It really was a great tradition, the Christmas Fair. Tables were lined with wonderful donations—board games and stuffed animals and blankets. Cerise watched as a young girl, probably no more than eight, ran a gentle finger along a pink box containing a brand-new Barbie Bride doll. Then she picked up the box and hugged it.
“Look at her.” Cerise nodded in the girl’s direction. “It’s sweet.”
A few tables over, an older woman caught her eye, smiled her recognition and headed in their direction. Cerise noted the choice of sneakers with the knee-length skirt. Very Fellowship Hall practical.
“Cerise,” said the woman, the wobble in her voice commensurate to her age. “Do you remember me? I had you in Sunday school.”
Cerise’s mind was blank but she hoped enough fake enthusiasm would fool her brain into spitting up a name. “Of course! Yes. Mrs.—” Darn.
“Walters. Evelyn Walters. My husband was Maynard Walters. But you may not remember him. He passed.”
“Oh.” Cerise gently touched her wrist. “I’m sorry. When was that?”
“It was 1989.”
Cerise nodded and hmm’d consolingly, doing her best to avoid looking at Barb, who was busy making wild eyes, obviously less concerned about maintaining her decorum.
“Anyway, such sad news about your mother,” said Mrs. Walters. “And all that upset.”
Barb raised a curious eyebrow. Cerise ignored her.
“Yes, well, she’s doing better every day. Doctors expect her to be fully recovered soon.”
“Well, our Patrick never married, either. Says he’s too busy traveling here and there for work. I guess that’s just the way of the world these days.”
Her voice trailed off into a melancholy hum. Cerise couldn’t quite pick out the tune.
“Anyway...” Mrs. Walters turned to address Barb for the first time since making her appearance. “Hello.”
“Hello,” said Barb.
Mrs. Walters nodded. “Yes, well...” Then she turned and headed back to where she’d come from.
“Interesting,” said Barb under her breath.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” answered Cerise.
Her phone began to vibrate again.
“Hi, Mom.”
Barb shot her a look and rolled her eyes. Cerise ignored it.
“Do they have the boys’ toys separated from the girls’? If they’re even close to each other they get muddled into a horrible mess and we have girls thinking they have no choice but to go home with some sort of remote control monstrosity.”
Cerise scanned the chaos on the tables. “It looks as if everything is going wonderfully, Mom. No need to worry. Love you.” Her mother was still talking as she hung up.
The calls continued. Had she checked on the number of additional tickets being handed out? Were the high school volunteers behaving themselves? Had anyone remembered to make the coffee?
Just as the clock was edging up on the end of the day, her phone, unsurprisingly, rang again.
“I need you to make sure someone donated a Bible. We can’t host a church Christmas Fair without at least pretending it’s not all about the gifts.”
“Well, Mom, the tables are nearly picked clean by now. I don’t have any way of knowing what everyone donated.”
Barb shuffled in her boots and straightened her ponytail. Cerise could tell she didn’t want to let on about how much she was enjoying watching her squirm with every phone call. Not that Cerise could blame her.
She turned and imitated a flapping beak with her hand as her mother expended every last ounce of worry over the donations. Barb raised an eyebrow, but didn’t laugh.
“All right. I’ll do what I can, Mom.”
The shoppers were nearly all gone and the room hummed with the activity of volunteers cleaning up and breaking everything down. Cerise was torn between telling her mother that the event was over and withholding that information, for fear the news would result in another round of reminder calls.
A few of the volunteers laid a picnic blanket against the wall by the entrance and spread it with an array of snacks. Small children began appearing from every direction, hungry and drawn to the food.
“Look,” mouthed Cerise, waving at Barb and pointing at the children amassing on the blanket. Her mother was still talking but she’d quit listening. “They’re like minnows in a pond.”
Finally Barb cracked a smile and laughed. It felt delicious.
“Mom, I—” Cerise tried to interrupt but Violet carried on. “Mom? Mom.”
One of the mothers tending the minnow pond overheard her and looked up.
“Is that your mom on the phone, Cerise?”
Cerise nodded, though she didn’t have the slightest clue as to who this woman was.
The woman took two gingerly hops across the blanket and landed at Cerise’s side. “Hello, Violet!” She lined her face up with Cerise’s and spoke into the phone. Cerise could smell the Goldfish crackers on the woman’s breath. “It’s Meg here. We miss you something awful, but it’s so wonderful to see your daughter! I’ve been telling everyone the congregation is going to have a two-mommy family!”
For the first time all day, Cerise could tell that she hadn’t been the first one to hang up.
12
Richard
THERE WASN’T A damn thing to eat in the whole house.
“Eldris!”
Not that she was even home. No, she was still over at the church cleaning up the mess Violet left with the Christmas charity fest, or whatever they called it. Violet was always handing work to Eldris and she was forever taking it, claimed she enjoyed helping others. To which he wanted to say, Well, if that’s the case, Eldris, how come there isn’t a goddamn thing to eat in the whole house?
Not that he did say that, of course. That would’ve had her in tears and him feeling like the worst. Still. Since when did he stop being someone his wife liked to help?
