It is almost dinnertime and I hear my front door open.
“Perry? Are you here?” It is Cherry’s voice. It always sounds like she is singing. I love her voice.
“You want roni-cheese for dinner? I bought hot dogs too! Keith and I went to the store,” she calls out.
I slide the box back against the wall just as she walks into the room. She smells like smoke. I like that because it reminds me of Gram. I do not have time to take my mess off the bed.
“Perry? What are all these?”
“Gram and Gramp’s stuff. It is mine now.”
“Cool,” she says. “You’re so lucky. I don’t have anything like this. I have nothing from my family.”
She sits on the edge of the bed and looks at my memory things. I get Gramp’s record player out and put on one of Gramp’s records.
“This one is Sousa. Army guys march to this,” I tell her.
We both kick our feet in time to the music.
“What’s this?” she asks, and unfolds a piece of paper. “It looks like a list.”
I take it from her hand. It has all the names of the people I am supposed to listen to: Gary, Officer Ray Mallory, firemen.
I read all the names.
I can do what they say, Gram said.
I have not looked at this list for a long time. I have not needed it. It is like I can decide who to listen to on my own now.
“Nothing. It is nothing,” I say.
I fold it back up and put it into Gram’s box.
39
My first Christmas after the lottery was cool-sad. Cool because Christmas is magic, but sad because Gram was not there to share it. Gram and I loved Christmas decorations.
“Hey, Cherry! Keith and I are going to drive around tonight and look at Christmas lights. You want to come?” I do not know why, but my armpits get all wet and my stomach is lumpy like when I eat too many nachos with cheese and peppers or whenever I visit Cherry at Marina Handy Mart. Her black eye is gone and she wears shiny blue glitter on her eyelashes.
“Sure. Yeah. That sounds fun.” She looks like she means it. Cherry always looks like she means what she says. That is why I like her. I want to yell yippee and bounce. I wait until I get back to Holsted ’s to do this.
I tell Keith that Cherry will come, and Manny laughs at me behind the cash register. His hair is so black and thick he looks like a leopard except he does not have spots, paws, or sharp teeth. He is skinny and smells like garlic today.
“Perry’s got a girlfriend. Perry’s got a girlfriend.” Manny sings this real low, so Keith cannot hear.
I tell him to stop. I am embarrassed and I feel my face get hot. Manny is concentrating so hard on teasing me that he does not hear Keith walk up behind him.
“Shut the fuck up, ya little twerp!” Keith always knows the right things to say. He adds, “Merry Christmas, jackass!” and hands him an envelope with one of the bonus checks I helped Gary write.
It made me very happy to give everybody Christmas bonuses. Manny smirks and laughs as he opens his Christmas card from Holsted ’s. His mouth drops open when he sees the amount of the check inside. He whistles and sings the rest of the day and pats me on the back.
“No hard feelings, Per? No hard feelings? You have yourself a heck of a Christmas, okay?” He does not tease me anymore about a girlfriend.
Christmas is a time for giving things.
The first present I can remember getting was army guys. They were in my stocking. Gram yelled when they got stuck in the vacuum. They were very good soldiers and could sneak everywhere. Keith and I found one inside the heat register when I moved out of our house. That little guy had to be hiding there for years. I was impressed.
Another present I remember was Etch A Sketch. That was the first hard present I got. I would be working on a picture and forget and put it upside down and it would go away. I would cry.
“Quit your bellyaching, Perry!” Gram would always say quit my bellyaching and tell me to try again. Gram said that to me each time I told her I didn’t think I could do something.
“Try again, Perry,” she said. “Try again! And then keep on trying!”
We would do Christmas stuff the whole month of December. We would write down people’s names on a list and decide what to get them. Gram liked lists. I do too. Everything we needed for presents was at Kmart or the Army-Navy store. Keith and I would go back later without her and buy the one thing she especially wanted that year. Three years ago, we got her an electric footbath soaker and two years ago, we got her a back massager that fit on the sofa. Last year it was a giant can of popcorn.
“If a body had that they wouldn’t need to make popcorn for a year!”
