The Corrections

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 moresenders 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.
    For as long as anyone could remember, the Tuesday ladies’ group at the church had raised money by manufacturing Advent calendars. These calendars were not, as Enid would hasten to tell you, the cheap windowed cardboard items that you bought for five dollars in a cellophane sleeve. They were beautifully hand-sewn and reusable. A green felt Christmas tree was stitched to a square of bleached canvas with twelve numbered pockets across the top and another twelve across the bottom. On each morning of Advent your children took an ornament from a pocket—a tiny rocking horse of felt and sequins, or a yellow felt turtledove, or a sequin-encrusted toy soldier—and pinned it to the tree. Even now, with her children all grown, Enid continued to shuffle and distribute the ornaments in their pockets every November 30. Only the ornament in the twenty-fourth pocket was the same every year: a tiny plastic Christ child in a walnut shell spray-painted gold. Although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about this ornament. To herit was an icon not merely of the Lord but of her own three babies and of all the sweet baby-smelling babies of the world. She’d filled the twenty-fourth pocket for thirty years, she knew very well what it contained, and still the anticipation of opening it could take her breath away.
    “It’s wonderful news about Chip, don’t you think?” she asked Alfred at breakfast.
    Alfred was shoveling up his hamster-pellet All-Bran and drinking his morning drink of hot milk and water. His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a