But when she read “Wild Geese” something changed. She thought it was beautiful, so she Googled the poet. When she read that Mary Oliver was gay and had spent her last years with her photographer lover, she suddenly realized the poem’s message about suffering. The world didn’t care if you were gay. But you, the reader and speaker in your own life, should care about what makes you happy. If you didn’t grasp what you could, then the world would simply move on without you.
Caroline realized that morning how unhappy she really was.
Jay asked her if she was leaving him for a woman. But that was such a trope, such a cliché. She wanted to tell him she was leaving him for a poem, because that had been the best embodiment of love she had ever felt. Instead she had turned away and tried to come up with the best self-help, Dr. Phil-like response she could think of. I’m not happy, but maybe this way I can be. Jay hadn’t fought her on it, and for that, Caroline was grateful. The divorce was easy. Even when Jay brought home Natalie, a girl ten years younger than Caroline, she had been happy for him. Love wasn’t about you—it was always about other people. And Caroline knew that this was what they both wanted. Even if it meant spending the first Christmas alone.
“Is that what this is about?” Trisha said, picking up a Christmas cookie and glancing at Caroline.
“What what is about?” Caroline asked, focusing on her friends again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.”
“We ran into Natalie at the grocery store,” Melanie explained.
“And I was wondering if she was why you’re boycotting Christmas,” Trisha added. “Are you upset Jay got a girl before you?”
“No, no,” Caroline said. “It’s never been about that.”
“Then what is it about?” Trisha asked. “We don’t really talk about it. You know you can, right?”
“I know. It’s not as simple as falling in love with another person. It’s more like, I suddenly saw my life from another angle, if that makes sense?”
“You didn’t want to celebrate Christmas anymore,” Adriana said. “But a different Light Holiday instead?”
“Yeah, sure,” Caroline said. “I just realized I wasn’t happy.”
“And are you now?”
Caroline smirked. “I was until you brought forbidden food into my house.”
Melanie laughed. “Fine, fine. I’ll eat all the gingerbread, Adriana will eat the Kutya, and Trisha—”
“No,” Trisha held up her hands. “I’m much too full!”
“Well, fine,” Melanie said. “I’ll eat it too. And then we’ll be even, Caroline. No more Christmas food left to distract you.”
“Except wine,” Melanie said, holding up a bottle. She smiled as she topped off everyone’s glasses and then raised her glass. “To your new place, Caroline.”
Caroline held up her glass and nodded. “To my new place.”
* * *
After everyone left, Caroline put away the leftovers. Most of the gingerbread cookies were gone, but she knew Daniel would finish them when he was here for New Years. She put the rest of the Kutya into the fridge before she was too tempted to eat it. As she looked around her kitchen, her stomach growled. Another shopping trip is definitely in order.
Caroline was halfway through making a shopping list before she realized she had included stuff that only her husband and son would eat. Why on earth would I want Pop Tarts? Granola bars? No, not at all. As she made another list, she struggled to remember what she liked to eat. The last time she made a shopping list for herself was in college.
Pizza. That was as far from festive as it could be. And really, she was living on her own again. Why not go back to the classics for a while?
She flipped open her laptop and Googled to find a local pizza place. As she filled out the online order form she came to a section that asked for “special instructions.” After a few minutes of thought, she typed, “Write a poem in the box” and hit submit before she could change her mind.
Nothing happened. She tried again, but this time the browser froze. She glanced at the clock and sighed. I wonder if it’s too close to closing time for them to make me a pizza. She picked up her phone and dialled in.
“Hello?” a woman answered.
“Hi, yes. Are you still open?”
“Barely,” the woman said. “We close in fifteen minutes.”
“Is that enough for a pizza? I would have called earlier, but the online form didn’t work and—”
“Really?” the woman interrupted. “I’m sorry about that, hold on.”
Caroline heard the woman yell at someone. Caroline heard a man answer but couldn’t tell what was said. It was only a moment before the woman was back on the line.
“Sorry about that. We’ve been having trouble with the online system. But please give me your order.”
“Okay, great. Thanks so much.” Caroline went back to her screen. Half of what she had specified was frozen, but she listed off the toppings as the woman on the other end wrote it all down.
“Anything else?”
“Um…” Caroline looked at her screen. She tried to scroll down to the lower half of the section, before it suddenly all disappeared. “Oh. It just disappeared.”
“Don’t worry, we’re almost done anyway. I think we just had the special instruction section. Did you put anything there?”
Caroline thought about her foolish request. Write a poem on the box? How ridiculous. This is what happened when machines stood in and took customer service requests—and when Caroline had had too much wine. She couldn’t bring herself to utter the request aloud.
“Um, nope. That’s it.”
“Well, okay. We will have it to your place in no time. Sorry about the online form.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be here.”
Caroline sighed as she hung up the phone. She sat down with another glass of wine and waited.
