The Hundred Gifts

by Jennifer Scott

  She didn’t even bother to speak to him when he left. Simply ate her toast and watched her news and read her magazine, just as she’d done so many times before the Kitchen Classroom had opened. Life. It had a way of just going round and round in circles, didn’t it?

  Bren spent most of the day listlessly wandering the house, everything looking dull and lifeless to her. Back in the day, December 22 had been exciting. So much energy the house felt like it was buzzing. She and the kids would be making sugar cookies—as they got older, someone would always try to sneak a penis onto a gingerbread man or snowman just to see if she would notice—decorating them with colored icing and sprinkles and even those silver candy balls that were so hard they damn near broke your teeth.

  They would be playing Christmas music—John Denver singing about the wide-open range and the Peanuts gang full of happiness and cheer—and humming along as they made huge messes of pies and pinecones and garland and those little Italian cookies that Bren could never seem to get exactly right, their joy bouncing off the wood paneling (and, later, the wallpaper, and, later again, the green paint) of the kitchen walls.

  Normally she would take them to her mom’s. Her dad would still be there—smoking clove cigarettes and rubbing his belly through a thin T-shirt, laughing at a sitcom or watching a football game or sometimes doing both at once, remote finger madly flipping back and forth, back and forth.

  Her mom would be in the kitchen with Aunt Cathy, arguing over whether to put oysters in the stuffing or giblets in the gravy or who would make the better presidential candidate for the next term or whose hair had the best platinum rinse or whether the Beatles were a good band that changed the face of music forever or a bunch of noise made popular by a bunch of screaming teenagers. Or God knew what else. It didn’t matter what else. It was the holidays, and Joan and Cathy’s arguments were as much part of the reverie as anything.

  Sitting at her kitchen table, a crossword nearly filled out, but stuck on an eleven-letter word for victorious also beginning with V, it seemed to Bren that the Christmas she remembered so dearly happened so long ago. Almost like something that had happened in a dream, but not in real life. People had died since then. Left this planet.

  People like her father and her uncle George, but also like the kids she’d seen the old woman—that Virginia Mash, or whatever her name was—giving hats and blankets to. People like mothers and sisters and young ones who had so much life left in them.

  It seemed so pointless, celebrating this one day out of the year, didn’t it?

  She placed her pen on the magazine and closed it, even though she’d figured out the word—vanquishing—and emptied the dregs of her hot chocolate in one bitter swallow, certain that she knew what she really needed right now. She needed to go back in time.

  She needed to see her mother. That was what she needed.

  • • •

  The first thing Bren heard when she walked through her mother’s front door was Aunt Cathy’s voice. She sighed. She loved her aunt, but sometimes she took so much energy to absorb. And sometimes, even when you were damn near fifty yourself, you just needed Mommy Time.

  “. . . told that customer service representative, first off, your name is no more Michael than mine is . . . ,” Aunt Cathy was saying. She stopped when Bren walked into the room. “Well, look who the cat coughed up,” she said. Her usual joke. Or at least Bren thought it was a joke. Knowing Aunt Cathy, she may very well have thought that was how the saying went.

  “Well, hello, Brenda. I wasn’t expecting you,” her mother said, sitting in her usual spot, coffee mug on the table in front of her, hands wrapped around it for warmth. “Did you shut the front door? It’s so cold out there—the storm door isn’t good enough.”

  “Gets dark as a well digger’s ass in here with all the doors shut,” Aunt Cathy chimed in.

  “I think the saying is cold as a well digger’s ass,” Bren said.

  “How do you know how cold a well digger’s ass is?” Aunt Cathy said. “Seems like it would be pretty warm to me.”

  “Well, how do you know how dark one is?” Joan asked. “Seems like we’re all making guesses here.”

  “Touché,” Aunt Cathy said.

  “Or tushy,” Bren supplied. “Given the subject at hand.” They all giggled. It felt good to laugh, but it also made Bren miss the ladies at the Kitchen Classroom all the more. She got herself a cup of coffee, even though her gut was already sloshing from the hot chocolate.

