Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  At least, they were the only ones there for ten minutes.

  Ten minutes after they had arrived, the front door swung open, and Dave heard someone say, “After you, Sweet Pea.”

  You would have thought Tommy’s mother and father would have been mortified.

  But Tommy’s mother and father weren’t mortified.

  They were starving.

  Tommy’s father pulled up a couple of chairs, sat at the table, and said, “All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.”

  Dave said, “Pascal?”

  “You got that right,” said Tommy’s father as he reached for the menu. “Have you ordered yet?”

  He added another pizza and a bottle of Chianti.

  “That was quite a night,” said Tommy’s father. “First fires,” he said, and then he turned and winked at Dave before adding, “and then floods.”

  You have to give Dave credit. He could have let it slide. But he didn’t. He went for it. He stood up and he said, “I have a confession.”

  Soon everyone was laughing. Tommy’s parents, Tommy, Morley, Sam—even Stephanie.

  Sam went next. When his father finished, Sam looked at Morley, and Morley nodded. Sam stood up and reached into the pouch of his hoodie and pulled out a plastic bag full of turkey.

  “My friend Murphy taught me that you never go anywhere unfamiliar for dinner without a plastic bag.”

  Tommy’s father turned to Tommy and raised his eyebrows.

  Tommy looked chagrined. Tommy said, “The potted tree. By the kitchen door. Buried.”

  It was Helen, sitting at the end of the table, the only one without pizza in front of her, who got the biggest laugh.

  “I don’t know what you are all talking about,” said Helen. “I thought it was delicious.”

  —

  IT WAS UTTER foolishness.

  But we are all foolish in our own little ways. And never luckier than when we can admit it to ourselves, and to the others around us. Never more loved, nor more loving, than when we come together in foolishness and say to one another, I love you all the same. There are many good times, but those are the best. And there isn’t a better time for foolish love than during these dark days of winter.

  Dave, Morley, Sam, Stephanie, Helen, Tommy, and his parents—they all sat at a table eating crab pizza at Pizza by Alex until closing. And when it was time to go, everyone stood up and hugged.

  Out in the street, as they walked to their parked cars, Tommy’s mother caught Stephanie by the elbow and said quietly, “Your family is delightful.”

  Up ahead, at exactly the same moment, Dave turned to Morley and said pretty much the same thing. He said, “There’s something about those people that I like.”

  He said the same thing to Tommy when they were all in the car.

  “I like your parents,” he said.

  “Well, no kidding,” said Sam. “They’re exactly like us.”

  BACK WHEN MORLEY was a child, Christmas cards were a big deal. That was the heyday of the Christmas card. There were actually Christmas card salesmen who went door to door with catalogues under their arms. The post office had to hire extra staff to get through Christmas—in busy neighbourhoods, they would assign two carriers to each route.

  Morley’s parents would hang their cards, like lines of laundry, around the living room. In bumper years, they would slip surplus cards over the slats of the louvred kitchen doors.

  Morley would take them down, a handful at a time, and lie on the couch and read all of them.

  “Who’s Joan?” she would ask her parents. “Do I know Alex and Jean?”

  Those cards were, in an odd way, a precursor to the internet—if not a worldwide web, a web of everyone you knew, a parade of family and friends that popped through the mailbox and marched around the living room. It was the perfect holiday gathering—everyone was there, but you didn’t have to clean up.

  —

  CHRISTMAS CARDS HAVE fallen out of favour these days.

  Unlike her mother, Morley doesn’t need a little leather-bound book with columns so she can tick off the cards she has sent and received. Morley’s Christmas card list is counted in tens rather than hundreds.

  Even so, getting them done is not an insignificant chore. Every year, around now, she reserves an evening for the writing and addressing. Once she gets down to it, it is not an unpleasant night.

  She has her own rules. She would never use a picture of her family on the front. She buys her cards from a charity where her purchase will do some good. And she has never included one of those Christmas letters—no matter how well everyone was doing.

