Greenie grabbed a gourd from his arrangement and rolled it down the bar toward Tracy.
“This thing smell right to you?”
The gourd veered to the left and dropped onto one of the barstools. Tracy retrieved the gourd and sniffed it.
She shrugged. “It doesn’t smell wrong,” she said, passing it back and forth between her hands.
Tracy’s cousin Tom was smoking a cigarette on Shelly’s porch when Tracy arrived. His glass of red was full nearly to the brim, and several crusted drip stains lined the outside. The stem of the glass had an orange pipe cleaner wound tightly around it, and a green construction-paper leaf was scotch-taped to the base.
“Hi, T,” Tom said. He held his cigarette at his lips with his index finger and thumb, the rest of his fingers curled over and around it in a loose fist, like he was trying to protect it from the cold. His forehead opened up to bare pink scalp that was dented once, deep and straight right across the crown. The hair that remained around his ears was dark and wiry. He wore stylish glasses with tortoiseshell frames and had an enterprising little moustache.
Tracy brushed a crumb from his chest.
“How you holding up?” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“Your dad. I haven’t talked to you since.” Tom said. “I guess it’s good it happened the way it did, huh? You were saying he only had a few months anyway?”
“Yeah, that’s true.” Tracy reached into her purse, pulled out a Kleenex and wiped the snow off her boots. “I’m doing fine. A-OK.”
“Not to be morbid, Trace, but with cancer on both sides, you should really get checked. You get those screenings and stuff?”
“Sure, I do.”
“Glad you’re doing OK. So, where’s your date? Shelly said you RSVP’d two.”
“He’s with his family. He begged me to come to theirs, but Shelly really wanted me here. I’m gonna duck out of this thing a little early to spend the evening with him.”
“Well thank goodness you’re here now, for my sake. I thought I’d be the only one flying solo.” Tom ran his hand across the porch railing to gather some snow, and packed a snowball with both hands. He wound up and threw it like a baseball toward Tracy’s truck. It smacked into the passenger’s wheel.
Tracy aimed her key at her truck to lock it. The truck beeped twice and the headlights flashed.
“You think I need my emergency brake?”
“Nah.”
Shelly greeted Tracy just inside the door. She had lost weight and her lipstick matched her shirt. She wiped her hands on her white mini-apron and they hugged.
“I’m glad you came early,” Shelly said. “They’re calling for a foot this afternoon, I was worried you’d run into that on your way.”
“My truck is great in this stuff.”
“I don’t know where the kids are,” Shelly said. She hollered their names then turned back to Tracy. “You won’t even recognize Jay, he’s grown a foot in the past month. Kristen wears glasses now. Make yourself at home. Oh—do you mind?” Shelly nodded toward a neat lineup of shoes to the left of the entrance. Tracy had to sit down on an antique wooden chair next to the door in order to pull off her zippered black boots. Shelly disappeared into the kitchen.
“This-a-way,” Tom said. “I’ll get you a drink, then introduce you to Mac’s lame friends and we can go goochy-goochy goo at their babies.”
Shelly and Mac had added an entire wing to their downstairs since Tracy had last been there. The dining arrangement was an impressive lineup of card tables connected with light blue tablecloths, and it stretched from the far end of the living room the entire way through the downstairs, ending in the winterized patio. It was a nice house, there was no getting around that. It wasn’t all that much bigger than Tracy’s home, but it was new and immaculate, with beige carpet and leather couches and a huge framed cityscape photo of Buffalo at night. They already had their Christmas tree, a real spruce, decorated with red tinsel and Santa’s made from felt.
Tom introduced Tracy to Mac’s brother and his wife, then Shelly’s best friend and her family, and a handsome couple who didn’t speak much English, from Shelly and Mac’s church.
“Helen and Johann are Germans,” Shelly said, joining the conversation over Tracy’s shoulder, “visiting all the way from Chad. They do mission work there.”
