Delores Bell tugged at her morning paper, pulling it from its plastic cover. Mid-grunt, she paused, eyeing a patch of flattened grass next to her walkway.
“Where’s my sheep?” She nosed at the grass with the toe of her snow boot, which hadn’t seen snow for three years. Finding no clues, she considered. The pins were gone, too. A gust strong enough to liberate his pins would have been strong enough to carry the lamb to another yard, as he was made of light foam plastic.
A sharp knife of December air urged her inside, but Delores promised herself she would drive around the neighborhood later that morning.
Leon was in the kitchen making himself a piece of buttered toast. Delores dropped the newspaper onto the table, placed its rubber band in a drawer with all the others, and went around closing the cabinet doors he had left open. Leon ducked as a door narrowly cleared his head.
“Did you see my sheep when you came home last night?” Delores asked, her back to him.
Leon didn’t answer.
“At first I thought the wind must have taken it, but it would have taken a person to pull those pins out. The ground hasn’t been soft.”
Delores picked up the partially unrolled morning paper and dumped the circulars into the kitchen trash. Glancing down the first page, she shook her head reproachfully. “This world. I tell you what. We are certainly in the end of days.”
Leon, having buttered his toast, grabbed his car keys, and was out the back door. Delores paused over the obituary page. Clucking her tongue over the youngest among the newly deceased, she picked up her grandson’s dirtied butter knife, rinsed it, and dropped it into the sink.
Leon was in his second year out of high school, and the second month of a new job. He did not enjoy working sales in December, especially in the electronics section at Walmart. As he backed out of the driveway, and turned onto the street, Leon saw something large and white caught in the neighboring hedgerow. He gave it no further thought, as he had not heard his grandmother’s voice. During his toast buttering, he had been engrossed in a true crime podcast which was quickly climbing toward a shocking discovery about a serial killer who targeted tourists hiking the countryside around his remote Scottish town.
As the sound of her grandson’s car faded, Delores carried her coffee into the den, settled herself on the couch and unmuted the television. This studio news show had been a part of her solitary morning coffee for years. As she sipped from her #1 Grandma mug, it occurred to her that at some unknown point, news anchors had stopped sitting behind desks and now perched on sectional sofas. Maybe it’s for the shoe companies, she mused, while clucking her tongue at the footage of young people holding up cardboard signs and shouting about the newest outrage. Thanking her lucky stars her grandson wasn’t mixed up with all that nonsense and setting down her empty coffee mug, she surveyed the room.
The den windows faced west, which missed the morning light. When layers of dust had settled on her collection of Victorian angels, she didn’t notice unless she happened to venture into the room in the golden hour, when all the dust motes shimmer in the rectangles of light. But that was her meal cooking time. For some reason, today she noticed, and picked up the feather duster. First, she dusted the family photographs. There was Jennifer’s senior photo, her freckled face framed with the big hair so popular at that time. Jennifer was Delores’s only child, and Leon was Jennifer’s.
When the two moved in after Delores lost Jennifer’s father, her Victorian angel collection began to grow. She felt connected to each ceramic cherub with their tiny wings, the rosy-cheeked Christmas angel with green and red holly crown, the chubby violin-holding angel child with gold ringlets and pale blue eyes, and situated in special pride of place this season, her fat Christmas baby angel with his gold feathery wings. She felt a Christian ought to have something pleasant to look at while saying their prayers. A cradle protestant, she disliked the look of a Crucifix.
She appreciated how they stood patiently as her feather duster did its work, bearing to mind a scene from her school days— Wilbur the pig, standing serenely for his buttermilk bath. It was sometime during those elementary school days when she began imagining guardian angels who were there to protect her and her family from danger. The danger her eight-year-old mind conjured was a confused specter of rampaging murderous gangs and senseless attacks on innocents, perhaps an amalgamation of newspaper headlines and her father’s old John Wayne and WWII movies. Her adult mind conjured similar images, mostly of gang members crossing the border illegally.
It was time to do her morning errands.
The grocery store parking lot was more crowded than usual for a Wednesday morning. Delores waited for a spot to open up near the door. As she dug through her purse for a quarter, a voice interrupted her. “Do you want this cart?” Delores looked up into the face of a tall, older man. “Yes, thank you.” He waved her quarter away. Delores hurried after the man. “I don’t like taking advantage of people,” she explained, holding out the coin. “Nothing is free in this world, right?” She gave a nervous laugh.