  Until this year.

  This year Morley broke all her rules. This year she designed and printed the card herself. She not only featured a picture of Dave on the front but she also enclosed a two-page Christmas letter—the long and sorry tale explaining why no one received a card from her last year.

  It’s not that I forgot you, her letter began.

  —

  THE STORY STARTED on a blustery night last December. A night when hunkering down with a mug of tea and a pile of cards seemed like a perfectly cozy idea.

  “It’s good to get that done,” Morley said to Dave when she crawled into bed. “I wrote a little more than most years.”

  The next morning, those cards were waiting by the front door—addressed and ready to go. All they needed was stamps.

  “I’ll do that,” said Dave. “I can go to the post office at lunch.”

  Morley shook her head.

  Dave insisted.

  “It’s no trouble,” he said. And he scooped up the cards and tucked them in his bag.

  It was against her better instincts to let him do that, but he really didn’t give her a choice. It would have seemed ungrateful—and a little insulting—to keep protesting.

  —

  DAVE SELDOM VARIES his walk to work. He has a route that avoids the busy streets and favours the quiet ones. There are always plenty of distractions nevertheless. So he had rounded the corner that would take him past Kenny’s café and on to his little record store before he saw the mailbox and remembered the cards.

  He dug them out of his bag. He pulled the big red handle and placed them carefully in the metal tray. He shut it. He began to walk away, and then he turned and reopened the door—just to verify that the cards had fallen.

  He was aware of how reluctant Morley had been to give those cards to him. And he was aware of how he had dug in his heels when he took them. So he was feeling pretty good about himself as he turned the corner.

  At noon he headed over to Kenny’s café for lunch. He had decided to treat himself to a plate of dumplings along with his regular bowl of noodle soup. You want to celebrate the small triumphs—there are more of them than the big ones.

  As he sat at the last seat at the counter waiting for the dumplings, he glanced at his watch. He would make it quick. He had errands to run before he returned to the store. The first was to go to the post office for stamps.

  The world shrieked to a stop.

  When Kenny came out of the kitchen with the dumplings, Dave’s stool was still spinning.

  And Dave was around the corner and up the street—staring at the little red mailbox the way a tourist stares at those red-jacketed, bear-hatted guards at Buckingham Palace.

  Tentatively, like a tourist poking a guard, Dave reached out, pulled open the tray, and peered in.

  —

  A MAILBOX TRAY is a marvel of engineering—designed so you can insert a surprisingly large package. But just try to reach in and remove a small pack of envelopes. It is, first, impossible; and pretty soon after that, painful.

  No matter how he tried, it was clear he was not going to get his arm down there.

  “Ouch,” muttered Dave.

  As he pondered his next move, Dave spotted three boys bumping down the street toward him. They were nine, maybe ten years old.

  Perhaps if he took the smallest of the three, and held him by t
he ankles, he could lower him into the box.

  Even Dave knew that was a ridiculous idea. You can’t have something simultaneously in and out of those boxes. Getting the kid in the mailbox would only work if he could fit him in the tray and dump him in.

  The boys walked past him, and Dave leaned in to read the notice by the handle. The mail wouldn’t be collected until 6 P.M. At least he had time on his side.

  “Stay calm,” he said to the mailbox.

  —

  EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE a friend like Itche Kerr. A guy you can turn to when you have a problem.

  Itche is a friend from the old days.

  A band member might have a dispute over rent, or a visa, or lost luggage. Whatever the situation, Itche always had a solution. That’s what Itche did: Itche solved problems.

  It had been a while since Dave had had a problem of this magnitude. It took him some time to find Itche’s number.

  “Richard,” he said. “I need you. Bring your keys.”

  —

  “ONE OF THESE might work,” said Itche, throwing a ring of keys on the counter.

  They were at the record store.

  Dave picked up the keys and said, “Will you come with me?”