Richard grabbed a box of stale saltines from the back of the pantry and got to work looking for peanut butter. It’d better be creamy. That chunky crap just broke the crackers in half and made a mess of everything.
Well, all right. Something was actually going his way for once. He pulled an unopened jar of creamy peanut butter from behind a can of kidney beans. Kidney. Didn’t Eldris know he only ate black beans?
Their regular dinner plates wouldn’t be big enough to hold all the peanut butter crackers he was going to make. Maybe he ought to pull out a serving tray. That should be adequate. Where did Eldris keep that sort of holiday-only crap, anyway? Hell if he knew. He only paid for the goddamn stuff.
Ah, hell. This was his house. His money, his food, his house. Who said he needed a plate?
He picked up the jar of peanut butter and the box of crackers and headed for the silverware drawer. Did he need a knife? His house. He made the rules.
Not to say that he was a slob, though, either. He wasn’t some Neanderthal who ate with his fingers. No, he’d been a goddamn SVP with an expense account and a corporate Amex card. He ate lunch at five-star restaurants and ordered whatever he liked. He knew the difference between a salad fork and a dinner fork. No one would have stared at him across a white tablecloth and wondered whether this was his first time at bat.
Damn it. Since when had he started mixing metaphors?
No, he wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him get lazy. He grabbed a knife out of the drawer and headed for the couch.
The box of crackers didn’t last nearly long enough. He was still hungry.
“Eldris!”
Not that she was even home yet. He knew that. He just liked having the freedom to let off a little steam when he wanted to. Yelling seemed like as good a way as any.
“Eldris!” Christ, that felt good. “Eldris! Eldris! Ellllldrissssss!”
“For h
eaven’s sake, Richard, you sound like an old man in the senility ward.”
Goddamn it!
He jumped from the couch, jar of peanut butter in his hand, aimed and ready. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“Well, of course you wouldn’t have heard me with all that bellowing. What on earth is wrong with you? I could hear you practically halfway down the block.” She dumped a worn grocery tote on the kitchen counter and did a double take in his direction. “Is that my sweatshirt you’re wearing?”
Richard glanced down. Right. The university logo was stitched in pink and gold. So what?
“There wasn’t any clean laundry.”
“As if you’re too busy to do a load for yourself. Kyle could manage that by the time he was twelve.” She put her hands on her hips. This was Eldris on a roll.
“And you’re eating on the couch again! Seriously, Richard?” She marched over and grabbed the jar of peanut butter with one hand and brushed the cracker crumbs from the couch cushion with the other. “What has gotten into you?”
She marched back to the kitchen and opened her grocery sack. She pulled a loaf of bread out of the bag and made him a sloppy sandwich, then dropped it on a plate at the kitchen table.
Man, it looked good, even without the jelly. But he wouldn’t take it yet. He wasn’t that simple. In fact, just this morning he’d gotten a very interesting email. An offer of sorts. Not the kind of offer one gets after a networking lunch or seeing an ad in the paper, but it paid. Cash.
“Richard, do you know who I just spent the day with? People with real problems. People who lost their homes, their jobs, some of them even their kids. The least I can do is show them a tiny bit of Christmas cheer. And now I come home to find that you won’t even get off the couch long enough to do laundry!”
It wouldn’t be easy, this deal he’d been offered. So he’d sat on it. Mulled it. Took his time. Thought it over. Had a bite to eat. He knew better than to rush a decision.
Eldris dug into her bag again and began dumping the contents onto the counter. Cornmeal. Tomato sauce. Kidney beans.
Kidney.
“You know I hate kidney beans, Eldris!”
She slammed the last can down on the counter. “You need them for vegetarian chili and vegetarian chili is cheap!”
And there it was. Eldris’s talent for reminding him of just how much of a loser he was. Couldn’t get a job, couldn’t even afford the expensive beans—aw, hell, not even the goddamn meat—for his chili.
He’d had it.
He walked into the office and slammed the door behind him.
The same email lit up his screen as soon as he touched the mouse. “All right. I’m in,” he typed. “See you tomorrow night.”
Feds Receive Most Unusual Welcome Gift
by Harvey Arpell,
staff reporter, Minneapolis/St. Paul Standard
December 28, 2017
Minneapolis, MN—Members of the Federal Reserve Bank, who gathered in Minneapolis Tuesday for a three-day summit on the nation’s monetary policy, were greeted with a most unusual welcome gift—an eight-foot statue on the lawn facing the Federal Reserve Building. The statue, depicting a begging child, was constructed of chicken wire and eyeglasses. According to Minneapolis Police, a group calling themselves “The Watchers,” claimed responsibility for the installation via multiple social media sites, writing, “We see the vulnerable among us, but who will speak for them?”
Other than this incident, the group does not have a history with law enforcement.
No arrests have been made and the installation has been removed.
13
Cerise
CERISE FLEXED HER fingers to relieve the cramping in her joints. Who knew week-old mashed potatoes were crazy difficult to scrape from the pan? Maybe if she’d realized she was eating glue...
