The Last Gift

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she replied. Liz opened the car door and stood for minute, adjusting her coat and perfectly positioning her purse on the floor.

“Any day now,” I quipped.

“Oh, shut up,” she said, shutting the door.

“Alrighty, let’s go get this over with, shall we?” I sighed as I put my car in gear.

We drove in silence for a moment.

“Is Mom going to be there?” Liz asked. Our relationship with our mother is very different. She and Liz have always butted heads and seldom see eye-to-eye, whereas I have always been close with her. So technically, I should know the answer to her question.

“Umm,” I hesitated. “I don’t think so. She’s changed her mind so much. It’s not easy for her to see Grandma’s stuff all strewn about. It’s probably best if she isn’t there. We can take care of it.”

Liz let out one of her classic, disapproving sighs. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her shake her head and open her mouth to say something characteristically negative, so I quickly interjected.

“Oh hey! Maybe we’ll find that gift thing Grandma always left under the Christmas tree. Remember that?”

“Becky, please. It’s long gone. When was the last time we even saw it?”

I tried to think back so I could prove her wrong, one of my favorite things to do in life. But even I couldn’t remember.

“Well,” I offered, “Grandma never threw anything away, so I’m sure it’s in her house somewhere.”

Grandma’s house. A single-wide trailer on a small lot in the middle of the woods in rural New Hampshire. The last time I had been there was two months prior, visiting her after her first stroke. She struggled to communicate. She would open her mouth to speak but only gibberish would come out. It made her very frustrated.

A month later, she passed away in a hospital room, surrounded by her children, with Liz and I each holding a hand.

I pushed my sadness aside and started thinking about the gift again.

“Didn’t you ever wonder what it was?” I asked her.

“It was probably nothing, Becky,” she huffed, clearly annoyed.

“You must have wondered when you were little. It was always under the tree, in the far back, wrapped in brown paper with a twine ribbon with ‘For PA, Love Red’ scrawled in tiny print on it. Who was PA? Who was Red? It was always there but no one ever opened it or talked about it. Drove me crazy as a kid.”

“I don’t know. I just always figured she didn’t realize she put it out with all of the other gifts.”

I refused to believe her. If it was important or sentimental, my grandmother kept it. When I got married, she gifted me a paper plate I had drawn on when I was seven years old, nicely fitted in an oak frame. I drew what I had hoped my life would be. I was an ‘animal doctor.’ I had two kids and a dog. I had a husband with blond hair. She had kept that drawing for 17 years.

Knowing I hit a brick wall with my sister, I turned the volume up on the car stereo. We drove in silence the rest of the way until we turned onto the dirt road leading to my grandmother’s house.

“Oh…I don’t think I can do this,” Liz choked. I looked at her and saw tears already falling. Being a sympathetic crier, I followed suit.

I reached over and patted my sister’s knee. “It’s ok, it’s going to be ok. She’d be happy it’s us doing this.”

Liz looked at me with sad eyes, not fully believing what I was saying but nodding nonetheless.

Walking into our grandmother’s house was like going back in time. The living room had the same couch covered in a floral blanket. The same picture of Jesus I drew for her in 9th grade, framed above it, the same delicate doilies on the side table.

I took a deep breath to help with the lump in my throat.

We began in the back bedroom, carefully going through my grandmother’s things, separating them into piles for each of her children and grandchildren by what we thought would mean the most to them.

We went room by room, occasionally becoming teary depending on what small item we’d find. Her perfume. Her hairbrush. Little reminder notes written to herself in the same grandma handwriting we loved. It took us far too long when we were younger to realize that the ‘Love Santa’ on our gift tags were the same handwriting. But we loved it, nonetheless.

We moved to her bedroom, which she seldom slept in. She always preferred sleeping on the couch. “It’s better for my back,” she used to explain. Instead, she used her bedroom to keep the things that meant the most to her.

We slid open her closet doors to see her pretty shirts and pants hanging there neatly. On the floor were boxes, shoes, folders, and bags.

“We can give mom all of the clothes and she, Aunt Pat and Aunt Kathy can go through them. We’ll do this stuff,” my sister ordered as she motioned to the stuff on the closet floor.

I nodded in agreement and we both sat on the floor. Liz began pulling stuff out of the closet, the first being an old, round hat box. She handed it to me, as she went back to grab other items. I opened the lid and found a pile of old black and white photos, the kind with rounded corners, some faded in spots, some blurry, others clear as day.

I backed away from the closet and leaned against her bed, putting the box in my lap. I picked up each photo carefully. Some of the people in the photos I recognized right away, like my grandmother’s father. He always had a sly grin and looked so much like my grandmother. My great grandmother smiled at me from the pictures too, her hair in a bun, glasses framing her pretty, rounded face and a collared shirt buttoned all the way up to her chin.

