“Don’t worry, Chu, I’ll go down there and make them shut up so you can sleep.”
But Chuy only barely opened an eye in response to his name. He let out a feeble cough—more of a wheeze than a cough—licked his muzzle again, and went back to sleep.
Virginia Mash lay her head down next to his again. “Okay, okay, I’ll stay,” she said. “But only because you get so cranky when you’re hungry and I’m not here to feed you. You really should work on that, Chu. Nobody likes a crab.” She snuggled in closer, listening as there was more bustling noise, some laughter, some shushing. She closed her eyes to try to ignore them better. “You know, crab sounds really good right about now, Chuy, doesn’t it? Jamie loved crab. When she was a little girl, she used to eat a piece and then squeeze lemon directly into her mouth, like a shot chaser. Was the funniest thing.” She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. “I used to make a big old pot of crab and shrimp boil on New Year’s Eve for that girl. I think it was her favorite meal of the whole year. I’d just throw everything into one pot. Crab legs, shrimp, sausage, corn, potatoes. We ate it all with our fingers and wiped our hands on dish towels. Those were fun times, Chuy. I bet you can even remember one or two if you try real hard.” She turned again to face him, though his eyes were still closed. “I’ll tell you what, old dog. You get better, and I’ll make us a shrimp boil all our own this New Year’s Eve. It’ll be our special dinner. We’ll share it.”
She reached over and scratched him behind his ears. Once again, his eyes fluttered open. She thought she even saw his tail try to wag a little. So she kept doing it, even though her elbow creaked and the arthritis in her hands screamed with each movement.
They lay there for a long time. So long, in fact, Virginia was half afraid she wouldn’t be able to get up again. So long the noises below stopped and she heard the familiar whump of the front door of the Kitchen Classroom closing again and again.
At one point, she thought she heard the shushing of soft footsteps coming up her stairs. She perked up, waiting for a knock on the door, but it never came.
Eventually, Chuy began snoring—deep and guttural—and Virginia sat up, watching him sleep.
“I’ll bet you’re excited to see our Jamie,” she said. She pulled herself to standing, which required less work, but more grunting, than she’d anticipated. “Me too, old pal. Me too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Bren’s Friday had been busy. She’d made loaves of rye bread, baskets of pumpkin muffins, had looked up and made an Amish bread starter that they could all work off of, had made two Christmas ornaments out of dough, and was busy working on garden soap. She’d also stopped by the bookstore and had bought an armload—everything from thrillers to classics, and even one Bible, although she was fairly certain the woman upstairs was not much of a churchgoer. It was the whole love thy neighbor vibe she wasn’t getting.
She’d been in touch with everyone. Together, they had managed to make forty-eight gifts, and they all agreed to meet at the classroom to drop off what they had so far. Tonight’s haul up the stairs would probably take two treks. Bren was practically giddy at the thought.
More snow had dropped overnight, but then the sun had come out, so the world seemed impossibly bright and glittery, the snow like a dusting of diamonds. Instead of watching the news, Bren dragged her kitchen chair—the one that wobbled when you moved around in it—to the window and watched as neighborhood kids played, building snowmen, hurtling down hills on sleds, their feet leaving little trails of joy behind them everywhere they went.
“The guys are coming over,” Gary said, popping his head into the kitchen at one point. He was officially on Christmas vacation, not that it made any difference in Bren’s life. As she watched him scratch his belly, wearing only a T-shirt and sweatpants with tired elastic, she tried not to remember the way they used to talk about spending Christmas in the mountains, at a ski resort, a roaring fire warming their feet and glasses of wine warming their bellies and It’s a Wonderful Life warming their hearts. They’d once had plans.
“Uh-huh,” she said. She picked up her toast and bit into it. It was dry and tasteless. Needed something.
“You think you might be willing to make us some snacks?” he asked. He’d opened the refrigerator and was bent inside of it, so was spared the incredulous look that she couldn’t keep from her face.
“You’re kidding, right?”
He straightened. “What?”
“You expect me to cook for you now.” She slapped the toast down on her plate. Crumbs flew, but she didn’t care.
“You don’t have to cook. Just if you could whip up a little something.”
She stood, took her plate to the sink. “I have a class tonight,” she said icily.
He reached out and tried to touch her shoulder; she ducked away from it. “On a Friday? Oh, come on, Brennie, don’t be like that. We had a bad night. It was just a fight. We’ve got our big dinner coming up.”
She rinsed her plate and put it in the dishwasher, and then turned to face him. “Don’t wait up.”
• • •
She had been so furious when she left her house, she’d had to stop for a coffee on the way to the square. Okay, technically, the coffeehouse was not so much on the way to the square as it was all the way across town in the opposite direction, but she really, really needed that time to think.
Was he being genuine? She honestly just couldn’t tell anymore. A sad statement after so many years together.
By the time she got to the Kitchen Classroom, everyone was already there. There were loads of gifts by the tiny tree—enough to instantly brighten Bren’s sour mood—but she could tell as soon as she walked in that something was wrong.
