On his 93rd birthday, Arnold made his most sincere wish: to hear his children’s laughter filling his home one last time. The table was set, the turkey was roasted, the candles were lit, and he waited for them.
Several hours stretched on in a long silence until there was a knock at the door. But it was not the one he was expecting.
The cottage at the end of Maple Street had seen better days, and so had its sole occupant. Arnold sat in his worn armchair, its leather cracked from years of use, and his cat Joe purred softly in his lap.
In his 92 years, his fingers were no longer as firm as they once were, but they still ran over Joe’s orange fur, seeking comfort in the familiar silence.
The midday light filtered through the dusty windows, casting long shadows on the photographs that held fragments of happier times.
‘You know what today is, Joe?’ Arnold’s voice trembled as he reached for the dusty photo album, his hands shaking from more than just age. “Little Tommy’s birthday. He would have been… let me see… forty-two years old.”
He flipped through pages of memories, and each one cut to his heart. “Look at him, he has no front teeth. Mariam made him the superhero cake he wanted so badly. I still remember how his eyes lit up!” His voice trailed off.
“He hugged her so tightly that day that he got icing all over her beautiful dress. She didn’t mind a bit. She never minded when it came to making our children happy.”
Five dusty photographs hung on the mantel – the smiling faces of his children, frozen in time. Bobby, with his toothy grin and skinned knees from countless adventures. Little Jenny stood clutching her favourite doll, which she named “Bella”.
Michael, proudly holding his first trophy, his father’s eyes shining with pride in his camera. Sarah in her graduation gown, tears of joy mingling with the spring rain. And Tommy on his wedding day, looking so much like Arnold from his own wedding photo it made his chest snap.
‘The house remembers them all, Joe,’ Arnold whispered, running a weathered hand along the wall where his children’s heights were marked in pencil.
His fingers lingered on each line, each carrying a poignant memory. “This one here? That’s from Bobby’s baseball practice. Mariam was so angry,” he grinned, wiping his eyes.
“But she couldn’t be angry when he looked at her with those puppy dog eyes. ‘Mum,’ he’d say, ‘I’ve been training to be like Daddy.’ And she would just melt.”
Then he made his way to the kitchen, where Mariam’s apron, faded but clean, still hung on a hook.
‘Do you remember Christmas morning, love?’ – He addressed the empty air. ‘Five pairs of feet clattering up the stairs, and you pretended for weeks not to hear them furtively peering at the presents.’
Then Arnold staggered up to the porch. On Tuesday afternoons he usually sat on the swing and watched the neighbourhood children play. Their laughter reminded Arnold of bygone days when his own yard was full of life. Today, the excited shouts of his neighbour Ben interrupted the routine.
“Arnie! Arnie!” Ben was practically racing across the lawn, his face lit up like a Christmas tree. “You’re not going to believe this! Both my kids are coming home for Christmas!”
Arnold stretched his lips into a smile as he hoped, but his heart broke even more. ‘That’s wonderful, Ben.’
“Sarah’s bringing the twins. They’re already walking! And Michael, he flew in from Seattle with his new wife!” Ben’s joy was contagious to everyone except Arnold. “Martha’s already planning the menu. Turkey, ham, her famous apple pie…”
‘Sounds perfect,’ Arnold muttered, his throat constricted. “Just like Mariam. She spent her days baking, you know. The whole house would smell of cinnamon and love.”
That evening he sat at the kitchen table with the old rotary phone in front of him like a mountain to be climbed. Each Tuesday his weekly ritual became harder and harder. First, he dialled Jenny’s number.
“Hi, Daddy. What’s wrong?” Her voice sounded detached and distracted. The little girl who once wouldn’t let go of his neck was now unable to spare him five minutes.
“Jenny, honey, I was thinking about how you dressed up as a princess for Halloween. You made me be a dragon, remember? You were so determined to save the kingdom. You said a princess didn’t need a prince if she had a daddy…”
“Look, Daddy, I have a very important meeting. I don’t have time to listen to these old stories. Can I call you back?”
Before he could finish, the buzzer buzzed in his ear. One down, four to go. The next three calls went to voicemail. Tommy, his youngest, at least picked up.
