The Hundred Gifts

by Jennifer Scott

  Bren had knowing-laughed along with her, but secretly, inwardly, she wondered what five-year-old boy or seven-year-old boy or twelve-year-old boy couldn’t think of one gift to ask for. What were they going to do, line up their dollar bills on their beds and count them? Roll around on their cash a little bit? Was that what passed for recreation these days? Knowing her snooty nephews, that was probably exactly what they did.

  So shopping was going to look a lot more like running to the ATM—one size fits all, amIright?—and maybe not even scraping together enough energy to buy fancy cards to put the cash in. Instead of heavy card stock laden with iridescent glittery snowscapes, she would probably end up tucking twenties into dollar-store flimsy getups, glossy and thin with some ridiculous animal, entirely unrelated to the holidays, smiling on the cover. What the heck does a raccoon in a necktie have to do with Christmas?

  “I haven’t even started to think about shopping,” Nan said, shifting around Bren’s chair to pick up a pair of scissors. “Nico’s already got a list as long as his arm. And you know he’ll get all of it. Just can’t say no to him.”

  Bren smiled. “He is so cute. What is he, four now?”

  Nan nodded. “Four going on fourteen. Spoiled seven ways from Sunday. Tilt your chin down.”

  “Not spoiled,” Bren said to her breasts. My word, but they had also gotten so big. Was it her imagination, or was she unable to tilt her chin all the way down, for the breast barricade? “Just loved. You two went through the wringer to get that baby.”

  Nan stopped cutting and Bren tipped her eyes up just in time to see Nan pointing to the mirror with her scissors. “Boy, have you got that right,” Nan said. She went back to Bren’s hair, tickling the base of her neck with the scissor point. “Thought we’d be two old farts, all alone together forever. So depressing.”

  Bren felt a prickle inside her stomach. Two old farts, all alone. Just like she and Gary were now. And Nan had never been more right—it was depressing as hell. The top of her shoulder itched. She snaked her hand up through the cape and scratched it. Nan stopped clipping again.

  “You ever tell Gary about that?” she asked.

  Bren shook her head, glad to be in the chin-tilt position so Nan couldn’t see her face. Nan made a noise.

  “Girl, you better tell him. Sooner rather than later, you know.”

  “I will,” Bren said. “It’s just . . . there’s nothing to tell yet.”

  “I suppose,” Nan said. She combed a swath of Bren’s hair down and ducked to clip it. “But you told me.”

  “Oh, Nan, you know that’s different,” Cara, the middle-aged stylist at the next chair, said. She switched on her hair dryer and picked up a large roller brush. The woman in her chair looked sleepy and serene, her lips pale and eyelids heavy. “We’re like therapists here,” she shouted over the noise of the dryer. “People are supposed to tell us everything.”

  “Vegas,” Tomie, the only male stylist, said. “We’re like Vegas. What happens at the salon . . .”

  “Stays at the salon,” Cara finished, and they burst into laughter.

  “Still,” Nan said, turning Bren’s chair so she faced the mirror, Skinny Lucy popping into the background again. She had finished pulling down the garland and was now taping little cardboard turkeys and cornucopias to the window. “When you gonna say something, honey?”

  Bren shrugged. “When I know something,” she said, “I guess.” And when Nan only raised her eyebrows questioningly, Bren added, “Gary’s so busy right now, anyway.”

  Recognizing when she was defeated, Nan sighed, raised her scissors, and changed the subject. “Oh yeah? What’s he into now? Still golfing?”

  “Oh no, he was no good at that.”

  “What? He golfed every day.”

  “And he finally recognized that he stunk.” Bren currently had twelve pairs of golf shoes in her bedroom closet. Twelve pairs! She wondered if even that adorable pro golfer—what was his name? Foaler? Fowler? Yes, that was it, Rickie Fowler—had twelve pairs of golf shoes. Gary couldn’t sink a hole in one if the hole was the Grand Canyon, but he had shoes, by God. Shoes, and a god-awful pair of pink pants. “Now he’s into dune buggies.”

  Nan stepped back. “Dune buggies? What does it mean to be ‘into dune buggies’? We don’t even have any dunes around here, do we? Where would we have dunes in Missouri?”