Outside, snow began to fall.
* * *
Kim Sauer, the assistant manager at the local Pizza Tavern, hung the office up phone with a bang. She knew her boss wouldn’t want to make another pizza this close to closing—even if Kim convinced him that they had a certain obligation. Their online system sucked because Sal wouldn’t update the software. So a lot of orders bounced and a lot of pizzas got lost in cyberspace. This wasn’t the first customer call, though the woman on the phone had been a lot nicer than the college kids who usually ordered this late.
“You know, you lose business that way,” Kim lectured Sal. “People want to order pizza and they want to do it from the privacy of their homes. They can’t do that if the system keeps freezing.”
“Well, that’s what phones are for. This person figured out how to use a phone. No harm done.”
“But some people don’t like the phone, Sal. You have to make things accessible to people.”
“That’s why I have you, dear,” he said with a wink. “You know how to make things easier for customers, so I let you get the phone. Anyone else who complains has to get used to it. This is the real world, after all. It doesn’t bend to your whim.”
Kim sighed. “So I’ll make the pizza, then?”
Sal lifted his eyebrows and nodded. Kim was used to this by now. Using her cane for leverage, she got some of the dough from the freezer and turned on one of the big industrial stoves. She glanced down at her writing pad to make a note of the toppings when her phone buzzed with an email. She had synced her IOS to the staff computer and the ringtone let her know it was an email from the pizza server. She tied her black hair behind her head and glanced down. Order 62 stared back at her, with Caroline Braithwaite’s name on the first line.
So it did go through. Maybe the system wasn’t completely broken. Kim opened up the email and verified the order with what she had written down. The toppings were fine: double cheese, with green peppers, mushrooms, but no olives. Kim began to un-wrap the fresh toppings she had put away and pulled out the sauce again.
The space between the industrial ovens and the f
ridge was only two feet, maybe, but it was far enough for Kim. She could manage the walk without her cane on the best of days, but not much beyond it. And at nearly one in the morning, during the cold months of winter, it sometimes felt impossible. She grasped her cane as she moved around to gather her materials, relishing the fact that this was the last order. For sure this time. She didn’t have to rush too much and she could go right home afterwards.
Kim knew Sal from a family friend. She grew up in this part of town, before she moved in with one of her girlfriends in San Francisco—and before the accident that made her walk with a cane. The night she was injured, Kim and her girlfriend had a bad fight (again), Kim went out and got drunk (again), and then she fell down a flight of stairs. Her knee shattered in the process, along with the relationship. Kim had stayed around to attend AA in San Francisco, but it hadn’t helped. To Kim, AA was a room full of people who wanted to dwell on their problems, not look at the world and realize they were a tiny, tiny part in it all.
So she came back home. She got a job in a pizza place, though she was in her early thirties. It was kind of sad, she knew. But most people were getting used to starting their lives over again. In this economy, you had to take what you could get.
“Hey Tiny Kim,” Sal said.
Kim jumped, lost in her thoughts. “Yeah?”
“You okay to lock up if I leave? The wife… she’s already mad I’m working so close to Christmas, you know. It’s just easier…”
“Go,” Kim said.
Sal lingered. “You sure? You got a ride home?”
“Yes. I’m not a complete invalid. Now go before I beat you with my cane.”
“There we go,” Sal said, a chuckle in his voice. “I miss the old Kim when you get quiet.”
“Uh-huh. And belligerence is the only way to solve it.”
“You know it,” Sal said. “And hey, Merry Christmas. Or whatever you wanna celebrate.”
“Thanks,” Kim said. She wiped a loose strand of hair back, getting flour on her face. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”
Kim waved from the counter and waited until Sal was gone. She sighed. Christmas was hard. She agreed to take this shift so she didn’t have to be alone tonight. She knew she wasn’t going to drink—even if Christmas was the drinking season, worse than Easter to a diabetic, she still knew she’d resist the temptation. It didn’t make much sense to celebrate good times when they had been few and far between.
She flicked on the radio. Sal hated the incessant chatter of weather reports, traffic copters, and 90s adult contemporary—or God forbid, Christmas songs, but Kim needed something to break up the dead air as she began to cook. She spread the sauce and the cheese as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” finished.
“And that was…” The radio announcer repeated the title. “I hope you are all snug in your beds. The storm we were talking about earlier will hit us in the early morning hours. Small flurries have already begun. Be sure to take it easy on those roads—and sleep in, as much as you can.”
Kim sighed. She didn’t mind driving in a snowstorm, but getting up the front walkway of her building was going to be hell if they hadn’t shovelled yet. She tried not to think about it and threw herself into her work. When she got to the special instructions on the online order form, she paused. Write a poem in the box? How cute. She hadn’t thought about poetry, especially for this season, in a long time.