“Hey, what’s . . . ?” She stopped when she saw Paula standing at her station in the front of the room, her arms crossed, her mouth turned down. Very serious pose. “What’s going on?”
Bren set her things with the other gifts under the tree and walked up to the front of the classroom, taking time to look at everyone, trying to determine what was happening by the look on her mother’s face, or Aunt Cathy’s. But she was only able to ascertain that Something Bad had happened.
“We’re terminado,” Lulu said. She made a slicing motion across her neck with her finger.
“What?” Bren’s hands automatically clasped at her own throat.
“She’s shut us down,” Aunt Cathy said. “The old cow.” She tipped her head up and shouted at the ceiling, “I want my elephant soaps back!”
Bren slowly unwound her scarf and took off her coat. “I don’t understand. She shut us down?”
Paula gave a look and held up a sheet of paper. “She got a restraining order against you. Us. All of us. Something about dumping trash on her property. I don’t know. It seems sketchy. I don’t know if she can actually get a restraining order against a business right beneath her feet. But she’s also been making reports about us disturbing the peace, and I’m being threatened with fines if we don’t take care of the problem.” Paula spread her hands apart. “I’m out of money.”
“But she’s the problem,” Lulu said. “All we’re doing is cooking.”
Paula held up another handful of papers. “I honestly don’t know how legit it all is, but she’s exhausted what little I had for legal help. I can’t fight her. I’m just going to have to . . .” She shrugged helplessly. “Quit.”
“Quit? But we haven’t been dumping. We’ve been leaving gifts.”
“Killing ugly with kindness,” Tammy Lynn interjected. The ball on her Santa hat flopped around when she moved.
“Yes. That,” Bren said. “We’re not leaving dog doo on her doorstep. It’s cookies. And stocking caps.”
“It’s out of my hands. I’m so sorry,” Paula said.
Bren thought that she should maybe be relieved. She had, after all, never been certain about her ability
to actually teach this class. And she had proven herself to be failing miserably. How many times had she wanted to—even tried to—quit? But instead of relief, she felt hopelessness and failure. How could this be? She needed this class. She needed Tammy Lynn and Lulu and Teresa and even quiet Rebecca. She needed to make gifts for the old woman upstairs. She needed to see this project through, even if she didn’t quite know why.
Or maybe she did know why. Maybe she knew that she needed this project because it was all she had left. Maybe she knew that good and well, but didn’t want to face it.
“We should talk to her,” Aunt Cathy said. “I’ll go.”
“No,” Joan said, blocking Cathy in with her stool. “That’s the last thing we should do. You of all people.”
Aunt Cathy gasped, affronted. “You’re saying I can’t be polite?”
Tammy Lynn patted her hand. “Don’t take it the wrong way, dear, but yes.”
“Yeah,” Paula said. “Don’t antagonize her. Really, we shouldn’t even be here. I just wanted to let you all know. I’ll refund everyone the rest of your money, and I’ll let you know if I get this worked out in time for a New Year’s class like we talked about. But I wouldn’t count on it. I’m so sorry, Bren.”
“It’s okay,” Bren felt herself saying, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t okay at all. Nothing was working out for her anymore, and she was sick and tired of pretending that everything was okay.
Slowly, they put on their coats and picked up their purses and filed toward the door.
“We brought a lot of things,” Teresa said as they neared the Christmas tree.
“We should leave it on her doorstep to spite her,” Aunt Cathy said. “Just one more time.”
“Not if it’s going to get us arrested,” Joan said.
“I wouldn’t mind it,” Tammy Lynn said on a shrug, “If I knew I’d gotten her goat one last time. I could use a few days off of my diet.” She laughed, but it fell flat as they all stared forlornly at the gifts.
“Not me,” Aunt Cathy said, breaking the silence. “If I’m going to jail, I’m gonna firebomb her.”
“Cathy!” Rebecca gasped.
“Oh, don’t worry about her, honey,” Joan said. “She’s been threatening to firebomb people at least three times a week since the Nixon era.”
“How do you know I’ve never gone through with it, huh?”
“Oh, come on,” Joan said. She picked up her gifts and headed out the door.
Aunt Cathy bent and picked hers up, too. “Well, if I can’t burn her apartment down, I’m sure not going to give her these socks. They’re good socks.”
There were mumbles of agreement, and while Bren grew more and more despondent as it became clear that they were all giving up on the project, she couldn’t help but pick up her gifts as well. She stood by the door, saying good-bye to each of them as they left. Finally, it was just her—and Paula boxing up some things in the background.
“Paula?”
“Hmm?”
Bren shifted her weight. “I’m really sorry. If I were a better cook, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”
“We’ll get it figured out,” Paula said. “And it seems to me whatever you were doing in this class, it was working just fine. The real kicker is I had two more people call today, wanting to sign up for our New Recipes for the New Year cooking class. You’d have had a full house.”
Bren tried to imagine what the classroom would look like, all filled up. She wondered how badly she could screw things up with even more people, more pressure. Not to mention new recipes that she’d never tried before.
Funny thing was, she actually could imagine it.