  Bren sighed, having already been through this argument more times than she cared to count. Things like available dunes were details to Gary. He wasn’t interested in hearing any sort of rational response. He was just interested in having something to do. “None that I know of. But that didn’t stop him from buying an old beat-up thing. It’s sitting in our garage—makes the whole house smell like a lawn mower—and every night he’s out there tinkering around on it, dreaming of the day he can go God knows where in it. I suppose to the grocery store. That’s the only place we ever go.”

  Nan raised one eyebrow, giggling. Bren couldn’t help joining in—even though this was more than a sore subject in her house, Nan’s giggle was contagious.

  “Will I have to start styling around helmet head?” Nan asked.

  “Oh, goodness, no. He won’t get me in that thing.”

  “Where do you put groceries in a dune buggy, anyway?”

  “Bet if he bends over, I’ll find a spot,” Bren said sourly, meaning it, but again the giggles started, which threatened to rip her out of her snit prematurely.

  The truth was, she was sick of Gary’s midlife crises. First it was the motorcycle. Expensive as hell, but it took only one week for Gary to decide he was much too vain to show up at work with sweaty clothes and wind-whipped hair. Then there’d been a short stint of very dedicated boys’ nights out, Gary coming home bloated from greasy bar food and beer farts so smelly she had, on more than one night, considered sleeping in Kelsey’s bed just to get some relief. Fortunately, none of the guys in Gary’s circle had the stomach, literally, for boys’ nights out anymore, and they were quickly kiboshed. So Gary had dived headlong onto the golf course in his fabulous shoes and pink pants—a hobby he quickly realized he was no good at—and now here Bren was with a house that stunk like the inside of a gasoline can.

  But at least he wasn’t lusting after some blond intern, she thought. At least he wasn’t blowing their retirement money on a red Lamborghini. Let him have his crisis. Soon (sooner than she wanted to admit, actually), fifty would get here and he would begin to settle into old age with her.

  God. What a miserable thought.

  “Well, dune buggy or no dune buggy,” Nan said, breaking into her thoughts as she combed out the last threads of hair and bent to clip them even, “you really should let him know about this.” She tapped Bren’s shoulder twice lightly with her comb. The sensation made Bren’s shoulder itch, but she resisted the urge to scratch. Leave it to Nan to always be able to bring a conversation back around to itself.

  “I got a job,” Bren blurted, shocking herself, but glad for the diversion.

  Nan stopped clipping. “A job? Doing what?”

  “Cooking,” Bren said. “Well, teaching a cooking class, actually. So sort of teaching, I guess. I’m not exactly sure. It’s a part-time thing. Seasonal. You know.” She shrugged, suddenly embarrassed and anxious and wishing she’d said nothing. She still hadn’t told Gary. She was still changing her mind on an hourly basis whether this job thing was going to happen.

  “Well, congratulations,” Nan said. “That’s really great. I can’t wait to hear all about it.”

  “And feel free to bring in leftovers,” Tomie shouted from his chair. “We will happily be your guinea pigs.”

  “If you insist,” Nan agreed, and they all laughed, even Bren, even though her laughter was having to elbow its way around an enormous lump in her throat to get out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lamb chops with mint gremolata. Turkey stuff
ed with wild rice, sausage, and apples. Crown rib pork roast and oyster stuffing moist with sage brown butter. Bren had made them all, sweating, littering every spare centimeter of her already-cramped counter space with spice bottles and measuring cups, spending a fortune on food she would soon throw out because Gary was too busy with his dune buggy to eat it and she was too full and too lazy and too sick of soggy bread cubes to so much as take another nibble. Her kitchen, outdated but usually clean and bright, was sopping with melted butter and thick with meat fumes and sticky with spilled broth. She had flakes of sage and red pepper and parsley permanently stuck to the bottoms of her feet. The hardwood floor felt as worn and gritty as a barn floor, and didn’t look much better.

  Yet none of it was right.

  They didn’t eat this shit on Christmas.