Tracy had two more glasses of wine. She greeted all the family members whose names she remembered. The ones who knew about her father offered condolences. She got a lot of compliments on her outfit. She’d sewn her skirt herself, and explained to everyone who commented on it that she was doing a whole collection of clothing and jewelry. She asked how much they would be willing to spend on a skirt like this. It was knee-length, black chiffon with vertical stripes of citrine, and it was secured at her waist with a gold seashell button. She’d read in a fashion magazine that citrine was the color to wear this fall, and she had picked out the pattern and material with Greenie’s family in mind.
In the kitchen, Shelly put her to work on the veggie plate. Tracy dumped a bag of baby carrots and a jar of olives onto different compartments of the glass serving tray. She sliced up red peppers and celery hearts and cucumber disks. Next to her, Shelly opened the oven and plunged a meat thermometer into the turkey. Dried zinnia heads were lined up across the island counter, and Tom was rearranging them when Shelly’s children came into the kitchen.
“You guys remember your Aunt Tracy?” Tom said.
Kristen was wearing a sombrero, a navy velvet dress and ballet slippers. Her teeth were tiny and rounded with spaces between them, like loosely strung pearls. Jay wore pleather chaps over his khaki pants and he had a plastic bow and arrow, which he aimed at Tracy’s face, but didn’t shoot. Shelly ushered the kids off to their rooms to get decent before the meal.
“Nice kids,” Tracy said.
“Speaking of kids,” Tom said, “is your boyfriend that bartender you introduced me to a while back? You still robbin’ that cradle?” He elbowed her.
“Greenie’s not that much younger. It’s not like we look weird together. You’re drunk, aren’t you? And yes, he’s my boyfriend, but it’s not even that serious.”
“All right, crabby,” said Tom.
They went to the dining room, where Tom pulled two chairs out from the table and sat down next to her. Tracy ate a handful of candy corn from a little porcelain dish that sat in the center of the table, next to rooster-shaped salt and pepper shakers. Directly across the table was a woman whose face looked like it had been boiled. She picked at a hard crumb on her fork, her hands horned and powdery. She introduced herself as Mac’s aunt, and Tracy had to tell her three times that Tom was her cousin, not her husband.
Once everyone was seated, Shelly stood and clinked her glass with her spoon. “Let’s send the wine around,” she said. “Make sure all the adults have a full glass before we say grace.” Mac sent two half-empty bottles of Merlot around the long table and opened a fresh Chardonnay He closed his eyes and smelled the cork before passing the bottle to his left.
Tracy raised her hand. “I have something, Shelly,” she said. “I have something quick before the prayer.”
Tracy reached underneath her chair and pulled out a shoe box. It was royal blue and had the Adidas logo on every side.
Tracy pushed her place setting forward to make room for the box on the table. She ran her index finger beneath the masking tape she’d put on all four sides of the lid to secure it.
“My dad loved the lake,” Tracy said loudly to the whole room. She opened the box and pulled out one bright purple feather earring attached to a tiny tarnished gold coin with a hole drilled through the center. “He took me fishing when I was little. He’s gone now but I saved some of his leftover fishing lures, which he decorated with some other little trinkets he found on the beach. I used his materials to make these earrings. I’ve wanted to get into the jewelry-making business for a while.”
Tracy lifted the earring and swung it in a sl
ow semicircle in front of her, then handed it to Tom. “You can pass it around,” she said.
Tom examined the earring up close and squeezed at the pea-sized glue bubble a little bit.
“If anyone wants a pair, you can talk to me after the meal,” Tracy said.
Shelly retrieved her napkin from her lap and ran it over her lips. “What a darling idea, Trace. Marty sure did love to fish, didn’t he?”
Tracy stirred her ice water with her knife. She watched one of Shelly’s friends down the table wrinkle her nose distastefully at the earring when it reached her.