  “So what brings you by, Brenda?” Joan asked.

  Bren shrugged, sipped her coffee, added a healthy dollop of creamer, sipped it again. “I was just missing Christmas, I guess. Where’s your tree, Mom?” She brushed dust off a Santa figurine her mother had placed in the center of the table.

  “Ah, just too much of a hassle this year. Not going to have one.”

  “That’s what I was afraid you’d say.” Bren slid into the chair across from her mother.

  Joan eyed her daughter. “Something wrong? Another mole?”

  “You can come help me put my tree the rest of the way up, if it’s that important to you,” Aunt Cathy said. “Thing’s a heavy pain in the ass. I don’t know why I bother.”

  Bren pointed at Aunt Cathy. “That. That’s what’s wrong. You have no tree, I almost had no tree, Aunt Cathy hates her tree. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  Joan and Cathy exchanged confused glances. “No,” Joan said. “Should it?”

  “Yes!” Bren exclaimed. “Yes, it should! I mean, what keeps us from becoming just like that old woman?”

  “What old woman? Is she talking about us?” Aunt Cathy said. “I’m not old. You are, but I’m way behind you.”

  “No, not you. Virginia Mash.” Bren realized that she was getting a little loud. “The woman upstairs?” Like Gary, both her mother and Aunt Cathy looked upward. “Above the Kitchen Classroom,” she said, exasperated. “She’s so miserable. Alone. Mean as a snake. And what would you bet she doesn’t have a Christmas tree in her apartment, either?”

  “Well, I don’t know, I think it’s a far cry from us to her, don’t you think?” Joan said. “Just because your arthritis—or a mole—is bothering you and you don’t want to mess with a tree for one year doesn’t mean you’re going to act like that woman.”

  “But don’t you miss it, Mom?” Bren cried. She stood up, paced to the sink and back, suddenly flooded with energy.

  “It’s just a tree, Brenda.”

  “Not the tree, all of it. The kids and the cookies and the wrapping paper and the fire in the fireplace.”

  Her mother looked into her coffee cup. “Well, sure, sometimes I miss those things. But there are still good things. Catherine and I watch movies, and we have a grand time. Don’t we, Catherine?”

  “I want to watch the Chevy Chase one tonight. The one where the squirrel gets stuck on his back. You can watch with us tonight, Bren, if you’re that bored. It’s a funny scene, that one.” Joan nodded in agreement.

  “I don’t want to watch Christmas Vacation,” Bren said. She dumped her mostly full coffee cup into the sink. “I want to still be making my own Christmas vacation.”

  “Well, why can’t you?” Joan asked.

  “Because it’s different now. The kids are gone and Gary’s busy and you’re going to Vegas, and nothing is the same. And I miss it.” She paced back over to the table and sat again. “Mom, don’t you miss Daddy?”

  Joan’s face went slack. “Of course I do,” she said. “Why would you even ask such thing?”

  “Because he’s gone and I miss him. He was the first one to leave our Christmas, and now there’s no more tree and no football and no kids or cookies or clove cigarettes.”

  “Oh, I hated those damn cigarettes,” Aunt Cathy said, wrinkling her nose. “Smelled terrible as a well digger’s ass.” And while she still had the saying wrong, Bren didn’t correc
t her, because it seemed like a fair comparison. “I’m glad they’re gone.”

  “That’s not the point,” Bren exclaimed. “Oh, just . . . forget it. Forget I said anything.”

  Joan reached across the table and patted Bren’s hand. “What’s really going on, Brenda? Something tells me this isn’t about clove cigarettes.”

  Bren slid over into the chair next to her mother and laid her head on Joan’s shoulder. “Oh, Mom. It’s everything. It’s the kids and that class and the old woman upstairs. And it’s Gary. I think he’s fallen out of love with me. He doesn’t want anything to do with me. All he can think about is his band.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sure he still loves you. Men just go through these kinds of changes differently. He probably misses the kids just as much as you do.”

  “I don’t know,” Bren said. “You can’t tell by talking to him.”

