The Blue Star
Part One: Christmas Afternoon
“No presents for you this year, sweetheart.”
My mother said it so lightly that, for a second, I thought she was joking. She was standing by the fireplace in her red holiday sweater with the sequined reindeer, holding a mug of eggnog, smiling the same pleasant church smile she’d worn to every Christmas I could remember. Yolanda Wallace has never once raised her voice in public. She didn’t raise it now.
My daughter, Kayla, stood beside the Christmas tree in the red velvet dress my wife had bought her for the occasion, her dark curls tied back with a white ribbon. She was seven years old, and she was watching her two cousins open what I’d later calculate was nearly five thousand dollars’ worth of presents.
Two brand-new iPhones, still in their white boxes. A PlayStation with three games. Noise-canceling headphones. Designer sneakers that cost more than my first car payment. A stack of gift cards fanned out like a winning poker hand.
My brother Brian’s boys, Tyrese and Marcus, eleven and nine, were sitting in a drift of torn wrapping paper so deep it came up to their knees. Brian sat on the couch behind them filming everything on his phone, laughing. My father was in his recliner with the Lions game on, turned up loud.
And Kayla stood by the tree with empty hands. No gift with her name on it. No stocking. Not even a candy cane from the bowl on the coffee table, because nobody had offered her one and she was too polite to take it.
She tugged gently on the leg of my jeans.
“Daddy?”
I crouched down beside her. “What is it, sweetheart?”
She glanced over at her grandmother before she answered, and then she whispered it, the way children whisper the things they’re afraid are true.
“Did Grandma forget about us?”
Before I could say a word, my father’s voice cut across the room from the recliner.
“Lance! Quit teaching that girl to be jealous!”
The football game kept roaring behind him. Somebody had just fumbled.
I stood up slowly. “She’s seven, Dad,” I said. “She asked a question.”
“Then teach her to be grateful,” he said, without looking away from the TV, “instead of watching what everybody else gets.”
Brian laughed from the couch. “Come on, man. Don’t ruin Christmas over a couple of presents.”
I looked at the pile of electronics around his sons. “That’s easy for you to say,” I said.
My mother folded her arms over the sequined reindeer. “We’re on a very tight budget this year, Lance,” she said. “You know that.”
A tight budget. I almost laughed out loud. My parents supposedly couldn’t afford a ten-dollar doll for my daughter, but somehow they had found thousands for Brian’s boys. I knew exactly how tight their budget was, because I’d been paying it for six years.
Part Two: The Star
There was something else, too. Something worse than the empty space under the tree.
Twenty minutes earlier, when we’d first arrived, Kayla had walked straight up to her grandmother holding a small package wrapped in tissue paper. Inside was a clay star she’d made at school. She’d spent two weeks on it, coming home every afternoon to tell me about the progress. She’d painted it sky blue and dotted gold paint carefully around all five points with the end of a toothpick. Across the middle, in her careful second-grade printing, she’d written one word.
GRANDMA.
My mother had barely glanced at it. “Oh,” she’d said. “That’s nice, honey.” Then she’d set it down on the end table without another look and turned to ask Brian if the boys wanted hot chocolate.
Now, standing in the living room with my father’s voice still ringing in my ears, I could see past the doorway into the kitchen. There was a black trash bag sitting by the back door, half full of wrapping paper and paper plates.
On top, with one point broken off, lay a small blue star.
Something inside me went very cold and very quiet.
My son, Simon, who was four, was sitting on the carpet near the tree playing with a piece of discarded curly ribbon, completely content. He was too young to understand any of it.
Kayla wasn’t.
“Get your coats, kids,” I said.
My mother frowned. “Lance, don’t you start making a scene.”
“I’m not making a scene,” I said. “We’re going home.”
My father finally turned away from the game. He leaned forward in his recliner and pointed at me. “Don’t you take that tone in my house,” he said.
I looked around the living room. At the big flat-screen television. At the warm air pouring from the vents. At the lights on the tree and the lamps on the end tables and the roof over our heads.
All of it paid for with money my wife and I had earned.
“Your house,” I repeated quietly.
My mother’s face tightened. “Lance,” she said, and there was a warning in it. “That’s enough.”
I didn’t argue. I walked into the kitchen, reached into the trash bag, and lifted out Kayla’s star. One point was snapped off. There was a smear of cranberry sauce across the gold dots. I wiped it carefully on my shirt and slipped it into my coat pocket.
