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!”