I've thought a lot, since, about why. Partly it was that I was afraid I'd be in trouble, for the phone call and for opening it. But mostly it was something else. When the station wagon came back up the driveway that afternoon and my mother came in stamping snow off her boots, with her cheeks red from the cold and her arms full of bags from Hess's and Kaufmann's, she was laughing. Sam had told the Santa at the mall that he wanted a Nintendo and a real dog and for Dad to keep his job, and the Santa, who my mother said smelled like Old Spice and Pall Malls, had looked at her over Sam's head with such a stricken face that she'd had to go stand behind a pillar until she stopped laughing. "That poor man," she kept saying, and wiping her eyes. "That poor man, he looked like somebody'd hit him with a shovel." I had not heard her laugh like that in a month, that big sudden sneeze of a laugh, and I couldn't make myself take it away from her. Not yet.
So I carried the envelope around for two days like a stone in my pocket. I took it to school on Monday, the last day before vacation, when we had a class party with Hawaiian Punch and Christmas cookies shaped like trees with green sprinkles, and Mr. Dombrowski's chorus sang "Do You Hear What I Hear" in the gym, badly, and I sat in the bleachers with my bookbag on my lap and both arms wrapped around it. After the concert I almost went to the music room to tell him. I got as far as the door. He was inside, alone, putting folding chairs away, stacking them one on top of another, and I thought of my father saying grown men would stand there holding a folding chair, and I turned around and left.
Monday night, the note came at 11:51. I lay in bed and listened to it, and listened to Oliver's soft thump on the floor, and his feet on the stairs, and the faint creak of my parents' door, which they'd started leaving open a crack for him. And then I heard something else. I heard my mother get up.
I knew her footsteps. I heard her cross the hall and go down the stairs, slowly, and I heard the third step from the bottom creak, the one that always creaked, and then nothing. I got out of bed and lay on the floor with my ear to the grate.
Through the iron squares I could see a slice of the living room below me, lit orange by the streetlight. I could see the corner of the piano and the end of the bench. And after a moment my mother came and sat down on the bench, right in my little square of vision, in her blue quilted robe, and put her hands on her knees.
She sat there for a long time. She didn't touch the keys. Once she lifted one hand and held it above them, the fingers spread a little, hovering, as if the keys were hot. Then she put it back on her knee.
I took the envelope out of my bookbag and went downstairs.
* * *
She heard me on the third step and turned around fast, and for a second, in the dark, with her face half orange and half shadow, she looked frightened. Then she saw it was me.
"Lib. What are you doing up? It's midnight."
"I have to give you something," I said. "I'm sorry. I should have given it to you on Saturday. I'm really sorry. I opened it. I didn't mean to, I mean I did mean to, but I'm sorry."