  They ate smoked beef brisket, coated with so much salt it seemed obscene, and doused with sticky sweet barbecue sauce and tender enough to spoon off hunks and balance on expensive onion buns and those King’s Hawaiian sweet rolls the kids loved so much. The house smelled like a tailgate party; the sides were beans and coleslaw and corn casserole with jalapeños and cheese dip with tortilla chips. Not a flake of sage to be found. Not a sprig of parsley. Not an artfully arranged circle of pork or a well-balanced stuffing.

  Jell-O salad. Wheat Thins and Triscuits and a thousand pounds of cream cheese in varying forms to dip them into. Pinwheels. Brownies. The occasional fried chicken tender or pot of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Ordinarily, you could barely see the faded blue Formica of Bren’s kitchen counter, much less the spot where Gary had dropped a highball glass and taken a hunk out of it or the spot where Kevin had gotten overzealous with Easter egg dye or the little mound of dried Krazy Glue that had fallen off of one of Kelsey’s never-ending art projects, for all the pots and bowls and handwoven hot pads.

  On Thanksgiving, they did the traditional. Of course they did. The same pumpkin pie that everyone else made. But Christmas, never. Picnic food was their Christmas. It was perfect for them. Bren loved it. She cherished it, actually. Wouldn’t have wanted to trade her brisket dinner for all the turkey dinners in the world. Wouldn’t have given a drop of her barbecue sauce for a gallon of browned butter. What the hell was browned butter, anyway? Why couldn’t anyone call it what it really was—burned?

  Bren had never considered before how untraditional her family’s Christmas dinner really was until she considered teaching others how to make it.

  Holiday Eats Class #1: The Fine Art of Dipping Your Shit in Ketchup.

  That was definitely not going to fly.

  She remembered the first Christmas that she brought Gary home to meet the family. How his eyes had gone big and surprised when her mother had brought out the barbecued meatballs, and then followed those with two whole briskets. Nearly thirty pounds of cow. They were blackened—caramelized—on the ends and juicy in the middle, and tendrils of steam wafted up, sending out puffs of delicious smoke scent that brought to mind Amish fall festivals and touchdowns at Arrowhead.

  “My family does turkey,” Gary had whispered to Bren as they filled up their paper plates. “And ham.”

  “It’s my grandmother’s recipe,” she’d said, blanching. “I’m sorry.”

  He’d hefted a spoonful of baked beans onto his plate and let the spoon thunk back down into the Crock-Pot, and then turned to her. “Are you kidding me? I’m so sick of turkey I could puke. This is the best.”

  It was then that Bren knew Gary was the man she would someday marry. And, she’d vowed to herself, when she did marry him, she would serve him smoked brisket and baked beans on Christmas Day for the rest of their lives together. And she did. And he would have it no other way now, either. Or at least he wouldn’t have until the kids moved out. A cafeteria? Really? They were going to give up Grandma’s brisket for limp green beans and bowls of tapioca?

  But Bren was certain she could never convince a class full of people to accept brisket as holiday fare. They’d be coming expecting traditional recipes. They’d want to baste birds and simmer the piss flavor out of cranberries and bake loaves of bread. They’d want to eat some goddamned figgy pudding, for all she knew.

  She made a quick mental note to suggest a figgy pudding doughnut to Tod. He would love that.

  Desperate, she dragged a chair across the kitchen and stepped up on it, patting the top of the refrigerator, what used to be home to junk food she didn’t want the kids devouring, now only a hiding place for the occasional plastic alphabet magnet, a whole lot of dust, and a little metal box that held all of her grandmother’s old recipes. Maybe she’d find something there.

  But as she sat on the chair, flipping through what she’d found, nothing seemed just right. Coconut cake. Her grandmother might have made that a couple of times. Creamed spinach. Oh yes, Bren vividly recalled that failed experiment, otherwise known as “The Unholy Christmas Incident” between Bren’s father and his aging mother-in-law. Nobody had known at the time that neither of them had more than five Christmases left in their lives. Of course, had he known, her father just might have blamed his mother-in-law’s creamed spinach for his untimely, and quite deadly, heart attack. Scalloped potatoes, the homemade kind. Oh, how Bren loved those. But nobody could quite make them like her grandma—even using her recipe, which they’d all suspected had been partial, nobody else’s as tasty as hers by design—and so they’d dropped them from their spread. Were they Christmassy enough for her to teach them to a class?