My mother had followed me to the kitchen doorway. She watched me do it.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she said.
I looked her in the eye. “No, Mom,” I said. “I’ve been ridiculous for six years. Today I’m done.”
Part Three: The Drive Home
Nobody said anything in the car until we were halfway home. Then Kayla’s voice came from the back seat, small and careful.
“Daddy, did I do something bad?”
My hands tightened on the wheel. “No, baby,” I said. “You didn’t do anything bad.”
“Then why didn’t Grandma get me anything?” She was quiet for a moment. “Maybe she didn’t like my star.”
I pulled into the empty parking lot of a closed Walgreens and put the car in park. Simon was asleep in his car seat with the curly ribbon still clutched in his fist. I turned around in my seat to face my daughter.
I took the blue star out of my pocket and held it up between us in the glow of the parking lot lights.
“Kayla,” I said. “Listen to me. This is beautiful. It’s the most beautiful thing anybody gave anybody in that house today. Grandma made a bad choice. A really bad one. But you didn’t do anything wrong. Not one thing.”
Tears were running down her cheeks. “Really?” she whispered.
“Really,” I said. “And you know where this is going? Right in the middle of our Christmas tree. Top branch. Right under the angel.”
She wiped her nose on her velvet sleeve. “Even with the broken part?”
“Especially with the broken part,” I said. “That way we’ll always remember what it survived.”
She managed a small, wet smile. I turned back around and drove us home. But my mind kept drifting somewhere I didn’t want it to go.
When I was nine years old, Brian got a brand-new red bicycle for Christmas. A Huffy with streamers on the handlebars. He was six.
I got three pairs of white tube socks.
My mother pulled me aside in the hallway afterward and told me I was older and should understand. Money was tight, she said. Brian was little. I was the big boy.
That became the pattern of my whole childhood. Brian needed. Lance understood. Brian broke things. Lance fixed them. Brian got in trouble. Lance covered for him. When Brian wrecked Dad’s truck at seventeen, I told our father I’d been driving. When Brian dropped out of community college, I helped him fill out the job applications.
I’d spent my whole life understanding. And now my parents were teaching the same lesson to my daughter.
I wasn’t going to let them.
Part Four: Six Years
Six years earlier, in March, my father had a heart attack on the loading dock of the warehouse in Dearborn where he’d worked for twenty-eight years. He survived. But his heart was damaged, and his doctor said he couldn’t go back to lifting freight. The warehouse didn’t have desk jobs for sixty-one-year-old forklift drivers.
Three months later, my mother called me crying.
“Lance,” she said. “We’re behind on the mortgage. Four months. The bank sent a letter. We’re going to lose the house.”
I’m a civil engineer. I work for the Michigan Department of Transportation, designing highway interchanges. I make a decent salary, not a big one. My wife, Kendra, is an emergency room nurse at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. We had two little kids then, and a small brick bungalow in Ferndale with a leaky basement, and a plan to save for a bigger house in five years.
I told my mother I’d help. Of course I did. She was my mother.
So every month, I paid twelve hundred and forty dollars toward their mortgage. Mom gave me the account information for the payments, and I set up an automatic transfer from my checking account on the first of every month.
And every month, I paid another eight hundred and sixty for everything else. Groceries. Electric. Gas. Car insurance. Dad’s heart medications, which cost three hundred dollars a month even with Medicare. To make it easier, Mom asked me to add her as an authorized user on my credit card and give her access to my checking account so she could pay the bills herself. So I don’t have to bother you every time the electric bill comes, honey.
I did.
Two thousand one hundred dollars a month. For seventy-two months. One hundred fifty-one thousand, two hundred dollars.
Kendra took extra shifts to make it work. Nights. Weekends. Holidays. Christmas Day, four years running. We postponed the bigger house. We skipped vacations. We drove our Honda until it had two hundred and twenty thousand miles on it. Kayla wore her cousins’ hand-me-downs, which my mother delivered in garbage bags with a little sigh about how generous Brian was.
And my mother made me promise not to tell Brian.
“He’d feel terrible,” she said. “Knowing we needed help. Knowing you’re paying and he isn’t. It would hurt his pride. Please, Lance. Let it be our secret.”
At church, she told everybody that Dad’s pension covered the bills.
My father doesn’t have a pension. The warehouse closed its pension plan in 2004.
I knew she was lying. But I told myself I was protecting their dignity. 