  Itche’s hands floated off the counter. He held them at his shoulders, palms forward, as if he were about to be arrested.

  “No way,” said Itche. “Section 23 of the Canada Post Act, man. Canada Post is an agent of Her Majesty the Queen. I don’t mess with the Queen.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Dave.

  Itche had probably stopped at the library on the way over and read up. Itche was like that. Thorough.

  “Section 48,” said Itche. “Any person who opens a receptacle authorized for the purpose of posting mail is guilty of an indictable offence.”

  Dave said, “Itche. I am not going to take anything that’s not mine.”

  Itche said, “You can have the keys, but you can’t have me.” And then he scooped them off the counter and held them up. “As long as you forget where you got them.”

  —

  THERE WERE TEN keys on the ring. The first one slid in perfectly but wouldn’t turn. The second didn’t fit.

  Miraculously the mailbox popped open with key seven. Dave felt a wave of relief as he stuffed the keys back into his pocket. He looked up and down the street. Then he peered in. There was a pile of letters on the floor of the box. Not a big pile, but enough that he couldn’t see any of Morley’s cards. He knelt down.

  He was trying to work fast. He was trying to stay out of view. He found the first card. He dropped it into his bag.

  And that’s when he heard the burst of a police siren. With his head more or less in the box, it was hard to tell if it was coming toward him.

  He heard a second burst of the siren. It was rounding the corner.

  He had a surge of adrenalin and one thought—he had to get out of sight.

  He lunged into the mailbox, raking his head across the door frame.

  He scrambled to draw his legs in.

  In the nick of time, he pulled the door shut behind him.

  As he sat there, with his knees drawn up to his chest, he heard the police car whiz past.

  He felt a wave of relief.

  And then a tingle of anxiety.

  The other sound he heard as the cops shot by…the little click. Was that the door?

  —

  YOU WOULD THINK Dave might have panicked. He didn’t. It was actually cozy in there. Sitting on the little pile of letters. And he had his cell phone with him. Instead of panic he was struck by the ridiculousness of it.

  Why did these things keep happening to him? Just once couldn’t he be the hero? He was, after all, only trying to be helpful.

  And that’s when he heard footsteps drawing close.

  And the postbox drawer opened.

  As it did, the tray inside, where he was sitting, pulled up, catching him under his ear.

  “Hey,” he said. But he clapped his hand over his mouth as he said it. Nothing good would come from someone realizing that there was a grown man hiding in the mailbox.

  As the tray crashed shut, an envelope fluttered down and landed between his knees.

  Whoever had been, had been and gone.

  —

  MORE FOOTSTEPS. And voices this time. A mother and her child. It sounded as if she was lifting the child up so she could put the letter in the box. Dave leaned away from the tray as it rose. Another envelope fluttered to his feet.

  He picked it up. It was addressed to the North Pole.

  “Make sure it’s gone in,” said the mother.

  Before Dave could move, the tray opened again, clipping him on the chin this time.

  Then it dropped and raised again. And then again. The kid kept checking, while Dave bobbed and weaved.

  Finally he reached up and pushed the door shut.

  The child said, “I think we broke it.”

  Dave heard the blessed sound of footsteps scurrying away.

  —

  THE NEXT FIFTEEN minutes were quiet.

  Dave pulled out his cell phone. He called Itche. He was careful to whisper.

  “I am not going to jail,” said Itche, “because you forgot to mail your wife’s Christmas cards. You are talking about an indictable offence. I am talking plausible deniability.”

  And the phone went dead.

  Who else could he call?

  Morley was out of the question. Sam was possible, but what kind of parent would he be if he made his son an accessory to a crime?

  —

  HE WAS DISTRACTED by a new sound. Footsteps? Yes. But slow. Tentative. And each step followed by an odd metallic scrape.

  Dave reached up, ready for the tray to rise. When it began to, he used one hand to slow the tray and the other to snatch the letter before the drawer was fully open.

  An elderly man said something Dave couldn’t make out.