Wait. On the phone, Caroline had only given her first name. But on the online order, her full name was Caroline Braithwaite.
No way. Was this the same woman Kim had known in high school? Would she even still have the same last name now? From what Kim could recall, Caroline seemed like the white picket fence and married life type of woman. She was destined for much bigger things beyond this town, too.
But so were you, Kim realized. And yet, sometime we end up where we began.
Kim slid the pizza into the large stove as she thought of her high school years. She pictured Caroline with long dark curls, a small mouth, and an impeccable eye for scenery in her creative writing. Could it be her? What’s the harm if it is?
Kim smiled. She knew the perfect way to test her hunch. Grabbing a box for the pizza, and a permanent marker, she began to write, the words coming to her like an old song.
* * *
There were three knocks on the door—bam, bam, bam with an even space between them. It sounded as though the delivery person was knocking in a pattern. Caroline thought of Marley’s chains in The Christmas Carol. What if the spirits of past, present, and future were coming to visit her tonight? Caroline laughed at the thought.
“Hello,” the pizza person said when Caroline opened the door. “Are you Caroline?”
“The one and only.” Caroline smiled, and then noticed the snow outside. “You must be freezing. And it’s so late. Here, come in.”
The girl came inside. But girl isn’t quite right, is it? This wasn’t a teenager trying to earn a couple extra bucks so she could go to the mall or the movies. This was a woman—and an attractive one at that. Her black hair was in a ponytail draped over one shoulder, her cheeks slightly red from the chill. Her eyes were brown—a deep brown that was almost black and Caroline found herself getting lost in. Caroline shuddered, just slightly, as the chill from the night touched her.
“Sorry. Please make yourself at home. I’m sure it’s late and you have other deliveries. I’ll get your money.”
“No,” the woman said. “I mean I have no other deliveries. You’re the last one for tonight.”
“Either way, I’m sure you want to get back home.”
The woman nodded half-heartedly. Caroline wished the woman had a nametag, but she wasn’t wearing a uniform.
“Are you the owner?” Caroline asked as they moved into the kitchen.
“No. Assistant manager. But I know the owner. We’re family friends from ages ago.”
“So you’re local?” Caroline asked.
“More or less. I used to live in San Francisco…and now I live here.”
“Seems like a short story for such a big move,” Caroline said. The woman shrugged as she took tentative steps into the kitchen. Caroline watched as the woman looked around the little house and the unpacked boxes. Caroline shook her head at the mess. Her friends hadn’t helped unpack at all. The only rooms up to Caroline’s standards were the kitchen and bedroom.
“I know,” Caroline said. “It’s a disaster area. I just moved in. Just ignore it.”
“No, it’s fine.”
The woman put the box down slowly. Caroline realized she carried a cane in her right hand and had been using her hip to balance the box. Not exactly the pizza girl fantasy that Caroline had first thought when she ordered the pizza. But this was nicer, almost. Caroline laid the money on the counter.
“This okay?”
“Yes. I can make change—”
“No. Keep it. You were nice to take my order this late.”
“Not at all.” The woman lingered, as if she was waiting for something else. She pocketed the money, before glancing at Caroline, and then looking away flustered. Caroline watched as her cheeks became a shade darker.
“This is your last delivery, I think you said?”
She nodded.
“Then can I offer you a drink? It’s the one good thing about moving in the winter, everyone has booze for Christmas.”
The woman smiled, but held up her free hand. “No, thank you. I wouldn’t mind some water, though.”
“Coming right up. You’re certainly living on the edge for this holiday season.”
As Caroline got the woman her drink, she felt a small ball of tension roll itself through her. What was she doing? It was late, she was still a little buzzed from the wine and her friends’ ceaseless chatter, and it was Christmas—a Light Holiday. Not everyone boycotted Christmas. Caroline just needed to eat her pizza and go to bed and allow this poor woman to go home.
“Here you are,” Caroline said.
The woman th
anked her with a nod. She kept her hand on the cane, avoiding Caroline’s eyes, as the silence stretched between them.
“Job hazard?” Caroline asked, referring to the cane. “Slip on the ice?”
“Oh. I had a spill, yeah. But it’s old now. Last year around this time. Not many people ask me, actually. Most look away.”
“I’ve seen a lot of spills. Nothing to be ashamed about, really.”
The woman smiled again and her eyes became softer, sweeter than before. Wow, she is pretty. Caroline was about to open the pizza box when the woman stepped forward.
“I should go.”
“No, it’s okay. If it’s your last order of the night, you should stay.” Caroline motioned to a chair.
“I don’t know…”
Caroline tilted her head to the side. In another light, the woman’s face took on a different quality than she was used to. More than just pretty, the woman was…familiar.
“You…Have we met before?”
The woman laughed. “I was wondering if you’d remember me.”
Unwrap these Presents Page 7