“Dad, hi, I’m in the middle of something here. The kids are crazy today, and Lisa’s got stuff going on at work. Can I…”
‘I miss you, son.’ Arnold’s voice broke, years of loneliness poured into those four words. “I miss your laughter in the house. Remember how you used to hide under my desk when you were afraid of a thunderstorm? You’d say, ‘Daddy, make the sky stop being angry.’ And I’d tell you stories until you fell asleep…”
A pause so short it could have been called imagination. “That’s great, Daddy. Look, I’ve got to run! We can talk later, right?”
Tommy hung up the phone, and Arnold was silent for a long moment. His reflection in the window showed an old man he barely recognised.
‘They used to fight over who would talk to me first,’ he said to Joe, who jumped into his lap. “Now they fight over who should talk to me at all. When did I become such a burden, Joe? When did their Pa become just another chore to be crossed off the list?”
Two weeks before Christmas, Arnold watched Ben’s family arrive at the house next door.
Cars filled the driveway, children spilled out into the yard, their laughter blowing in the winter wind. Something stirred in his chest. Not exactly hope, but very close.
His hands trembled as he pulled out his old desk, the same one Mariam had given him for their tenth wedding anniversary. ‘Help me find the right words, love,’ he whispered to her pictures, touching her smile through the glass.
“Help me bring our children home. Remember how proud we were of them? The five beautiful souls we brought into this world. Where did we lose them along the way?”
Five sheets of cream-coloured stationery, five envelopes and five chances to bring his family home cluttered the table. It was as if each sheet weighed a thousand pounds of hope.
‘My dear,’ Arnold began to write the same letter five times with slight changes, his handwriting trembling.
“Time moves strangely when you get older than me. The days seem both endless and too short at the same time. I’m turning 93 this Christmas and I want to see your face, to hear your voice not on the phone but across the kitchen table. To hold you close and tell you all the stories I’ve accumulated, all the memories that keep me company on quiet evenings.
I’m not getting any younger, my darling. Each birthday candle gets harder to blow out, and sometimes I wonder how many chances I have left to tell you how proud I am of you, how much I love you, how my heart still booms when I remember the first time you called me ‘Daddy.’
Please come home. At least one more time. Let me see your smile not in a picture, but across the table. Let me hug you and pretend, if only for a moment, that time isn’t going by so fast. Let me be your daddy again, if only for one more day…”
The next morning Arnold, clutching the five sealed envelopes to his chest like jewels, walked out into the piercing December wind. Each step to the post office seemed a mile away, and his cane tapped lonely on the frozen pavement.
‘Special delivery, Arnie?’ – Paula, a postal clerk who had known him for thirty years, asked. She pretended not to notice how his hands shook as he handed over the letters.
“Letters to my children, Paula. I want them home for Christmas.” There was a hopefulness in his voice that made Paula’s eyes water. She had seen him send countless letters over the years, his shoulders slumping more and more with each holiday.
‘I’m sure they’ll get through this time,’ she lied, taking extra care to seal each envelope. Her heart ached for the old man who wouldn’t stop believing.
Arnold nodded, pretending not to notice the pity in her voice. “I will. They have to. It’s different this time. I can feel it in my bones.”
He walked to the church after that, treading carefully on the icy pavement. Father Michael found him in the last pew with his hands clasped together in prayer.
‘Praying for a Christmas miracle, Arnie?’
‘Praying to see another one, Mike.’ Arnold’s voice trembled. “I keep telling myself there’s still time, but my bones know better. This may be my last chance to bring the kids home. To tell them…to show them…” He couldn’t finish, but Father Michael understood.
Back at his little cottage, decorating was an event for the neighbours. Ben arrived with boxes of bulbs, and Mrs Theo directed operations from her walker, waving her cane like a conductor’s wand.
‘The star is rising higher, Ben!’ – she shouted. “Arnie’s grandchildren must see it shining from the street! They must know that their grandfather’s house still shines!”
Arnold stood in the doorway, stunned by the kindness of the strangers who had become his family. ‘You guys don’t have to do all this.’