  “That’s because that’s not how men deal with these sorts of things. You have to relate to him on his level.”

  “Jealousy,” Aunt Cathy said. “Make him jealous. Go get you a little something on the side.”

  “No. Catherine!” Joan scolded. She turned back to Bren. “You let him have his space. And then when he gets it all worked out, he’ll come back to you and it will be like nothing ever happened.”

  “And in the meantime, you dip his toothbrush in the toilet every single day,” Aunt Cathy said.

  “No, you do not!” Joan said, acting shocked, but even she couldn’t keep a straight face. Bren giggled into her mom’s shoulder, feeling like a teenager again, and loving the image of Gary brushing his teeth with toilet water every morning. It wasn’t mature, but then again, he was wanting to relive those old glory days, now, wasn’t he? He wasn’t exactly interested in mature.

  In the end, Bren went over to Aunt Cathy’s to help with the tree. She was right—it was a pain in the ass—but they put on Christmas Vacation and Joan popped some popcorn, and by the end of it, Bren wasn’t so sure she missed Gary at all anymore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It turned out that Gil did get a gig for the band. It wasn’t a party at the airport Holiday Inn so much as it was the lobby of the Holiday Hotel, a dumpy by-the-hour place on the fringe of the city, out where the skater kids smoked dope and broke their ankles in the loading docks of warehouses and on the steps of the abandoned Amtrak depot.

  Snow on the Roof was to play exactly ten Christmas songs. No Hanukkah, no requests. They just weren’t good enough. But their encore was an almost-recognizable rendition of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” so they were feeling pretty stoked.

  When Bren had gotten home from Aunt Cathy’s, they were already playing. She sheepishly crept into the house, trying not to think about John being down there—still unsure about what exactly had gone down between them the night before in the living room, and even more unsure about the vague excitement it made her feel on the inside to know that, if she hadn’t misread everything, there was at least someone out there who found her interesting enough to want to be with. She was maybe just the tiniest bit unnerved that she didn’t feel guilty about that thought, either. Maybe Aunt Cathy was right—if Gary wanted to keep her, he needed to let her know that.

  No sooner had she had the thought than the basement door opened, the music swelling. Bren turned from the kitchen counter, where she was bent over watching the news.

  John stood in the doorway, looking as shy and hangdog as ever, only with that newfound creepy grin of his.

  “Oh,” she said, patting her hair. Why was she patting her hair? Hair patting was for swoony girls. She wasn’t a swoony girl. Hadn’t been a swoony girl in ages. Aunt Cathy was getting to her. “Taking a break?”

  “Just me,” he said. He held up a Six Flags tumbler. “Need a refill.”

  She held out her hand. “What is it?”

  “Just water. But don’t tell the guys. They think it’s something more. Truth is, all the beer and junk food have been wrecking my stomach. I’m not twenty anymore, you know.”

  Bren smiled. Finally. One of them admitted that this was a young man’s game they were all pretending at. “Yes, I do know. I’m not twenty anymore, either.” She took the tumbler and filled it with ice and water, her back to him. “Somebody needs to tell Gary that he’s not twenty anymore, either. I don’t see how he’s doing it, staying up so late every single night. I’m sound asleep before he even comes up to bed.”

  She screwed the cap back on the tumbler, but when she turned to hand it to him, she realized he had closed the distance between the two of them. He was close enough to reach out and touch her now, a thought that made her breath hitch with hesitation.

  “He’s a fool, then,” he said, stepping close. He took the tumbler from her hand and placed it on the kitchen counter without breaking eye contact.

  “I’m sorry?” Bren asked, her heart pounding in her throat, her eyes nearly crossing trying to focus on him while he was so close. She gulped.

  “If he’s not coming to bed with you,” he repeated. She could feel the heat coming off him. “He’s a fool.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about tha—”

  But she couldn’t finish because suddenly his mouth was on hers, his arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her in insistently. She made a muffled noise of protest, and even put her hands on his chest with every intention of pushing him away.

