For One More Day by Mitch Albom Read Free Book Online Page B

thought of her: Charming Posey.
    Apparently, that was only as long as my father's big hands were wrapped around her. Once she was divorced, freed of his grasp, other women didn't want that charm anywhere near their husbands.
    Thus my mother lost all of her friends. She might as well have had the plague. The card games she and my father used to play with neighbors? Finished. The invitations to birthday parties? Done. On the Fourth of July, you could smell charcoal everywhere–yet no one invited us to their cookout. At Christmastime, you would see cars in front of houses and mingling adults visible through the bay windows.
    But my mother would be in our kitchen, mixing cookie dough.
    "Aren't you going to that party? " we'd ask. "We're having a party right here," she'd say.
    She made it seem like her choice. Just the three of us. For a long time, I believed New Year's Eve was a family event, meant for squeezing chocolate syrup on ice cream and tooting noisemakers by a TV set. It surprised me to learn that my teenaged friends used the night for raiding the family liquor cabinet, because their parents were dressed up and gone by eight o'clock.
    "You mean you're stuck with your mom on New Year's?" they would ask. "Yeah," I'd moan.

    But it was my charming mother who was stuck.
    Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother
    I have already given up on Santa Claus by the time my old man leaves, but Roberta is only six, and she does the whole routine: leaving cookies, writing a note, sneaking to the window, pointing at stars and asking, "Is that a reindeer?"
    The first December we are on our own, my mother wants to do something special. She finds a complete Santa outfit: the red jacket, red pants, boots, fake beard. On Christmas Eve, she tells Roberta to go to bed at nine thirty and to not, whatever she does, be anywhere near the living room at ten o'clock–which, of course, means Roberta is out of bed at five minutes to ten and watching like a hawk I follow behind her, carrying a flashlight. We sit on the staircase.
    Suddenly, the room goes dark, and we hear rustling. My sister gasps. I flick on my flashlight. Roberta whisper screams, "No, Chick!" and I flick it off, but then, being that age, I flick it back on again and catch my mother in her Santa suit with a pillow sack. She turns and tries to bellow, "Ho! Ho! Ho! Who's there?" My sister ducks, but for some reason I keep that light shining on my mother, right in her bearded face, so she has to shield her eyes with her free hand. "Ho! Ho!" she tries again.
    Roberta is scrunched up like a bug, peeking over her fists.
    She whispers, "Chick, shut it off! You'll scare him away!" But I can only see the absurdity of the situation, how we are going to hare to fake everything from now on: fake a full dinner table, fake a female Santa Claus, fake being a family instead of three quarters of a family.
    "It's just Mom, " I say flatly. "Ho! Ho! Ho!" my mother says. "It is not!"
    Roberta says.
    "Yes it is, you twerp. It's Mom. Santa Claus isn't a girl, stupid.” I keep that light on my mother and I see her posture change–her head drops back, her shoulders slump, like a fugitive Santa caught by the cops. Roberta starts crying. I can tell my mother wants to yell at me, but she can't do that and blow her cover, so she stares me down between her stocking cap and her cotton beard, and I feel my father's absence all over the room. Finally, she dumps the pillowcase of small presents onto the floor and walks out the front door without so much as another "ho, ho, ho. " My sister runs back to bed, howling with tears. I am left on the stairs with my flashlight, illuminating an empty room and a tree.
    Rose
    WE CONTINUED WALKING through the old neighborhood. By now I had settled into a foggy acceptance of this what would you call it?–temporary insanity? I would go with my mother wherever she wanted to go until whatever I had done caught up with me. To be honest, not all of me wanted it to end. When a lost