Martha appeared from the neighbouring house with fresh biscuits. “Hush, Arnie. When was the last time you climbed the stairs? Besides, that’s what neighbours do. And that’s what family does.”
While they worked, Arnold secluded himself in the kitchen, running his fingers through Mariam’s old cookbook. ‘You should see them, honey,’ he whispered to the empty room. ‘Everyone here is helping, just like you would.’
His fingers trembled over a recipe for chocolate chip biscuits mottled with traces of dough from ten years ago. “Remember when the kids used to sneak the dough? Jenny with chocolate all over her face, swearing she hadn’t touched it? ‘Daddy,’ she’d say, ‘the biscuit monster must have made it!’ And you were winking at me over her head!”
And just like that, a cold and clear Christmas morning came. Mrs Theo’s homemade strawberry cake lay untouched on the kitchen table, and ‘Happy 93rd Birthday’ was written in trembling letters on the icing.
The waiting began.
Every sound of the car made Arnold’s heart jump, and every passing hour dimmed the hope in his eyes. Towards evening only the footsteps of departing neighbours were heard on the porch of the house, and their sympathy was heavier than loneliness.
‘Maybe they were delayed,’ Martha whispered softly to Ben as they left the house. ‘The weather’s been bad.’
‘The weather’s been bad for five years,’ Arnold muttered, looking at the five empty chairs around the dining table.
The turkey he had insisted on cooking remained untouched, a feast for ghosts and fading dreams. His hands trembled as he reached for the light switch, age and heartache were indistinguishable in that trembling.
He pressed his forehead against the cold windowpane, watching the last streetlights in the neighbourhood go out. ‘I guess this is it, Mariam.’ A tear rolled down his weathered cheek. ‘Our children won’t be coming home.’
Suddenly there was a loud knock as he was about to turn off the porch light, bringing him out of his reverie and heartbreak.
Through the frosted glass he made out a silhouette – too tall to be any of his children and too young to be neighbours. His hope crumbled further when he opened the door and saw a young man standing there with a camera in his hands and a tripod over his shoulder.
‘Hi, I’m Brady.’ The stranger’s smile was warm and genuine, reminding Arnold painfully of Bobby’s smile. “I’m new to the area and I’m making a documentary about Christmas celebrations. If you don’t mind, can I…”
‘There’s nothing to film here,’ Arnold snapped back, bitterness evident in every word. “Just an old man and his cat waiting for ghosts who don’t want to come home. No holiday worth recording. GET OUT!”
His voice cracked as he moved to close the door, unable to bear another witness to his loneliness.
‘Sir, wait,’ Brady tapped his foot on the door. “I’m not here to tell my heart-wrenching story. But I lost my parents two years ago. A car accident. I know what an empty house feels like during the holidays. How the silence gets so loud it hurts. Every Christmas song on the radio is like salt on an open wound. How setting the table for people who will never come…”
Arnold’s hand dropped to the door, his anger dissolving into shared grief. In Brady’s eyes he saw not pity, but the understanding that only comes after travelling the same dark path.
‘Do you mind if…’ Brady hesitated, his vulnerability showing through the soft smile: “If we celebrated together? No one should be alone at Christmas. And I could use some company, too. Sometimes the hardest part isn’t being alone. It’s remembering what it’s like not to be.”
Arnold stood, torn between decades of resentment and the unexpected warmth of sincere connection. The stranger’s words broke through his defences, appealing to the part of him that still remembered how to hope.
‘I have a cake,’ Arnold finally said, his voice hoarse from unshed tears. “It’s my birthday, too. That old Grinch just turned ninety-three! This cake is too big for me and the cat. Come on in.”
Brady’s eyes lit up with joy. ‘Give me twenty minutes,’ he said, already stepping back. ‘Just don’t blow out the candles yet.’
True to his word, Brady returned less than 20 minutes later, but not alone.
He had somehow gathered, it seemed, half the neighbours. Mrs Theo came waddling in with her famous eggnog, and Ben and Martha brought armfuls of hastily wrapped presents.
The house, hitherto silent, was suddenly filled with warmth and laughter.
