Adult Winner of the 2004 Holiday Fiction Contest

One Hundred Dollars
    
BY LAURA OTTERBERG
Winner of the Daniel Island News Ficiton Contest
Adult Division

    It had just started snowing again when Harvey walked out onto his front porch, stepping out of his frayed slippers and into his winter boots. Adjusting the faded, red velvet bow dangling from the wreath on his front door, he waited for the little, white mail Jeep to disappear around the corner. He hadn’t bothered to put lights up on the house or lights on the tree, for that matter, since Becca died. In fact, he hadn’t even bothered with a tree at all the last few years. It didn’t seem worth all the trouble, walking into the woods behind his house, carrying the heavy saw and getting covered with sticky beggar’s lice, just to find the perfect Frasier fir that no one but him would see anyway.
    Remembering yesterday, he wondered why he allowed himself to be such a glutton for punishment. Like every other afternoon in December, Harvey had watched from his recliner for the mailman, or mailwoman in his case, to pass by the front window, stopping at his box across the street. She usually came during "Dr. Phil" but sometimes she made him wait until "Oprah" was on. When he finally spotted the small Jeep, camouflaged against the snow blanketing the neighborhood, for the first time he could remember, it had not stopped at all. “Well, what do you expect, you old fool!” he had berated himself. The last of his cousins had passed away two years ago, and even the bank didn’t bother to send a card anymore.
Well, there was one he could depend on, even though it really shouldn’t count. He didn’t even know whom it came from, but he had come to rely on it all the same. Hurrying to get the frozen laces tied, Harvey didn’t want to miss the results of the holiday makeovers, to be revealed after the commercial break. Looking both ways and crossing the deserted street, its wet, gray slush turning white with the fresh powder, Harvey crossed the fingers of his left hand and opened the metal box with the other. Harvey didn’t want to admit it, but he had big hopes for today. It was Christmas Eve, after all. A grin slowly spread across his face, as he pulled an oversized, red envelope out of his mailbox. Poking his hand back into the mailbox, he withdrew a Sears circular and a power bill. Debating for a full minute, Harvey finally put them back, ensuring he would have mail on Monday.
    Back in his worn, brown leather recliner, Harvey looked at the envelope, savoring the moment. His name and address were handwritten in the now-familiar scrawl below the puzzling Charleston, South Carolina postmark. Careful not to tear the envelope, his eyes took in every detail of the silly snowman on the front, gradually opening the card and catching the hundred-dollar bill that nearly slid through his arthritic fingers. Deliberately saving the best for last, he read first the generic greeting, “May the warmth and love that surrounds us this holiday season remain throughout the year.” Then below the preprinted cursive script, the signature he would recognize anywhere proclaimed,
“Merry Christmas!
    Just wanted you to know that you are remembered!
    Thank you again,
    Your Christmas Angel”
    Just like all the others. Getting up from the comfortable recliner, needing a hand to steady his ascent these days, he crossed the room to add the card to the others taped to the mantel. This made twelve. Tearing a piece of scotch tape from the dispenser, he placed his latest treasure next to the others -– one for each year since 1993 -- and placed the bill in the Mason jar on top of the mantel, along with the other eleven. He had been perplexed when the first card came, convinced it must have been a mistake. When the second came a year later, his curiosity had been irresistibly, irrevocably piqued.
Becca had been convinced of the anonymous sender’s identity, but Harvey wasn’t so sure. He could still hear her soft, honeyed voice, telling her sister what he had done with the last of their Christmas money that year, “Apparently, Harvey isn’t as much of a tightwad as we thought. Gave some total stranger a hundred bucks at Wal-Mart today.”
***
    On the other side of town, Miles sat on the threadbare sofa in the house where he’d grown up, a talk show on softly in the background. Waiting for his mother to get home from work, he already had the turkey in the oven. He knew she would be tired and hungry, this being the hardest time of year for mail carriers. The pay was the same, while the volume of mail more than doubled and the weather worsened daily.
    He heard the back door open behind him, feeling a rush of bitter cold air on his neck, having forced its way inside on the heels of his weary mother. “You know, you really should go over and tell that man who you are,” came the familiar voice, as she opened the oven door, pretending to check the progress of their dinner but craving the burst of steam that would fog her glasses and warm her ice-cold face. “I see him every day, watching for me out the window. As soon as he thinks I can’t see him, he runs out to check the mail, just waiting for that card. Now take one of these pies over there and tell him.” Pointing to the pecan pies on the worn, Formica counter, the look on his mother’s face told Miles that she would not take no for an answer.
***
    Harvey was surprised to hear the doorbell ring, as he searched for his reading glasses to decipher the baffling directions on the back of his Hungry Man frozen turkey dinner. Crossing the house to the front door, he smoothed the few remaining hairs on his head and wished he’d thought to put on a clean shirt. It was Christmas Eve, after all.
    Ten minutes later, he was showing Miles the cards on his mantle. Delighted to have company, insisting that Miles stay and have a piece of pie, Harvey told the story of the cards, ending with his late wife’s theory of the angel’s identity.
    “We were over at Wal-Mart one Christmas Eve finishing up our shopping, and I saw this man standing alone at the jewelry counter. I watched him count all the money in his wallet three times, even the change in his pockets. Then he turned and walked away without buying anything, his head down. Before I even knew what I was doing, I ran after him, tossed a $100 bill on the ground behind him and said ‘Hey, buddy! Looks like you dropped this.’”
    Harvey remembered dropping the bill -– the last in his wallet -- behind the man’s retreating figure. The stranger had tried to refuse it, but Harvey insisted it wasn’t his, holding the bill in his outstretched hand. Looking now at the young man sitting across from him, Harvey said, “The stranger looked me in the eyes and finally said, ‘God bless you.’ He headed straight back to that counter and bought something in a little red box. I couldn’t see what it was. And I never saw him again.”
    “You don’t think that guy could be your mysterious angel?” Miles asked nervously, starting to doubt the wisdom of coming here.
    “I’m positive, because I’ve already been repaid twelve times over.” Besides, lately Harvey had stopped trying to figure it out, content to let the cards keep coming. “But to be on the safe side, I’ve never spent a nickel of the money, keeping it on the mantel in case I find out one day it’s all been a mistake. Maybe they’re famous, and that’s why they have to stay anonymous.” Visions of politicians, captains of industry and celebrities -- like sugarplums -- danced in his head.
    Miles had come to thank Harvey for the greatest gift of all on that Christmas long ago, his pride. He thought that revealing the angel’s identity would lift a lonely, old man’s spirits. Now Miles saw that his quiet gifts of remembrance were the best gift he could give his new friend, and their annual mystery had already brought Harvey his holiday cheer.
    Clearing the desert plates, Harvey said, “Now tell me again where you’re from?”
    “Over on College Street,” Miles said, giving his mother’s address and thinking about the South Carolina driver’s license in his wallet.
    As Harvey walked Miles to the door a few minutes later, he said, “Thank your momma for that pie. It’s delicious! I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to see the tree. I’m going to put it up in a few minutes.”
    Grabbing his winter coat off its hook behind the door, Harvey stepped out into the frosty, late afternoon air and into his boots, wondering where he had last seen his old saw.