Part 1: The Empty Chair
The card came on the nineteenth of December, in a heavy cream envelope with a printed label across the front. Marjorie Hallstrom knew the label before she saw the name on it. It was the same cheerful serif font her daughter-in-law used for the grocery lists and the sign-up sheets for the church rummage sale, and it had been printed on a sheet of white adhesive stock and stuck, slightly crooked, over the place where a return address would once have gone.
Her name was typed on the label, in full: Mrs. Marjorie Hallstrom. Then, beneath it, in blue ballpoint, in a round, bright hand that was not Marjorie’s, someone had added a single line: Merry Christmas, Grandma M!!
The exclamation points were a giveaway. Marjorie had been writing Christmas cards for fifty-one years and had never once used two.
She carried the envelope to the kitchen table, set it down beside her coffee, and sat for a while looking at it. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and the bread she had burned that morning. Outside the window, the snow lay thin and gray on the frozen yard, and the bird feeder hung motionless from its hook. It was a Tuesday in Mequon, Wisconsin, and the house was very quiet. Otis had been dead for nearly five years. Her wrist still ached when the weather turned.
She slit the envelope with a butter knife.
The card was the family photograph, the one the Hallstroms had been sending out since 1994. It was printed on heavy matte stock, the lake glittering behind them in a clean winter light, a pale line of birch trees on the far shore. Everybody was there. Her son Brian, grinning, with his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Courtney, in a red sweater, her chin up. The four grandchildren in a tangle at the bottom, three of them in matching plaid pajamas, the littlest one in a knit hat pulled over her eyes. The teenagers in the back row. Brian’s brother Dale and his wife Pat, with their two dogs. Courtney’s parents, Gail and Hank, who had driven up from Naperville. Twenty-one people, arranged in the same staggered rows that the photographer had been trying to achieve since 1994.
And on the left side of the picture, where the lake met the shore, there was a chair.
It was a wooden Adirondack chair, painted green, with a faded blue blanket folded over one arm. It had been Otis’s chair. He had sat in it every summer for thirty-four years, with a cup of black coffee in one hand and a grandchild in the other. In every family photograph taken at the lake since 1992, Otis was in that chair, and in the center of the photo, somebody was sitting in his lap, or on the arm, or leaning against the back.
In the card, the chair was empty.
The blanket was there. The blue wool had been tucked neatly over the arm, the way Marjorie always tucked it. The slats of the seat caught the light. There was nothing else, not even a shadow. The place where Marjorie had sat, every year, holding the newest baby with her cheek pressed against its hair, had been cropped away so cleanly that the lake simply continued where she should have been.
She looked at the card for a long time.
Then she turned it over, and read the back, and found the small printed credit line in the lower corner: Photography by Jerome Lacey, Ashland, WI.
Twenty-one people. She counted them three times, the way she counted the stitches on a quilt. Twenty-one. Her own family had twenty-two.
Marjorie put the card face down on the table, very carefully, and picked up her coffee. Her hand was steady. It was only later, when she went into the hallway to find her reading glasses, that she noticed she had left the front door unlocked, and that the cold air was pouring in across the hall runner, and that she was standing there in her slippers, in the middle of the morning, shaking.
Part 2: The Red Book
The address book was red leather, the color of a fire engine, with gilt edges that had worn down to brown at the corners. Marjorie had bought it at the Woolworth’s in Racine in November of 1974, the year she married Otis, for a dollar and eighty-nine cents. She had written the first entry on the first page that same night, sitting at the kitchen table of the rented duplex on Lathrop Avenue with the radio playing softly and a cup of cocoa going cold beside her.
Hallstrom, Otis & Marjorie. 1417 Lathrop Ave., Racine, Wis.
Marjorie had kept that sentence in mind for fifty-one years.
Every December, for thirty-one years, she had sat at the dining room table with the book open beside her and a box of cards at her elbow, and she had written them all out by hand. Two hundred and six. Then two hundred and eleven. Then two hundred and fourteen, the number it had held since 2009.
It took her nine evenings. Her wrist had never been the same after the fall on the ice at the mailbox in 2022, and the doctor had been firm about it: no more long writing sessions, no more pressure on the joint. So when she came out of the cast that spring, Courtney had come over with a laptop and a cup of tea and said, very kindly, “Grandma M, let me take this off your hands.”