‘Make a wish, Arnold,’ Brady urged as the candles flickered like tiny stars in a sea of faces that had become family.
Arnold closed his eyes, his heart overflowing with emotions he couldn’t put a name to. For the first time in years, he did not wish for the return of his children. Instead, he wished he could find the strength to let them go. To forgive. To find peace in the family he had found, not the one he had lost.
As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, Brady became as constant as the sunrise: showing up with groceries, staying for coffee, sharing stories and silence in equal measure.
In him, Arnold found not a replacement for his children, but a blessing of a different kind and proof that sometimes love comes in unexpected packages.
‘You remind me of Tommy at your age,’ Arnold said one morning as he watched Brady fix a loose floorboard. ‘Same kind heart.’
‘But there’s still a difference,’ Brady smiled, his eyes full of understanding. ‘I show up.’
That morning when Brady found him, Arnold was sitting quietly in his chair as if he’d just fallen asleep. Joe sat in his usual spot, watching his friend one last time.
The morning light caught the moths of dust dancing around Arnold, as if Mariam’s spirit had come to escort him home, finally ready to reunite with the love of his life, finding peace in an earthly farewell.
More people gathered for the funeral than Arnold’s birthday party. Brady watched the neighbours gather in a quiet circle, sharing stories of the old man’s kindness, his wit, and his ability to turn even the ordinary into magic.
They talked of summer evenings on his veranda, of wisdom spoken over a cup of too strong coffee, and of a life lived quietly but fully.
As Brady rose to deliver the eulogy, his fingers traced the edge of the plane ticket in his pocket – the very one he’d bought to surprise Arnold for his upcoming 94th birthday. A trip to Paris in the spring like Arnold had always dreamed of. It would be perfect.
Now he shoved it under the white satin upholstery of his coffin with trembling hands, a promise unfulfilled.
Arnold’s children arrived late, dressed in black, carrying fresh flowers that seemed to mock the faded relationship they represented. They huddled together, telling stories of the father they had learnt to love while he was alive. Their tears fell like rain after a drought, too late to nourish what had already died.
As the crowd thinned, Brady pulled a tattered envelope from his jacket pocket. Inside was the last letter Arnold had written but never mailed, just three days before his death:
“Dear children,
By the time you read this, I will be gone. Brady promised to mail these letters after…well, after I was gone. He’s a good boy. The son I found when I needed him most. I want you to know that I forgave you a long time ago. Life gets busy. I realise that now. But I hope that someday, when you’re old and your own children are too busy to call, you’ll remember me. Not with sadness or guilt, but with love.
I asked Brady to take my cane with me to Paris in case I wasn’t meant to live another day. Silly, isn’t it? An old man’s cane travelling the world without him. But this cane has been my companion for 20 years. She knows all my stories, hears all my prayers, feels all my tears. She deserves an adventure.
Be kinder to yourself. Be kinder to each other. And remember: it’s never too late to call the one you love. Until it is.
Love,
Dad.”
Brady was the last to leave the cemetery. He decided to keep Arnold’s letter with him because he knew it would be useless to send it to the children. At home he found Joe, Arnold’s aging tabby, waiting for him on the porch as if he knew exactly where he belonged.
‘You’re my family now, mate,’ Brady said, taking the cat in his arms. “Arnie will roast me alive if I leave you alone! You can take the corner of my bed, or pretty much anywhere else you feel cosy. Just don’t scratch the leather sofa, agreed?!”
That winter passed slowly, each day a reminder of Arnold’s empty chair. But when spring returned, painting the world with fresh colours, Brady knew it was time. As the cherry blossoms rustled in the morning breeze, he boarded the plane to Paris with Joe safely tucked away in a carrier.
In the overhead compartment, Arnold’s cane rested against his old leather suitcase.
‘You were wrong about one thing, Arnie,’ Brady whispered, watching the dawn colour the clouds with golden hues. “It’s not foolishness at all. Some dreams just need other legs to carry them.”
Down below, the golden rays of sunlight bathed the quiet cottage at the end of Maple Street, where memories of the old man’s love still warmed the walls and hope had never learnt to die.