The point was she was tired of living in chaos. Neither she nor Barb was particularly hung up on housecleaning. This was great in theory—they never fought about trivialities like who left their socks laying in the middle of the bathroom floor—but it also meant that their house was a rolling disaster zone. It wasn’t just the dirty dishes or the forsaken shoes or the piles of life’s miscellany. It wasn’t even the fact that Barb regularly bought new underwear in lieu of doing laundry.
It was time to get their crap together.
“Come New Year’s Day,” she’d declared last week over dinner, “we pick up after ourselves. Every day.”
Barb frowned. “I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. If we’re intent on change, why not just start now?”
Cerise looked around the kitchen. “Okay. You first.”
How had they gotten here? Any stranger would assume they were tidy, meticulous people. After all, they were both in detail-oriented professions—Cerise even working at the molecular level. You couldn’t get more finely detailed.
As for Barb, she could spot discrepancies between cuts in TV shows and movies even when they flashed on-screen for no more than a second or two—a coffee mug facing the wrong direction, a glass of wine that grew from nearly empty to nearly full, a necktie that went from straight to askew to straight again. She was wired for consistency.
Only, neither one of them seemed to crave the same in their home environment. Cerise didn’t know why.
Barb blamed her privileged childhood and the fact that she’d never known a time without a housekeeper.
“But wouldn’t that have just created an expectation in you? Like, wouldn’t you just expect someone to always take care of your mess for you?” Cerise was endlessly curious about Barb’s family life. Her parents seemed the stuff of novels.
“Maybe. My mother certainly hasn’t been able to survive without a maid and a generously flexible income.” Her mother was forever landing herself at the spa to escape the stresses of life, despite never demonstrating responsibility for a single thing other than managing her husband’s “idiosyncrasies.”
“But I was always a little annoyed that someone kept moving my stuff. Lay a book down on your bed to go get a glass of water and it wouldn’t be there when you returned five minutes later.”
Cerise’s mother had been the same way. Only, she wasn’t just picking the book up, she was also frowning and tsking at Cerise. “Clean space, clean brain,” she used to say. What did that even mean?
Of course, Cerise had never truly understood just how much time and energy her mother had invested in maintaining their home. When the dishes were always done and the laundry always clean and folded, the results looked effortless. She was fourteen before she realized how unusual it was for socks to customarily bear a crease.
“I’ll bet you’re nesting,” Barb had said. “Feeling the need to get the house ready for Shrimpy.” Then she stood, stretched and left the room. Cerise couldn’t believe it. Never mind her half-eaten plate of turkey meat loaf or the nibbled crusts of bread littering the table.
“Fairies?” Cerise called after her. “Is that who you think is going to come in and clean all this?”
The fairies never showed. Unless it was them ringing the doorbell just now.
She crumpled her dish towel and tossed it onto the mounting laundry heap at the top of basement stairs. One of them was going to have to tackle the laundry, and quick. After her shower, Cerise had toweled off with a T-shirt.
She went to the door and peeked out the side window to see who was ringing the bell. A small part of her was actually hoping for fairies. Instead, there stood Kyle and his fiancée, Rhonda Nelson, bundled in matching cotton fisherman sweaters and hunched against the December cold.
Oh, god.
It had been a few weeks since the accident—enough time that she’d gone from simply needing a new bra to having to unbutton her pants between meetings—and she still couldn’t bring herself to return Kyle’s phone calls. The best she
’d done was answer one of his pleading texts with a “Thanks. I’ll call you.”
Now she’d waited too long to make good on her promise and the living L.L.Bean advertisement on her front stoop was her penance.
“Barb!” she called. “Company!” She opened the door and hurried their guests in ahead of the wind.
“Wow,” she said. “I thought you two were spending the holidays in New York.” She’d squeezed that nugget of information for weeks, trusting it to save her from this very moment.
“We did.” Rhonda answered, though Cerise had been looking at Kyle for explanation. “It was just lovely. An intimate Christmas Eve dinner with dear friends and a candlelight vigil at St. Patrick’s. Santa even stuffed my stocking on Christmas morning!”
“Hmm, not sure where to begin on that one,” said Barb. “Except to congratulate Santa, I guess?” She winked at Kyle, who was too busy shaking his head no to blush.
Cerise was having a hard time getting past the “intimate dinner with dear friends.” Rhonda hadn’t moved more than six months ago. How intimate could her New York friends be?
“Well, come in. Come in,” she said, gathering her senses. “The fire’s on in the living room.”
It took nearly an hour to exhaust Rhonda of small talk—the recent Weather Channel trips to South Carolina and South Africa, her chances of nabbing the coveted 8 p.m. time slot, the frustrations of finding a New York wedding planner willing to coordinate with the Minneapolis wedding team.
“Brutal,” said Barb.
“You can’t even begin to imagine,” said Rhonda without losing her smile. “And anyway, Kyle had an urgent issue come up at the foundation. So between the need to micromanage the Minneapolis wedding team and his needing to deal with work, here we are!”
“What happened with EyeShine?” said Cerise, taking care to lock eyes with Kyle before speaking.
Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners Page 9