It had seemed reasonable at the time. Marjorie had been grateful. She had sat on the couch and watched her daughter-in-law open the red book and begin to type, slowly, one name at a time, into a spreadsheet with color-coded columns and a drop-down menu for Relationship. Courtney had been patient and cheerful. She had spent three weekends on it. At the end, she had printed out a set of adhesive labels on her own printer, in the cheerful serif font she used for everything, and she had said, “There. Now you won’t have to strain yourself, and we can keep the list up to date for everyone.”
Marjorie had said, “Thank you, dear.”
She had not realized, until the following Christmas, that the list was not the same. There were errors in the spreadsheet. The Hendersons had become Henderson, R. & D. Cousin Lois, who had moved to Tucson in 1997 and had never liked the cold, was listed under an address in Milwaukee that had been a laundromat since 2003. Four of the lighthouse keeper’s family had been merged into one household. Marjorie had found the errors at the kitchen table in December, with a red pen in one hand and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and she had written in the margins, very carefully, Corrected by hand.
Part 3: The Proof Set
Brian called on Thursday morning, sounding sheepish, as if he had been waiting for a good moment that never came.
“Mom, I know what you’re going to say about the card.”
“You haven’t seen what I’m going to say,” said Marjorie.
“Courtney said you’d be upset. She said the photographer made a mistake and that she’s getting it fixed for next year.”
“Did she say what kind of mistake?”
There was a pause on the line. Marjorie could hear a child shrieking in the background, and a television playing a cartoon with a lot of cymbals in it.
“She said he cropped the wrong frame,” Brian said finally. “She said it was an accident.”
“Brian. I’m sitting in your father’s kitchen with the card in front of me. There’s no frame in the world that puts a chair where a grandmother should be and then fails to find her.”
Brian said nothing for a moment. Then he said, very quietly, “Mom, I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Marjorie. “That’s why I’m calling you before I call anyone else.”
She drove to Ashland on Friday, four hours north, with the card on the passenger seat. Jerome Lacey had a studio above a hardware store on Front Street. He was a small, tidy man in his sixties with a gray beard and a quick, appraising way of looking at people. He had photographed the Hallstroms every summer at the lake for twenty-eight years, and he did not look pleased to see Marjorie on his stairs without an appointment.
“Mrs. Hallstrom. Is something wrong with the card?”
“Something is very wrong with the card,” said Marjorie, and she put it down on his counter, face up.
Jerome looked at it for a long time. He picked it up, turned it over, held it to the window. Then he set it down, very gently, and said, “I didn’t crop that.”
“I didn’t think you had.”
“Your daughter-in-law sent me a file in November. She asked for the final proof, without the chair, because—” He stopped. His mouth tightened. “She said it looked cluttered. She said she wanted a cleaner look for the list.”
Marjorie said nothing.
Jerome walked over to a filing cabinet in the corner of the studio, opened the bottom drawer, and drew out a long flat archival box, tied with white cotton string. He untied it, lifted the lid, and carefully slid out a stack of prints.
“These are the proof set,” he said. “We do twelve for every family session. The client chooses which one to order. The rest are kept on file, in case they’re needed later.” He spread the top few across the counter. “Your family’s proofs were sent to Courtney, in October. She said she’d choose the final. She didn’t mention the proofs. But I always give the grandmother a full set, because the grandmother is the one who asks for them years later.”
He lifted one print from the middle of the stack and laid it in front of her.
It was the uncropped original. The lake glittered behind them, and the birches were pale on the far shore. Brian and Courtney, grinning. The grandchildren in their plaid pajamas. The teenagers in the back row. Dale and Pat with the dogs. Gail and Hank from Naperville.
And there, on the left side, in the Adirondack chair Otis had built in 1968, sat Marjorie. She was leaning forward with her cheek against the hair of the newest baby, a fat, sleepy girl in a yellow sleeper, whose fist was wrapped tight around one of Marjorie’s silver earrings. Marjorie’s eyes were closed. Her mouth was open on something like a laugh. Otis’s blue blanket was folded over the arm of the chair, and her hand rested on it, just above the baby’s back.
Marjorie made a small sound.
“Her name is Emma,” said Jerome gently. “Courtney’s sister’s girl. You were holding her when I took it. You told me, ‘Take the one with the lake behind us, Jerry, Otis would have liked that one.’ I remember because you called me Jerry, and nobody’s called me Jerry since my mother.”