Gram appreciated anything that saved time.
At Army-Navy, there was always a ton of good stuff.
“Hey how about these?” I found canteens. They were dark green and had US ARMY in black letters on the side. They were totally cool.
We got them for John, David, and Louise. Even though we did not see them very often, we still bought them Christmas presents. They were always too busy to buy us any. That’s okay.
Gram would do her witch laugh when we found something really good, and we would buy it for everyone on our list. It saved time. Five years ago it was extra cold and snowed a lot, so we bought everybody long underwear. Keith really liked his and still wears the tops, even though they are stretched, stained, and have lots of holes from cigarette burns. Gram and I had a lot of fun shopping. My eyes get wet when I remember that Gram will not be here this Christmas.
We put more oil in Yo, because he leaks, and drive all the way to Seattle. Pretend snow fluffs down and it is perfect. Gram called snow that didn’t stick pretend snow.
“All of the advantages of snow, but none of the problems,” Gram said. “No getting stuck in the road, no slipping, no messing up bus schedules. Pretend snow is a damn sight better than real snow and it still makes it feel like Christmas.”
Cherry squishes me next to the door, which makes me hot, cold, and bouncy. She sits in the middle. Cherry does not seem to bother Keith like I do when I bounce or talk too much or sit too close. He puts an arm around her and takes it off only when he has to shift gears.
“Hey, look! Snow!” Cherry points at the windshield. Only the driver’s side wiper clears the snow, the other wiper just shudders. There is always something on Yo that decides not to work. Keith looks unhappy and pushes his lower lip out while he squeezes the wheel.
“Now, when did that happen? I can’t see! Shit! I hope this doesn’t stick. It’ll be a bitch to get back to Everett if it does.” He has me open the window and reach around to push the wiper and encourage it to work.
“Come on! You can do it,” I say. After a few pushes it works fine and Keith laughs.
I laugh because he does.
“Sometimes all things need is a little encouragement,” I tell him.
When we get to the neighborhood with all the decorations, the snow is sticking on the ground and Yo slides as we turn a corner. There are a lot of other people that have the exact same idea of looking at Christmas lights. We end up in the middle of a long line of cars and have to go slowly, which is fun because Keith usually drives too fast.
The houses all have colored lights that flash and move.
“These people go all out decorating!” Gram used to say. My favorite is when there are reindeer and stuff on roofs.
“I love the blue lights. Look at that one!” Cherry points out to the left.
“Look over there!” I point to the other side where someone put a giant plastic Snoopy in a sled on their porch.
Poor Keith has to look back and forth each time one of us gets excited. He eventually just stares straight ahead, bites his lip, and tries not to rear-end the car in front. When we come to the end, Cherry and I are hungry so Keith stops at Dick’s Drive-In for milk-shakes and french fries.
“What’s your favorite part of Christmas, Keith?” Cherry pokes him with a fry.
“When it’s over.” Keith looks grumpy. He is picking his teeth with Cherry’s straw.
“Why are you so irked? It’s Christmas,” she says.
I want to tell Cherry to stop asking questions. They are the same kind of questions that Gram used to ask. Keith does the same thing to Cherry that he did to Gram. He pulls out his wallet, opens it up, and flips out a picture.
“See this? Her name’s April. She used to be my wife. And the baby? My son, Jason. It was taken more than thirty years ago. She married my ex-best-buddy, Roger. Last time I saw her was the day I shipped out to ’Nam.” Keith’s eyes squeeze shut and then open again.
“December 24, 1971,” he says in a voice that does not sound like Keith. “I signed both divorce and adoption papers at the same time, hiding my ass under a table in the mess tent while Charlie mortared the fucking hell out of my company. I thought I was gonna die anyway. What did it matter? That’s what all those fucking lawyers do if you really want to know. Take advantage of a grunt’s fear of death. They’re all a bunch of moneygrubbing bastards. I even had to pay for the privilege of losing my wife and son to that backstabbing asshole.”