“I remember,” Shelly continued brightly, “how Marty used to take the three of us fishing when he’d come down for a visit, Tracy and me and Tom here too. Marty always baited my hook for me because I didn’t like that part. We fished off the canal, in the Niagara River, and sometimes off that, what was it called? Oh, the Nowak pier just upriver. Oh, and sometimes he’d take us out on the big lake in his little boat. That was such a treat.”
Tracy stared at her cousin. She could hear the blood rushing into her face while Shelly gazed up at the ceiling fan. Shelly’s freshly highlighted hair fell back from her face, exposing dangly green earrings that matched her necklace. Shelly looked, as usual, like she was a woman who really knew how the world worked. “Let’s all raise our glasses to Marty,” Shelly said.
Around the table, people said, “Marty,” and they looked sideways at Tracy, and they drank.
The earring had made it around the table. Tom handed it to Tracy and she dropped it into the shoe box, then tucked the box under her elbow while lifting the legs of her chair to back it soundlessly away from the table.
“‘Scusing myself,” she whispered to Tom, while Mac started to pray.
In the kitchen, Tracy yanked a frosty bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured herself a glass. There was plenty of food still out on the stove and countertop, but she reached instead into the pocket of her skirt for the warm string cheese she’d forgotten about on the drive down. A Cooking Light magazine was clothespinned open to a sweet potato recipe. Tracy removed the clothespin and held it between her teeth while she paged through the magazine. She eased herself onto the counter so her legs dangled, heels knocking against the cupboard, and started into an article on the best and worst uses for Splenda.
Mac and Shelly’s little black Scottish Terrier trotted in, stood at Tracy’s feet, and rubbed its chin against her ankle bone. “Go away, Lucas,” she said. The vodka was cold and syrupy on the roof of her mouth. She tried to ignore the Thanksgiving toasts still going on in the other room.
Shelly appeared at the doorway a few minutes later. “What’s wrong, Trace?”
Tracy slapped the magazine shut and looked up. “What would you guess?”
Shelly blinked. “All I know is that we’re all out there having a good time, and you’re in here drinking vodka and muttering under your breath and eating—is that a string cheese? Did you bring that?”
Tracy set her glass down hard on the counter. “You didn’t have to go and make like you have all these nice memories of fishing with my dad in his boat out on the lake. You know he never took you out there. When he fished with you, it was always just off the pier or at the shore. His boat wouldn’t seat more than just me and him.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Shelly’s face stretched long and open. “He took us out there on the lake at least half a dozen times. I swear on my kids. I remember it clear as day. It was tight, but the boat wasn’t too small. All four of us could go out at once.”
“That’s a load of crap, Shelly.” Tracy slid off the counter. “You were along on the trips to the canal. And to the river, maybe. But you never came out on the lake with us. That was the best fishing, where we got the walleye, but he’d never take anyone other than me because there wasn’t room in his boat.”
Shelly looked stunned. “See this is what’s wrong with this family,” she said. Lucas was at her feet, so she picked him up around his ribs, carried him to the basement door, and dropped him from so high that he squeaked softly. “Here I am, trying to tell a nice memory ...”
Tom rounded the corner into the kitchen.
Tracy turned to him. “Do you remember these fishing trips with my dad that Shelly’s going on about? These ones in the boat, out on the lake?”
“Marty was all right,” Tom said. “I don’t remember that he ever took me out in his boat, but my memory’s for shit.”
Tracy looked back at Shelly, who threw both of her hands out in front of her. “I swear to you, Tracy. Why would I make something like that up?” she said. “I don’t care enough to make something like that up!”
Tracy crumpled up the string cheese wrapper in her hand and went to the kitchen sink. “Because you’re a one-upper,” she said over her shoulder.
Shelly had always had a nervous habit of clenching her fists when she was upset, working them in and out while she searched for the right word, careful to never fully lose control. Tracy didn’t turn around, but Shelly was quiet for a moment, and Tracy imagined that she had both hands pumping now like she was giving blood. She heard Shelly whisper something sharp to Tom, then something about her guests, then she left the kitchen.