  The problem was . . . she kind of didn’t want to. The kiss felt nice. Soft. Warm. Close. She hadn’t felt softness or warmth or closeness in so long.

  John must have sensed her pushing her hesitation away, because he suddenly kissed deeper, the sensation touching Bren in places that hadn’t been awakened in forever. She sucked in air through her nose in surprise, still telling herself in the back of her mind that she shouldn’t be enjoying this, should be slapping his face or calling for Gary or screaming like a proper damsel in distress.

  But would Gary even care? She was no longer so sure. There was a part of her—a very depressed part—that thought Gary might welcome someone else taking the heat off him for a change. Whew, she could imagine Gary saying. Let her yammer your ear off for an hour about some cranky old woman in her cooking class.

  Finally, John broke the kiss, but he still didn’t pull away. In fact, if anything, he ground his hips into hers harder, his hands spreading to take ownership of the small of her back. Still, the music blatted on downstairs, almost as an unidentifiable soundtrack to their indiscretion.

  Bren removed her hands from his chest, and pulled back as much as she could without actually breaking his grasp, partly stilled by shock, and partly unwilling to leave the moment of feeling wanted.

  “John,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “I shouldn’t. Not here. But I could feel it, and I knew I’d never convince you unless I did something big. So here’s something big.” He leaned in and kissed her again, this time lighter and less insistent, though his fingers stroked their way up her back and into her hair as he did so.

  She let out a moan—she couldn’t help it—and then tucked her lips in on themselves, her eyes going big in surprise. When was the last time she’d made that noise?

  This time she did push him away. “John,” she said again.

  “You’re right,” he said. “This is a bad place. We can meet somewhere later. Anywhere. You pick.”

  “Meet?” she said stupidly. “Pick?” It was only then that she began to edge backward.

  “Just probably not the Holiday Hotel,” he said. “For obvious reasons.”

  “Hotel?” Bren realized she sounded redundant, if not a little obtuse, but she was so in shock she couldn’t seem to muster her own thoughts. Was this really happening? Was she talking hotel with a man she’d just kissed, who wasn’t Gary? Three days before Christmas? “John, I’m not . . . I’m not . . .” was all she could manage.

  He pulled her in tighter. “It
’s okay, Bren. I understand. I know you’re not the kind of woman to just jump in bed with everybody. We have something special. I’ve felt it and so have you. For years.” He leaned his forehead against hers. It was rimmed with sweat. Or maybe hers was—she really couldn’t tell, and the fact that she couldn’t tell made it all the worse. Her sweat had actually comingled with another man’s sweat. This, somehow, felt like even more of a betrayal than the kiss itself.

  “But I haven’t,” she said. Maybe the tiniest lie. She had noticed something off about him, and yet she’d continued to ignore it. Deny it. Even after he’d caught her in the living room that day, even when he’d told her that he and Cindy had broken up, and all that stuff about the nuts and the boning, she’d still tried to deny that it had ever happened. Maybe she was hoping that he’d lose interest, get his senses back.

  Or maybe she had enjoyed the attention too much.

  She cleared her voice, made it stronger. “I haven’t felt anything. I’m devoted to Gary.”

  He stepped back, incredulity sweeping over his face. With maybe a dash of disappointment. “Why? He treats you like crap, Bren. He doesn’t pay any attention to you. He barely even knows you’re here.”

  Even though he hadn’t said anything she didn’t already know, it still stung to hear it aloud. “With all due respect, John, that’s our business.”

  “And so you’ll just ignore what we have, then? You’ll just ignore this?” He darted in again, swept an arm around her back, and kissed her with even more passion. Her toes tingled with it, and once again, to her surprise, she did not pull back. That moan may have even made a reappearance. She could have been imagining it, but she possibly might have even leaned into him a bit. Dammit, what was her body thinking? He just . . . felt so warm. So good. And maybe he was right—maybe she needed to give up on Gary. Maybe Gary had given up on her long ago and she was a fool for staying loyal to a man who, even in other people’s opinions, treated her like crap.