And she liked it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
December 21 had always been Bren’s busiest day of the holiday season. It started back when the kids were little, and the twenty-first was their last full day of school before holiday break. The day always sprang up on Bren, as if she didn’t know it was coming, and she found herself horrified and energized by the length of her to-do list. Over the years, the habit stuck, and even though she had no real reason for it, other than perhaps to take her mind off of her many troubles, Bren found herself cleaning the house top to bottom on December 21.
She started with the kitchen, making it tidy and lemony fresh, and then changed the sheets on all the beds—even the two guest beds—and vacuumed and dusted and reorganized the hall closet. And still it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.
Gary was in the house somewhere, though Bren had no real idea where. She honestly didn’t care. She was still angry with him for that night at Olive Garden, and the last thing she wanted to do was admit to him that she’d lost her job at the Kitchen Classroom, so avoidance seemed like the best policy at the moment.
She supposed he was knocking around downstairs in the basement, so she lingered upstairs in their bedroom, eyeing the attic hatch and thinking that the only way she could get farther away from him without actually leaving the house would be if she were to go up there.
But the attic was dusty and probably full of spiders, and the only things up there were her father’s navy trunk and the Christmas decorations, anyway.
She’d been gnawing on her fingernail, but she suddenly stopped. The Christmas decorations. She stayed still for a few moments, thinking, and then sprang from the bed.
“Well, why the hell not?” she said aloud before hooking her finger through the pull string and lowering the attic door.
After all, just because her too-worldly-for-the-world kids couldn’t be bothered, why should she go without her lovely tree? Just because Gary’s twilight years had no room for tradition or cheer or gifts didn’t mean her life had no room for those things. Christmas may have moved on without her, but that didn’t mean she had to move on without Christmas.
She climbed up the wooden ladder, wiping cobwebs, or what felt like cobwebs, off her face and out of her mouth as she went. Normally she would make Gary go up and do this, and now she remembered why. It was dirty and cold, and she was guessing it was going to be a real feat of acrobatics to get the boxes down the ladder rungs. But that was okay. She didn’t need him. She could do it on her own.
It was dark in the attic, and she had to fumble for a few moments to find the pull cord for the one bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling. She pulled it, and the attic was bathed in stark light, creating shadows that were perhaps scarier than the shadows that were there in the dark. Bren went straight to the six boxes that held the decorations and groaned. This was going to be a damn lot of work.
Somehow she managed to wrestle all six boxes out of the attic and downstairs to the living room without breaking any bones or knocking any holes in the walls. She was sweating by the time she was ready to go through them, but it was a good sweat. Like a workout. The most exercise she’d had in a while, and she kind of liked it. For the first time in a long time, she wasn’t hungry.
Just as she opened the first box, there were a few clicks of wood hitting wood and then some tentative drumbeats rumbling up through the floor from the basement. Bren sighed. She bent in front of the entertainment center and sorted through their old CDs, her fingers leaving prints in the dust on top of them. Goodness, how long had it been? She flipped through until she found what she was looking for. She held it up and wiped the dust off the cover. Bing Crosby. Her favorite.
She started the music, cranking up the volume to drown out Gil’s drumbeats, and then turned to the first box. Before he got to “White Christmas,” she had unearthed and assembled their ancient first Christmas tree, which was so short she could put the angel on top without so much as standing on her toes. It wasn’t a real tree, but it would do. Actually, it would more than do. It was cute. And festive.
Oh, those had been the days. She and Gary in that old apartment with the clanging pipes and the furnace that never really worked all that well. How they’d been so e
xcited to buy this little tree. It was their first moment of legitimacy, their first item of permanency. How she longed to go back to that first Christmas. He’d bought her a simple gold bracelet. She’d bought him a toolbox. They’d bought each other a bottle of expensive champagne and cooked steaks on their filthy stove and watched movies while balancing their plates on their laps. Why had they been so eager to grow out of that? Why had she worked so hard to get them . . . here?
She shook off the thought and continued wrapping the tree in blue garland. She picked through the ornaments, choosing only the ones that meant the most to her—the triangle reindeer head Kevin had made out of popsicle sticks in preschool, the clay snowman Kelsey had painted green when she was three—and hanging them lovingly on the tree.
When she was done with the tree, she moved on to the hearth, placing her wooden Santa Clauses just so, lost in memories and in thought and feeling so happy that she’d decided to decorate. Soon “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” queued up and she began humming, then moving her hips, then flat-out dancing around the room, straightening the gown of the angel with her fingers. Her dance partner.
The song ended, she placed the angel on top of the tree and curtsied to her. And in that dead airspace between “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and “Christmas in Killarney,” she heard it. Applause. Only it was real and in the room with her and the sound of only one person clapping.
She whipped around, her hands automatically going to her heart. John stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, leaning against the doorframe, smiling at Bren. He stopped clapping and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Oh, goodness, I didn’t know you were here,” Bren said, rushing over to turn down the music. She was struck by the thought that she’d said that to him a few times recently. Why did it seem like he was always creeping up on her? “I’m so embarrassed.” She swiped her hair out of her eyes as she stood.
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