The Gift of Love

Ted took the package to his room. It was addressed to him. There was no return address. It wasn’t heavy, but it was wide enough that it took both his arms to hold it.

Ted was nine years old. His mother and his step-father were drinking red wine when the doorbell rang. It was before dinner and during homework, and he heard the doorbell ring and then his name being called from down stairs.

Once he came down stairs they both looked at him and seemed amused and handed him the brown wrapped box covered with stamps; the stamps were everywhere, there were stamps you lick and also the ones that mail-people punch with the circles and the dates. There was English writing and there was Chinese writing, or maybe it was Japanese. There were stickers over stickers over stickers.

There was the name Theodore W. Martin in bold black print.

The package was slightly smooshed but not too much, and it smelled just a bit like WD 40, and a bit like the food Ted fed his goldfish.

His mother and step-father, with their wine glasses and their red-wine colored lips, wanted him to open the package right there where he stood. They were curious as well as amused.

“Open it up,” they both said at the same time.

They watched Ted turn without a word and walk up the stairs toward his bedroom holding the package addressed to him. He was doing something at this moment he never would do, ever. He was told point blank to open it up, and instead he walked up-stairs. Without a word. He just turned and walked up the stairs.

He felt their eyes on the back of his head as he did so.

Ted knew who sent the package to him. He had been waiting for it without even knowing he was waiting for it. He had expected it and hoped for it and knew it would one day arrive, and never even thought he was hoping and waiting and expecting it to arrive.

And here it was. At last!

His feet felt heavy as he marched up the stairs. His heart pounded in his chest as his feet rose and fell on the steps. His mother and his step-father had been smiling at each other and at him and waiting for him to open the package, nodding at him, “Come on,” they said, standing over him holding their wine glasses expecting him to sit down and comply with their wishes. And Ted was more than a little aware that instead of doing that—he was walking up-stairs.

They stood down there watching him. Ted knew if they called to him he would not turn around. He could feel them watching him and that they were looking over at each other and he could hear their silence thundering in his ears as their eyes bore into the back of his head.

Ted shared his bedroom with his step-brother, Nathan. Nathan was five. Ted came into the bedroom almost ready to faint with the enormity of it all.

He closed the door with his foot, sideways. The door didn’t quite close and he used his foot again to shut it tight.

Nathan was on the floor with a coloring book and was too involved to look up at first, but when Ted began to slide a knife through the tape that held the creases of the box, Nathan looked over at the sound.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s from my father,” Ted told him in a whisper. He had opened the box with his back turned to Nathan and had not yet shown him the contents.

He pulled the white paper away and lifted from the package a pair of large green shoes that were too large for anyone to wear.

He put the shoes on the floor and took off his sneakers and stepped into them. There were jellybeans inside the shoes which trickled out onto the floor and he could feel them in the toes of the shoes and he took a step and more jellybeans fell out as he walked across the floor.

Ted took three or four more steps in the shoes and stopped. Both boys silently stared down at them. They were the craziest, ugliest, weirdest most wonderful shoes either boy had ever seen.

“I thought your dad was dead,” Nathan said.

“He’s not.”

“I thought he was killed—“

“He wasn’t!”

With pinky fingers clasped Nathan was sworn to secrecy. Nathan thought it pretty cool that Ted’s father was alive and in a circus somewhere in China, or maybe Japan.

At dinner Ted wore the clown shoes and said he didn’t know who they were from, but that he was going to keep them and wear them to school the next day.

His step-father laughed out loud and said he didn’t think so.

“What the hell?” his step-father said, “I mean, really, what the hell? Are you kidding me? Clown shoes?”

Ted and Nathan ate their Mac and cheese with their heads down close to the plates, neither one looking up as Nathan’s father said again and again, “Who sends a kid clown shoes?”

Both boys noticed that Ted’s mother just shook her head in wonderment. She shook her head and shook her head and puzzled her face and once in a while she raised and lowered her shoulders in bemusement, but each and every time the question was asked, “Who the hell sends a kid clown shoes?” she never, ever, said a word.

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