  Dave dropped his voice an octave. He said, “You have just used a Canada Post automated vacuum box. Your letter is already on its way. Merry Christmas. Au revoir.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  Dave said, “Would you like to complete a customer satisfaction survey?”

  But the old man was gone.

  —

  DAVE TURNED BACK to his phone and was startled when the tray was raised again. This time when the metal drawer fell back down, the remains of a half-eaten hot dog fell into his lap.

  “Hey,” yelled Dave, incensed.

  The indignity of what had just happened outweighed his discretion.

  He began banging on the walls of the box.

  He took the hot dog and placed it in the tray and shoved it back up. He heard it plop on the sidewalk.

  There was a moment of dead silence. Then he heard the sound of someone running away.

  Dave yelled, “I am the post office. I know where you live.”

  —

  “DAVE?”

  Someone was whispering his name.

  “Dave!”

  “Emil? Is that you, Emil?”

  Emil is a neighbourhood fixture. Until a few years ago, Emil used to sleep in the stairwell next door to the Heart of Christ Religious Supplies and Fax Services—just across the street from Dave’s record store. Before bed he would use his universal remote control to watch whatever shows he wanted on the television in the window of an electronics store.

  Most often lost to the world and too agitated to communicate, Emil is capable of moments of lucidity.

  “Emil, how did you know it was me?”

  “You are the only person I know crazy enough to get into a mailbox, Dave.”

  “Emil, I need your help.”

  Dave had stuck his fingers out of the letter slot. He was waving Itche’s keys.

  He felt Emil’s hand touch his. He felt him take the keys.

  Dave said, “Emil, use the key and open the door. It is the seventh key.”

  Emil said, “Oh I couldn’t do that, Dav
e. That would be tampering with the Queen’s mail. That’s an indictable offence.”

  “Emil,” said Dave.

  But Emil was gone.

  And so were the keys.

  A few minutes later, the slot opened again. A paper bag dropped in. Dave opened it. A grilled cheese sandwich and the keys.

  —

  IT WAS NEARLY five. The pace of visitors had slowed. Dave had resigned himself to being in the box until the mail was picked up.

  He had turned on the flashlight on his phone. The phone was tucked under his chin. He was sorting through the letters one by one.

  He had been there long enough to have worked out a pretty good routine. One hand up to stop the tray from coming down, so the occasional customer had to slide their letters through the slot; his other hand, sorting.

  Every time he found one of Morley’s cards, he dropped it into a little pile on his lap.

  From across the street, the light seeping through the cracks gave the mailbox an eerie glow. Inside, the idea of all the little notes was making Dave a bit teary.

  There was an astounding variety to go through. He had seen a fat one addressed to Paris—the envelope sealed with a Christmas tree sticker. A card to the Czech Republic. And one to India. Another of Morley’s. A small red envelope going to England. A lot to the United States. A lot more for Canada. Another of Morley’s. And a second, in a child’s printing, addressed to the North Pole.

  It was affecting. All of them presumably said the same thing. The one thing that is so hard to say in person, but that everyone says at the bottom of a card: love. Love, me. Love, you. Love, Dave. Love, Stuart.

  —

  IT WAS TWENTY past six when the big red-and-white Canada Post truck glided out of the traffic and slowed beside the box. The lights on the storefronts had come on—twinkling over the snowy sidewalks and into the street. The lights in the restaurants, too, and in the crowded bars. It was funny, thought Alf Moore. It was both the darkest and lightest time of the year, all at the same time. Everyone walking down the street twinkling like they were part of some massive Christmas snow globe.

  Alf, a forty-year postal veteran, slipped the truck against the curb beside the mailbox, reached over, and slid the sidewalk-side door open. The job asked a lot of him at this time of year. Driving was hard. It was difficult to keep warm in that big truck. But all the parcels and cards had to be delivered before Christmas. There wasn’t a time of the year when Alf felt more important.