The invitation came in a pink envelope with a cartoon reindeer stamp stuck on upside down, and the address was written in purple crayon, in letters an inch high, so the mail carrier had to fold it twice to fit it in Bettye Ruth Pace's mailbox.
TO GRANDMA BETTYE. EDISTO CROSSING. SOUTH CAROLINA.
There was no street address. There was no zip code. The post office in Edisto Crossing had delivered it anyway, because there was only one Grandma Bettye in Edisto Crossing, and the whole post office knew her.
Bettye opened it standing at the mailbox in the December sun.
Inside was a sheet of construction paper, folded in half. On the front was a drawing of a Christmas tree with a star and four stick people holding hands. Three tall ones and one small one.
Inside, in purple crayon, it said: YOU ARE INVITED TO CHRISTMAS. DECEMBER 24. AT MY HOUSE. I MISS YOU. LOVE HARPER. P.S. DONT TELL MOM.
Bettye was seventy-three. She had been a seamstress in Edisto Crossing for fifty years, in a little shop on the main street between the bait store and the bank. She had sewn wedding dresses and christening gowns and prom gowns and burial dresses for three generations of Lowcountry women. She had hemmed every pair of Sunday pants in town.
She had not seen her granddaughter in two years.
She had not spoken to her daughter in two years either.
It had been a foolish fight. Most of the worst ones are.
Two summers ago, Angela's husband had left her. Angela was forty-six, with an eight-year-old daughter and a mortgage in Charleston she could not pay alone. She had called her mother crying and asked if she and Harper could come live in the old house in Edisto Crossing, just for a while.
Bettye had said yes. Of course she had said yes.
Then she had said something else. She did not remember exactly. Something about how she had warned Angela about that man before the wedding. Something about how Angela had never once listened to her in her whole life.
Angela had gone very quiet on the phone.
Then she said, "You know what, Mama? Forget it. I'll figure it out myself. I always do."
And she hung up. And she had not called back.
Bettye had called her eleven times that first month. Angela had not answered. Bettye had written letters. They had come back unopened. At Christmas, Bettye had mailed presents for Harper. They had come back too.
The second Christmas, Bettye did not mail anything.
She had sat in her little house alone on Christmas Eve with the television on and a plate of oyster dressing she did not eat, and she had told herself it was Angela's fault, and she had not believed it.
She put Harper's invitation on the kitchen table and looked at it for three days.
On the first day, she decided she could not go. Angela had not invited her. Angela would be furious. It would ruin Christmas for all of them.
On the second day, she called her friend Miss Hattie from church and read her the invitation over the phone.
"Bettye Ruth," Miss Hattie said, "that child has done the bravest thing anybody in your family has done in two years. Are you going to let an eight-year-old be braver than you?"
On the third day, Bettye went to her shop and opened the cedar chest where she kept the fabric she was saving for something special.
She sewed for a week.
She did not tell anyone what she was making. She worked at night, after the shop closed, at her old Singer under the lamp. She had not sewn this carefully since Angela's wedding dress in 2009.
It was a Christmas dress for a ten-year-old. Deep red velvet, with a white collar of old lace that had been Bettye's own mother's, and a sash of green satin. She guessed the size from the drawing. Harper had drawn herself almost as tall as the other two stick people. She must have grown.
She wrapped it in white tissue paper in a box from the department store, with a green ribbon.
Then, on the afternoon of December twenty-fourth, she put on her good church coat, put the box on the passenger seat of her old Buick, and drove the forty-five miles up Highway 17 to Charleston.
Angela's house was a little yellow bungalow in West Ashley with a wreath on the door. Bettye had found the address in an old Christmas card from three years ago.
She sat in the car outside for twenty minutes. The lights were on inside. She could see a Christmas tree in the front window, and, every so often, a small shape running past it.
At five o'clock, she got out of the car with the box and the pink envelope in her hand, walked up the steps, and rang the bell.
The door opened.
Angela was standing there in a Christmas sweater, with a dish towel over her shoulder. She was forty-eight. Her hair was shorter. She looked tired and older and so much like Bettye's own mother that Bettye almost said her name.
For a moment, neither of them said anything.
Then Angela's face went hard, the way it had gone hard on the phone two years ago.
"Mama," she said. "What are you doing here? Who invited you?"
And behind her, in the hallway, Bettye saw a small girl in pajamas, holding a stuffed reindeer, freeze with her hand over her mouth.