Liz would pause briefly to look at them but didn’t seem to have the same affinity for them as I did. She had found my grandmother’s Christmas china and was more interested in that.

“She always told me she’d give me this set you know,” she ventured.

I waved my hand in her direction as if to say, Whatever, go ahead, I’m busy.

“Are you going to help or just look at pictures?” she snapped.

I rolled my eyes and carefully set the hatbox aside.

I crawled back over to the closet and began digging through the other side. I picked up an old, floral bag and peeked inside. “Oh, I think it’s an old scrapbook!” I exclaimed.

Liz mumbled something as she continued to dig in the closet.

Its dark, blue cover was worn on every corner and a faded, gold ‘Memories’, sprawled across the top. The pages were originally black but had lightened around the edges with age. I gently opened it, feeling a rush of excitement and anticipation. The first page took my breath away.

“It’s our grandfather,” I whispered.

The first page had a glossy black and white photo of our grandfather, Robert. He was dressed in professional boxing shorts with white shoes and high black socks. He wore boxing gloves on his hands and was in a classic boxer stance with gloves up and ready. He had a smirk on his face and even though it was black and white, I knew from stories that the dense curly hair on his head was bright red.

Beneath the photo, in white pencil and written in my grandmother’s handwriting were the words, “Bob, 1948, Boston Garden”.

The scrapbook was full of newspaper clippings about his boxing bouts, each placed thoughtfully by someone who clearly cared about him.

On some pages, my grandmother had pasted golden glove ribbons he had earned. I lightly ran my finger over each one, feeling the old satin and wondering if he had been happy when he received it.

I flipped through each page until they went blank. The last clipping was from 1951 from a match he had lost. I knew why it all stopped there. I shut the book and closed my eyes, remembering the stories I had heard over the years. About a year after that last clipping, on a Sunday morning in December 1952, my grandfather shot himself in the head with a shotgun while he was home alone.

My grandmother only ever mentioned it twice and ever so briefly. One time she had said he had been asked to throw fights and his life was threatened. Another time she said he was suffering from alcoholism and was depressed. Although I wanted more information, I never asked for it. It was her history to tell, not mine.

As my sister huffed and puffed in the closet, I opened the scrapbook again, going to the last few pages. I noticed one article wasn’t filled with statistics like the rest.

‘Manchester Boxer Expecting Baby’, it began.

I looked at the year—1949. My mom was born in 1950, so she must have been the baby. The article continued,

Golden Glove boxer, Robert “Red” Perkins from Manchester, announced he and his wife Patty Anne are expecting their 3rd child together. This new bundle of joy will join their two daughters, Kathleen and Patricia. It is sure to be a big year for the Perkins family.

I stared at the article for a few moments until I was startled.

“Oh my God Becky!” Liz yelled.

Expecting admonishment for my lack of effort, I replied, “Sorry, I’ll help more.”

“No, you idiot, look! The brown box!” Liz emerged from a deep corner in the closet. She was holding the brown box, the same one that sat under our Christmas tree every year.

“Oh my god,” I gasped. The twine had been flattened and the ink on top was faded, but you could still see a faint ‘PA’ and ‘Love, Red’ on it.

I took a sharp breath. “Liz,” I began, “I think know who PA and Red are!”

“Who?” she asked excitedly.

I showed her the article I had just read.

“Our grandfather was called ‘Red’. And look, Grandma didn’t go by Patricia, she went by Patty Anne— PA!”

We sat in stunned silence until I said what we were both thinking, “It’s a Christmas present to her from him. She never opened it. He must have wrapped it before—," I trailed off, not wanting to say the words.

“She never opened it. She kept it under the tree all these years,” Liz said, as her eyes began to water. “Should we—,” she started.

“No,” I interjected. “We can’t. That is hers and hers alone. There’s a reason she couldn’t open it and we need to respect that.”

“But the other people in our family are going to open it, I know they will,” she said.

“We can’t let that happen.”

“How?”

“They don’t remember it. They don’t even know it still exists. As far as they’re concerned, it’s been lost. It needs to be with Grandma,” I said confidently.

For once, we were in full agreement.

Two weeks later…

After an hour drive, Liz and I arrived at the cemetery where our grandparents were buried. We got out of the car, Liz holding a trowel, me holding the small brown box, now nestled safely in a plexiglass container. We dug a small hole at the front of their shared headstone and carefully placed the box in. We said goodbye to it and covered it with soil. We planted a small Iris bulb, our grandmother’s favorite, so it would bloom every spring.

“It’s safe now Grandma,” I whispered.