“I remember too,” said Marjorie.
She sat down on the stool beside the counter, very slowly, and put one hand flat on the photograph.
“Mr. Lacey,” she said, “I’d like to buy the proofs. All twelve.”
“They’re yours, Mrs. Hallstrom. Always were.”
“And I’d like a copy of the file Courtney sent you. The original, with the chair, and the request for the cropped version, and the date.”
Jerome hesitated. “That’s a lot of paper, for a card.”
“It’s not a card,” said Marjorie. “It’s a list. And I’ve been keeping it for fifty-two years.”
He nodded slowly, and reached for the phone on his desk, and asked his assistant to pull the October file.
It was a short email. Marjorie read it twice on the little monitor at the end of the counter, with Jerome standing silently beside her. It had been sent from an account in Courtney’s name, with the subject line Card Crop — Please? The body was three lines long.
Hi Jerome! Can we use the cleaner version for the list this year? Grandma M’s chair is a bit distracting. Thanks so much, Courtney.
Marjorie read it three times. Then she said, quietly, “Thank you, Mr. Lacey. I’d like you to keep the file. I’ll be needing it.”
She drove home that night in the dark, with the twelve proofs in a flat box on the passenger seat, and the heater finally blowing warm. Somewhere past Hayward, the sky broke open with stars.
When she got to the house, the porch light was on. There was a note taped to the front door in Courtney’s bright, round handwriting. Grandma M — Brian says you were upset! Come to dinner Sunday? I’m so sorry about the card!!
Marjorie took the note down, folded it neatly, and put it in her coat pocket.
She did not reply.
Part 4: The Replies
The first reply came on the twenty-eighth of December, in a plain white envelope addressed to Mrs. Marjorie Hallstrom, 1417 Lathrop Avenue, Racine, Wisconsin.
Marjorie stared at it for a full minute before she picked it up.
It was the wrong address. Her house was in Mequon. The Lathrop Avenue duplex had been sold in 1979, and the Hallstroms had moved north in 1986, and nobody in Racine had sent her mail there in forty years. But the handwriting on the envelope was careful, schoolroom-square, the kind of hand that had been taught to make its capital R with a loop. The return address in the corner was R. Kowalski, 88 Maple Court, Racine.
Marjorie opened it at the kitchen table.
Dear Marjorie,
I got your card on the 22nd. Your list came with it, though you may not know that. The label on the back said Hallstrom, Otis & Marjorie, Racine, and that’s how I knew it was yours. I haven’t seen that label in forty years. You used to write to me every year on the back of a postcard with a picture of the Lake Michigan lighthouse, and then you stopped, and I never knew why.
I’m writing to say I saw you. The card had you cut out, and I didn’t like it, and I’ve never liked anything about the way people leave each other out of pictures. So I am sending you my own picture of you, the one I took at Otis’s birthday in 1981, when you were holding a cake and laughing so hard you couldn’t see. You’d like it.
Love, Ruthie.
Enclosed was a faded snapshot, the colors gone soft and orange, of a young woman in a yellow apron with a birthday cake in her hands and her head thrown back. She was laughing so hard that the candles were streaming smoke. Behind her, a man was reaching for the cake with both arms, grinning like a fool.
Marjorie did not remember the snapshot. She did not remember the apron, or the cake, or the man, although she knew, from the set of his shoulders and the shape of his hands, that it was Otis.
She sat with the photograph in her lap for a long time.
By the thirty-first, the mail had begun to come in earnest. The carrier, a young man named Dev who had been delivering to Lathrop Avenue since before Marjorie was born, came up the driveway on the thirty-first with a canvas bag so full he had to carry it in both arms. He set it on the front step, looked at her through the storm door with an expression of profound confusion, and said, “Mrs. Hallstrom, I think you need to see this.”
There were a hundred and twelve envelopes in the bag. Most of them were addressed in the same hand as the first, or in shakier, older hands, or in the crisp block capitals of men who had once been in the Army. Some were typed. A few had been written on the backs of Christmas cards from other years, with the old stamps still attached, and a few had been folded into thick bundles held together with rubber bands.
They had all been sent to her house.
Marjorie carried them one by one to the dining room table, where the red book had once sat open beside the box of cards. She slit each envelope with the butter knife and read it, one at a time, as the afternoon light crossed the floorboards and the furnace clicked on and off in the basement.