The man threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, is that what the Good Book says?” His warm hand brushing her cold fingertips, he accepted the quarter and placed it in his trouser pocket. His look of true amusement as he theatrically doffed his hat confused her. Delores felt a pink flush run up her neck. Her cheeks grew hot. Why did he have to laugh at me like that? It’s only right what I did!
At the post office, Delores waited in line behind a woman and her daughter. The woman wore a head scarf. The child, little more than three or four, had a neat braid in her hair and wore a shirt that said “Princess.” Delores glanced at the woman and peered down at the girl, who quickly hid her face in her mother’s coat. Such a shame. The mail clerk blinked slowly as the Muslim woman hoisted a large box onto the counter. “Anything liquid, fragile, or potentially hazardous?” The woman shook her head no. Delores watched as the mail clerk weighed the box and printed a label. The woman took her receipt and turned to leave. Seized by a sudden surge of charity, Delores smiled at the woman and brightly sang out, “Merry Christmas!” There was something about the look that briefly flickered across the mother’s face that struck Delores as both confusing and familiar. After an awkward pause, the mother smiled politely and returned, “Merry Christmas,” taking her daughter’s hand and leaving the building.
The post office parking lot gleamed in the morning sun. Stepping into the shadow of her car to block the glare, Delores was reading the notification on her phone. She fumbled for her reading glasses and got behind the wheel. As she was preparing to watch the Instagram reel her church friend had shared with her, a sudden rapping at her window startled her. It was the scarfed woman from the post office line. She was looking at her. Alarmed, Delores debated for a full three seconds about turning on the car and throwing it into reverse before cracking her window a few inches and squinting up into the sund. “Yes?”
“There is a bird under your car. I think it cannot fly. I have been trying to shoo it away and now it has hopped under your car.” Delores looked at the woman for a moment. Then, grunting, she eased out of the driver’s seat and bent down to peer into the shadows. “Is that, a white pigeon?” Delores was surprised.
“It looks smaller than a pigeon. I think it’s a dove. Maybe it is a pet? I don’t think it can fly.”
“You know about doves?” Delores watched as the woman went to her car and retrieved a crumpled bakery bag from the front passenger seat. Taking out what looked like a coffee cake, she broke off a piece and sprinkled the crumbs on the asphalt.
“Yes. My uncle used to raise them. Doves are smaller than white pigeons.”
Having laid a path of sugary crumbs, the woman rejoined Delores next to the driver’s side. “Now, we wait.”
The woman’s daughter had now unstrapped herself from her booster seat and had come to stand next to her mother. The three watched. It didn’t take long for the bird to find its way to the offering.
“Now! Go quickly, if you can,” the woman urged. Delores felt strangely amenable to following this stranger’s instruction.
Turning her key in the ignition, Delores called through the narrowly cracked window, “Well, thank you for your help,” and drove away. In her rearview, she could see the woman spreading a few more crumbs to lure the bird away from her car, then rushing her daughter back into her seat, looking back over her shoulder to check on the dove.
***
Delores was still holding her purse, in the middle of watching the Instagram reel her friend sent her, when she heard a knock at the front door. Sheer curtains revealed an unfamiliar silhouette. The form was slender, likely a teenage youth, or adult woman. “No solicitors!” she called out, waiting for the figure to go away. Delores watched as the form bent low before retreating out of view. She hung her purse and keys by the door before unlocking it. There, on her doorsill, was her missing lamb, speechless and forlorn. She glimpsed a young man re-crossing the street. He was part of the landcaping crew parked in the opposite driveway.
“Hello?” Her shout sailed into the cold, catching the ear of the man, not much older than her grandson. Gesturing toward the hedge, he pointed back at the lamb. Then turning, he offered a half wave and quickly tugged the chain on the leaf blower. “Thank you!” she called. Then suddenly heard the voice of Julio Eglasias from his 1970 Christmas album and fumbled shyly, “Feliz Nevidad!” but she was not quick enough, nor loud enough, to be heard above the sound of the blower motor.
Picking up her lamb, she observed no damage. “What have you been up to?” she scolded. Having forgotten about the instagram reel, she walked past her phone toward the kitchen, drew a tack hammer from a drawer, and marched back outside with the lamb in the crook of her arm. Placing him back in his patch of grass, she borrowed one of the metal rods securing the shepherd and slid it through the holder at the back of her lamb. Then, she raised the hammer, and drove the stake into the hard winter ground.
Step closer. 