Tracy sipped her vodka. There were morsels of food cemented to the base of the sink, and a stalk of celery coming up through the garbage disposal. A fake candle with a bulb for a flame was perched on the windowsill above the sink and it shone bright and golden. It even had fake drips of wax.
Tom joined Tracy at the window. Outside, a greasy-looking crow was picking at seeds from a bird feeder that hung on a wire from a young, thin maple tree. Tracy could see across Shelly’s and Mac’s lawn all the way into the kitchen of the next house over, where bodies moved back and forth across the window in pairs, swaying and bending to laugh.
“Don’t let her get you all wound up,” Tom said. “Who cares if she went out on the boat with you or if she didn’t? What’s the point of going back and forth over memories anyway? It’s like ... poking dead roadkill with a stick.”
The house smelled like so many good things that Tracy’s entire body felt wobbly. She listened to Lucas whining at the basement door. She retrieved a turkey scrap from the compost and cracked the door to deliver it to him. She finished her vodka in one swallow and her sinuses burned.
Tracy straightened her watch over her wrist. “I’m outta here. Greenie’s expecting me soon anyway.”
The snow was wet. Tracy held the shoe box over her head to protect her hair on her way out to her truck. She had a specific pair in mind for Greenie’s sister, who was wearing neon greens in most of the family pictures Tracy had seen.
She got into her truck and turned the heat on high. She ran the wipers to clear away the inch of feathery snow that had collected on the windshield. The wipers squeaked. Her book on tape started back up, and she paused it. She dialed Greenie.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said.
“Your voice sounds weird.”
“I’m all fired up. I fought with my cousin. The one I told you about.” Tracy shivered and adjusted her vents. “I’ll be on my way to your folks’ place in five, just need to stop for gas and a coffee. Remind me again what’s the address?”
“You sure you’re OK to drive?” Greenie said.
“I’ll be fine.”
“It’s really coming down.”
“Greenie, I’m fine,” she said. “I’ve got my chains put on.”
Tracy heard the soft chafe of Greenie’s palm over his mouthpiece, and his muffled voice when he called, “Nobody, Ma,” then something else that she couldn’t make out. His voice came back strong. “Trace, I think you should just spend today there with your family. We can talk tomorrow.”
Tracy didn’t want to cry but it was all gathered right behind her face and it was hot and urgent. It came out in a single, heavy sob, and then she was done. She hung up her phone and threw it onto the floor mat of the passenger seat, where it thunked against the bottle of red
she’d picked up to take to the Greens’.
How was it that she hadn’t once in her entire life cried about her very own father, not once; not on the day he left, not over the visits he missed, not when he was diagnosed, or the day he died. Not one single tear for her very own father. Yet Greenie, that child, that selfish, stupid boy, he could straight-up squash her in half a second. How many times she had tentatively rehearsed this day in her mind.
Tracy lit a cigarette.
She woke to tapping at her cheek. She sat up and rubbed the left side of her face, which was icy cold from being pressed against the window of her truck. There was a spot of fog on her window. She rubbed it away with the inside of her wrist. It was dark out. The German from Chad was at her window.
She felt around and beneath herself but couldn’t locate her keys to roll down the window, so she opened her door. She was met by a screaming wintry gust that took her breath away.
“I’m sorry.” The man propped his arms on her door and the roof of her truck so that she was protected from the wind. “You’re in our path.” His face was pearl-colored in the moonlight and it was lovely, made up of flat, even planes and perfect angles, like origami. He pointed at the car parked in front of Tracy, where she could see the back of his wife’s head in the passenger’s seat.
Tracy blinked. “What time is it?”
He looked at his watch. “Seven fifteen.”
“Sheesh.” Tracy checked her center consul for her keys, then the top of the dashboard.
“I like your dress,” he said. “Good color.”
“It’s a skirt,” she said. “A dress is if it’s all connected. This is a shirt plus a skirt. I sewed the skirt myself.” She pointed to them. “Shirt, skirt,” she said.
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