“Mrs. Hallstrom,” he said. “I’m Father Tom Walsh. From St. Brendan’s, in Port Washington. I’m sorry to come without calling. Your list asked me to bring you this.”
He unwrapped the package on the porch. It was a framed photograph, a little warped by damp, of a family gathered in front of a small white church under a summer sky. Otis was in the center, in a Sunday suit, holding a baby on his hip. Marjorie was standing beside him, laughing, with her hand on his arm. The date was written on the back in her own handwriting, in pencil: Joseph’s baptism, June 1979.
“I was the one who christened him,” said Father Walsh quietly. “I’ve been carrying that picture in my desk for forty-seven years. I didn’t know who else to send it to.”
Marjorie took it in both hands. Her eyes were blurring.
“Would you like to come in, Father?” she asked. “I’ve got a box of twelve proofs in the dining room, and I think I’m going to need someone to help me find the ones that go in the right order.”
On the first of January, a silver Buick had pulled into the driveway, and a tall man in a gray overcoat had walked up to the porch with his hat in his hand. Father Tom Walsh, from St. Brendan’s in Port Washington, had brought a framed photograph of Otis holding a baby at a church christening in 1979. “I’ve been carrying that picture in my desk for forty-seven years,” he said. “I didn’t know who else to send it to.” He smiled, and stepped inside, and took off his hat.
By the second of January the replies numbered one hundred and eighty-seven. Marjorie had counted them every night, in the dining room, with the red book open beside her for the first time in two years, and a pencil in her hand. She had matched each reply to a household in the book, and written the household’s name in the margin, and drawn a neat line beneath it. Some of the households had sent three or four letters each. Some had sent none. Two were marked with a single small cross, which she had written in pencil beside the name of a man who had died in 2011, and whose widow had written to say that she still kept the card he had sent every December, tucked into the frame of his bedroom mirror.
It was late on the second when Marjorie reached the last envelope in the bag.
It had been slipped in among the others, a little worn at the edges, with a Milwaukee postmark from the twenty-ninth of December. The handwriting on the front was bold and slanted, the handwriting of a man who had never once in his life used a ballpoint pen on anything that mattered.
Marj—
Got your card. Got the list. Got the chair. Mary Ann said I should just call, but I don’t call people, I write. Otis would’ve said the same.
I’ve been holding onto something since 2021. He asked me to keep it till you asked. Well, you haven’t asked, but I figure this is as close as you’re going to come. It’s a note in his hand. Read it.
— Hank Yablonski, Milwaukee.
Marjorie turned the photograph over with trembling fingers.
It was an index card, yellowed at the corners, in Otis’s blocky print: For Marj, when she asks. Twelve proofs, in the box at Jerry’s. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. — O., Sept. 2021.
Marjorie stared at the card for a long time. Jerome had said nothing about a set from 2021. She suspected he had been waiting, as Otis had, for her to ask.
Then she stood up, carried the box from the hall closet into the dining room, set it on the table beside the red book, and untied the cotton string with fingers that would not quite stop shaking.
The top print was the uncropped original.
The lake glittered behind them. The birches were pale on the far shore. And there, in the green Adirondack chair Otis had built in 1968, with the blue blanket folded over its arm, sat a woman with her cheek against the hair of a sleeping baby and her eyes closed, laughing as though the whole world had finally come to the lake to see her.
She was still looking at it when the phone began to ring.
Part 5: Both Mine
On the second of January, with a hundred and eighty-seven replies stacked beside the red book, Marjorie sat at the dining room table and wrote out the envelopes herself, in ink, with a fountain pen that had once belonged to her mother. Her wrist ached. She did not care.
Courtney came over at noon, carrying a tray of sandwiches and a bag of new stamps from the post office. She stopped in the doorway of the dining room when she saw the box of proofs on the table, and the red book, and the stack of envelopes already addressed in Marjorie’s hand, with the ink still drying on the flaps.
“Grandma M,” she said softly. “What is all this?”
“It’s the list,” said Marjorie. “It’s the real list. It’s been mine since 1974, and I’m sending it out myself this year.”
Courtney’s face went pale, and then pink, and then something that Marjorie had not expected to see there, which was the tired, uncertain look of a young woman who has been trying very hard to be useful for a long time and has just realized she has been doing it in the wrong room.
