas: presents. At around 9:30 that night, when they finally sat down to open them, the phone rang. Dorothy said, before picking up the phone, “Wait a minute . . . let me see who this is. . . . Don’t open anything yet.” Oh, rats! thought Bobby, who was just about to tear into the big box with his name on it.
They could hear Dorothy saying to someone on the phone, “Oh no . . . oh, you poor thing. . . . Oh . . . well, bless your heart. . . . Yes . . . I’m sure he will. . . . Oh, you poor dear.” She came back in and looked at Doc. “That was Poor Tot. Her mother stole all the presents she had wrapped and hid them in the backyard and now she can’t find them and she wondered if you would go down and open up the drugstore for her so she could get a few things for the kids to have in the morning. I told her you would.”
“All right,” said Doc and got up to get his coat. “You all go ahead and open the presents. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Dorothy said, “We will do no such thing. We are not going to open anything until you get back.”
Bobby asked his mother, “Can’t we open just one?”
“No, Bobby, put that back down.”
Mother Smith sighed. “Poor Tot, to have to work all day and then to have to put up with that crazy mother of hers and try to raise those two children at the same time. I don’t know how she puts up with it all myself.”
“I don’t either, and to make matters worse,” Dorothy