I didn’t know my father; it’s how my mother wanted it or maybe what he wanted. I don’t know. I’d often find my mom staring out the kitchen window while washing the dishes at night. She always seemed to be looking for something or someone or hoping for something or someone. Her face was one of wistfulness … or perhaps it was longing. It’s hard to recall. It changed, I suppose, from day to day.

I never asked about the man who was my father, but on my tenth Christmas I gathered my nerve as we put up our decorations. We dragged the artificial tree in from the garage and positioned the plastic Santa and reindeer on the front lawn. My heart pounded as we pulled Grandma’s porcelain nativity pieces from a box of ornaments. I took a small cow from its packaging and placed it on the coffee table. I fumbled for the right words but knew I just had to come out with it. “Do you ever wish my father was here?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the bluish white cow.

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She worked in silence, her hands fluttering like moths.

“There was a king once,” she said, peering at me over her glasses.

“Where?” I asked.

“Um,” she said, polishing the shepherd boy’s head with the tail of her shirt. “He lived in some far-off land. On a whim he decided to place an enormous boulder in the middle of the road.”

“How’d he get it there?” I asked, lifting a lamb from the tissue paper.

She paused. “I don’t know. I’m sure he had an ox move it.”

“It’d take more than one ox to move a huge boulder, wouldn’t it?”

She sighed, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “He had six oxen push the boulder.”

“Now that seems like too many.”

“How many do you want him to have?”

I thought it over as I unwrapped the baby Jesus. “Four.”

She shook her head and turned Mary just so on the table.