“I’m so sorry,” Courtney said. “I just wanted to help. You had the wrist, and the list was getting so big, and I thought—”
“I know what you thought,” said Marjorie gently. “And you were kind to think of it. But a list is not something you consolidate, dear. It’s something you keep.”
Courtney sat down, slowly, in the chair across from her. She looked at the box of proofs for a long time. Then she reached out and touched the corner of the top print with one fingertip, and her mouth trembled.
“That’s the one with Emma,” she said. “I didn’t want to see it. I had it in my drawer for two months. I didn’t want to see Grandpa’s chair with somebody else in it.”
“It’s not somebody else,” said Marjorie. “It’s me. And you’re going to help me send it out.”
Courtney laughed through her tears. “Grandma M, I can’t lick envelopes. I’ve got a whole family that needs me to make dinner.”
“Then you’ll lick envelopes after dinner,” said Marjorie, and pushed the first stack across the table. “Two hundred and fourteen. Every one of them has to say Hallstrom, Otis & Marjorie on the front in my hand, and your name, dear, on the back, with a little heart next to it.”
“Why a heart?”
“Because you’re the one who kept the list up to date,” said Marjorie. “Even when you got it wrong.”
They worked through the afternoon. Courtney’s children came in and out, tracking snow across the kitchen tiles, and Brian came to collect the sandwiches and stayed to help with the stamps. The grandchildren licked the envelope flaps with great solemnity and then wiped their tongues on their sleeves. The radio played carols softly from the windowsill. Outside, the snow began to fall in big slow flakes, settling over the bird feeder and the frozen yard, and the lamplight in the dining room turned gold.
Inside each card was the uncropped original, printed from Jerome Lacey’s file. Twenty-two people, arranged in the same staggered rows. Otis’s green chair on the left, with its blue blanket and a grandmother sitting in it, holding the newest baby, with her eyes closed and her mouth open on something like a laugh.
And on the back of every card, in Marjorie’s neat, round, careful hand, the same short line:
The real card. The real list. Both mine. — D.
“Dot,” said Marjorie, when Courtney asked what the D stood for. “Your grandfather always called me Dot when he was pleased with me. I thought it was time somebody did.”
Courtney’s eyes filled up again. She got up from her chair, came around the table, and put her arms around Marjorie’s shoulders from behind, the way the grandchildren did, and rested her chin on top of her head.
“I’m sorry,” Courtney whispered. “I’m so sorry, Grandma M.”
“I know, sweetheart,” said Marjorie. “Now lick the envelopes.”
On the morning of the third, the mail was delivered to two hundred and fourteen households across three Wisconsin counties, two Illinois suburbs, a retirement community in Scottsdale, and a lighthouse keeper’s cottage in Door County. The replies kept coming for weeks after that, and they did not stop for a month.
By the middle of January, the family had gathered at the lake house for the first time since the summer. The snow lay thick on the frozen lake, and the birches were white against the sky, and the Adirondack chair sat where it always had, on the left side of the porch, with its blue blanket folded over the arm.
Marjorie came out in her heavy coat with a cup of coffee in her hand, and sat down in the chair.
Nobody said anything. Brian came out first, and then Dale and Pat with the dogs, and then Gail and Hank, who had driven up from Naperville with a box of cookies. The grandchildren clattered down the porch steps. The teenagers wandered out in their hoodies with their phones.
And Courtney came last, carrying the newest baby in a knit blanket, a fat, sleepy girl in a yellow hat who was just beginning to notice the world.
She stopped in front of the chair and looked at her mother-in-law for a long moment, and her face was very still.
Then she held out the baby.
Marjorie set down her coffee, and reached up, and took the warm bundle into her lap. The baby blinked at her, solemn and wide-eyed, and then reached up with one small fist and caught hold of Marjorie’s silver earring, and held on.
Marjorie laughed, and pressed her cheek against the soft hair, and closed her eyes.
She did not need a camera. She did not need a proof set, or a list, or a red book with its rubber band and its electrical tape. She had her name in her own hand, and her chair on her own porch, and the whole family standing around her in the cold, waiting for her to say it was time to take the picture.
“Well,” said Marjorie Hallstrom, softly, to the baby and the lake and the open winter sky. “Come on, then. Let’s get everybody in.”