  Ugh, she didn’t know!

  She slammed the box shut. Held it in her lap. Then stood and tucked it away on top of the fridge again. Quit. She had to quit; that was all there was to it. She could cook. But she couldn’t do this.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, Bren crossed the kitchen and grabbed the phone, dialing the number she now knew by heart. She’d started to quit at least a dozen times already that day, only to hang up the instant Paula answered. But this time she wouldn’t disconnect. This time she would quit and be done with it.

  “Hello?”

  “Paula? Hello, yes, this is Bren Epperson.”

  “Oh, hey, Bren, I was just talking about you.”

  Bren blinked, thrown off. “You were?”

  “Yeah, there was a lady here asking about the holiday cooking class. Said she’s tired of the usual turkey and stuffing and was looking for a way to spice up her holiday menu. I told her you would have lots of unique recipes up your sleeve.”

  “You told . . . unique?” Bren flopped back into the chair that she’d still never moved from next to the refrigerator. The fridge—old friend, bought before the time of fancy things like digital temperature readouts and built-in ice dispensers—kicked on with a whoosh and a hum. She leaned her head against it, feeling the vibration in her temple.

  Paula laughed. “Don’t sound so surprised. You look like just the kind of lady who would have out-of-the-box recipes, pardon the pun.” She laughed again. “Maybe something literally spicy. Jalapeño stuffing, maybe? Chipotle gravy? Buffalo turkey wings?”

  Bren gazed at the counter, where her recipe book was still spread out. “Or Southwestern corn casserole,” she said numbly, hardly believing her ears.

  “Exactly! Now, there’s a holiday recipe nobody is expecting. Who eats Southwestern corn casserole for Christmas? It’s brilliant!”

  Bren forced out a chuckle. “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know who.”

  “I’m going to start to bill your class that way, I think. Unique flavors for a Christmas they never saw coming. Oh! That’s it! New class title: The Never-Saw-It-Coming Christmas! What do you think?”

  “I never saw it coming,” Bren said, only half joking, though her mouth turned up in a smile with Paula’s laugh.

  “So tell me why you called,” Paula said.

  “Oh.” Bren was lost for words, no longer sure what to say at all. Why was she calling? What was it she’d been wa
nting to say? That she was going to quit? Well, she could hardly quit now that she was on the hook for Southwestern corn casserole. Not to mention, she would hate to have to explain to Nan that it was a brisket that took her down. “I was just wondering if you’d had anyone sign up,” she lied.

  “Yes,” Paula said. Bren could hear papers shuffling in the background. “Just the one, actually. But she seemed really eager, and maybe she’ll tell her friends. And I am going to go out and really plug the class today, especially now that we have a new title for it. Do you have any friends or family that might be interested? Because, you know, feel free to recruit some of your own people.”

  “Recruit. Yes. Of course,” Bren said. “I’ll do that.”

  “Okay, sounds like a plan. Well, then I guess I’ll see you next Thursday. Send me your ingredients list by Friday, okay? Remember, two classes a week.”

  “Yes, sure,” Bren said, on autopilot. She was still stunned that she would now be able to send an ingredients list that included KC Masterpiece and canned pork and beans without feeling like a total failure.

  Bren hung up the phone and considered who this strange woman might be. The one sick of turkey—just like Gary had been—and looking for food with a little kick. The one responsible, really, for the new class title. Never saw it coming. Boy, wasn’t that the truth!

  Bren wondered idly if she would like this woman. If maybe they’d end up being friends. It had been a long time since Bren had any real friends.

  Sure, there were neighbors. Even good neighbors, who would come outside for a drink on a cool fall evening. There were Gary’s work friends, who became her friends, too—most notably John and Cindy, with whom they’d shared a great many rowdy evenings, but whom they hadn’t really heard much from since Gary’s last promotion. And there were school friends. Tight-knit mommies who tested out all their fears and insecurities on one another. But those friendships dissolved as the kids moved up to middle school, junior high, high school, beyond. She’d been invited to only one wedding. Just one—the wedding of a boy Bren had babysat for a short stint in early elementary school. And she had invited none of those mommy friends to Kelsey’s wedding. It was as if that period of her life had never existed, as if those people had never existed.