Chapter 8 - The Whittle and the Wood
The house grew silent around midnight. The only sound was the howling of the blizzard against the cedar siding and the occasional crackle of the dying fire.
I couldn't sleep. The sofa was comfortable enough, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw the letter. *I’m pregnant. Six weeks. The doctor said the heartbeat is strong.*
I threw off the blanket and sat up, rubbing my face in my hands. The room was illuminated only by the faint red embers in the hearth and the multicolored glow of the Christmas tree lights that Lauren had left plugged in.
I walked over to the tree, drawn by an instinct I couldn't quite explain.
Underneath the tree, wrapped in cheap, festive paper with cartoon snowmen, were five small gifts. On top of the stack sat an unwrapped object—something that caught the firelight in a strange, uneven way.
I knelt down on the rug to look closer.
It was a piece of pine wood, roughly eight inches long. Someone had attempted to carve it into the shape of a pickup truck. The cuts were jagged, hesitant, clearly made with a dull pocketknife, but the proportions were surprisingly accurate. The wheel wells were carved out with careful symmetry, and someone had tried to sand the cab smooth with coarse paper.
Beside it lay a small piece of paper with Leo’s untamed handwriting: *For Santa’s workshop - Leo.*
My throat tightened.
I picked up the little wooden truck. The cuts were rough, but I recognized the technique. It was the same way my grandfather had taught me to block out a piece of timber before using the gouge. Leo hadn't learned that from me; it was in his blood, in his fingers, in the way his mind perceived the form hidden inside a block of raw pine.
From my front pocket, I pulled out my own pocketknife—a three-blade Case knife with bone handles that my grandfather had given me on my sixteenth birthday, the one tool I had never parted with, even when I had pawned everything else to eat.
I looked at the stairs. Silence.
I sat cross-legged on the rug beside the tree, pulled a small red rag from my coat pocket to catch the shavings, and opened the fine-detail whittling blade.
May you like
Carefully, reverently, without changing the shape the boy had intended, I began to smooth the rough edges. I carved the subtle bevel along the hood. I cleaned out the sawdust trapped in the wheel wells. I shaped the tiny front bumper so it sat square against the grain.
For two hours, while the storm raged outside, I poured seven years of lost love into a scrap of pine, carving in silence beneath the colored lights of my son's Christmas tree.
