The Corrections

She told not only her friends but everybody else she knew in St. Jude, including her butcher, her broker, and her mailman, that her grandson Jonah was coming for the holidays. Naturally she was disappointed that Gary and Jonah were staying for just three days and were leaving at noon on Christmas, but plenty of fun could be packed into three days. She had tickets for the Christmasland light show and The Nutcracker; tree-trimming, sledding, caroling, and a Christmas Eve church service were also on the bill. She dug out cookie recipes that she hadn’t used in twenty years. She laid in eggnog.

On the Sunday before Christmas she awoke at 3:05 a.m. and thought: Thirty-six hours. Four hours later she got up thinking: Thirty-two hours. Late in the day she took Alfred to the street-association Christmas party at Dale and Honey Driblett’s, sat him down safely with Kirby Root, and proceeded to remind all her neighbors that her favorite grandson, who’d been looking forward all year to a Christmas in St. Jude, was arriving tomorrow afternoon. She located Alfred in the Dribletts’ downstairs bathroom and argued with him unexpectedly about his supposed constipation. She took him home and put him to bed, erased the argument from her memory, and sat down in the dining room to knock off another dozen Christmas cards.

Already the wicker basket for incoming greetings contained a four-inch stack of cards from old friends like Norma Greene and new friends like Sylvia Roth. More and more senders Xeroxed or word-processed their Christmas notes, but Enid was having none of this. Even if it meant being late with them, she’d undertaken to handwrite a hundred notes and hand-address nearly two hundred envelopes. Besides her standard Two-Paragraph Note and her four-paragraph Full Note, she had a boilerplate Short Note:

    Loved our cruise to see the autumn color in New England and maritime Canada. Al took an unexpected “swim” in the Gulf of St. Lawrence but is feeling “ship-shape” again! Denise’s super-deluxe new restaurant in Phila. was written up in the NY Times. Chip continued work at his NYC law firm and pursued investments in Eastern Europe. We enjoyed a wonderful visit from Gary and our “precocious” youngest grandson Jonah. Hoping the whole family will be in St. Jude for Christmas—a heavenly treat for me! Love to you all—

It was ten o’clock and she was shaking the cramp from her writing hand when Gary called from Philadelphia.

“Looking forward to seeing the two of you in seventeen hours!” Enid sang into the telephone.

“Some bad news here,” Gary said. “Jonah’s been throwing up and has a fever. I don’t think I can take him on the plane.”

This camel of disappointment balked at the needle’s eye of Enid’s willingness to apprehend it.

“See how he feels in the morning,” she said. “Kids get twenty-four-hour bugs, I bet he’ll be fine. He can rest on the plane if he needs to. He can go to bed early and sleep late on Tuesday!”

“Mother.”

“If he’s really sick, Gary, I understand, he can’t come. But if he gets over his fever—”

“Believe me, we’re all disappointed. Especially Jonah.”

“No need to make any decision right this minute. Tomorrow is a completely new day.”

“I’m warning you it will probably just be me.”

“Well, but, Gary, things could look very, very different in the morning. Why don’t you wait and make your decision then, and surprise me. I bet everything’s going to work out fine!”

It was the season of joy and miracles, and Enid went to bed full of hope.

Early the next morning she was awakened—rewarded—by the ringing of the phone, the sound of Chip’s voice, the news that he was coming home from Lithuania within forty-eight hours and the family would be complete on Christmas Eve. She was humming when she went downstairs and pinned another ornament on the Advent calendar that hung on the front door.