“So, no.” He puts his picture away and his wallet back in his pocket. “Christmas is a real drag.” He spits this out along with the straw in his mouth.
Cherry is quiet and I am sad now. I would like to meet April and Jason. They look nice.
I know tonight Keith will drink. He will start with beer. Afterwards he will look for the bottles he took from John’s house. I know that he keeps them in a lower cupboard in the galley of his boat. They are almost empty. The next day he will be hungover and sick and then he will not drink for days and then something will remind him, and he will start all over again.
It is after eleven when we get back to Everett. Keith parks Yo in the handicapped space.
“Hey! You can’t park there,” Cherry says. She does not know our rules.
I do not want her to make Keith mad. He is already sad.
“It’s for disabled trucks too. Yo qualifies. He leaks enough oil to be anemic.” Keith glares at her, and then he looks back down at his feet like he is sorry for snapping.
“Hey, Cherry, you coming?” I ask, and start walking up my stairs backwards. Cherry sleeps in my bed and I still sleep on Gram’s couch.
She looks down and kicks her foot in the gravel.
“I think I’ll hang out on Keith’s boat for a while if it’s okay with you, Perry. Just leave the door unlocked for me.”
Cherry lifts her head, stares at Keith, and smiles.
He stares back and his face completely changes. He smiles back at her real slow. They do not say a word. They just stare at each other.
“You guys okay?” I ask.
They do not answer me.
“Cherry?” I say again.
Keith’s eyes get wide like he is just waking up.
“I’ll take care of her, Per, don’t you worry. You go on up to bed.” His voice sounds squeaky, like a mouse in a trap.
“Okay.” I am tired. I need to go to bed.
My arm that got hurt at Marina Handy Mart tingles as I walk up the stairs. It still sometimes bothers me. I have to open and close my fingers to make it un-numb. I take a shower, get into my pajamas, and stand in front of my window looking out at the falling snow. I put Hershey’s Kisses into my mouth one by one and stare outside.
The chocolate melts on my tongue, not in my hand. Ha! That is an ad, I think.
The lights at the pier make the dock look like a Christmas card. It is not good to eat a lot of candy before you go to bed, so I put my bag away, go into the bathroom, and brush my teeth.
When I come back to the window, I can see a yellow glow through the portholes on Keith’s boat. I see them flicker and flash, then go dark. After a while, I notice Diamond Girl moving. She is rocking hard back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Her lines stretch and snap. I watch for an hour until she stops moving and floats gently on the water. It is quiet. I yawn until my jaw cracks and go to bed.
40
Christmas is a time for giving. It was hard to decide what to buy Louise, David, and John. Fruit baskets. Gram told me in my head. Send them big fancy baskets of fruit.
I appreciated Gram helping me out.
I sent them checks too. I had to send Louise’s fruit basket to John’s house because I do not have her real address. I have never gone to visit her. She has a PO, which is a sort of a box. You cannot send flowers to a PO. I think it is too small for a fruit basket. It is only a tiny little place. Louise came by Holsted’s three days before Christmas to ask for another check. I heard her because I was hiding in the back room. I peeked out through the crack in the door. Her hair is brown with yellow stripes now. She still scares me. I could hear her nails rapping on the counter. Keith told her to wait and went over to where I was hiding.
“What do you want to do? You want me to kick her skinny little ass outside?” he hisses.
“No.” I hiss back. We both sound like snakes.
I kneel on the floor and write another check.
“You don’t have to give her money each time she comes. This is just shit!”
Keith doesn’t understand. I give her money to go away. Not to make her come.
“Is she gone?” I whisper through the door.
“Yeah, she’s gone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Keith says.
We spend Christmas Eve with Gary’s family. Gary’s wife, Sandy, is funny and blond and his daughters, Kelly and Meagan, know me from when they come into the store. One is five years older than the other. I used to get them mixed up. Kelly is the older one and Meagan is the younger. Their house smells like turkey, pumpkin pie, and other Christmas food. My mouth is wet and I have to swallow my spit. My stomach is grumbling so loud that Kelly looks at me strange.
“I didn’t eat any lunch,” I tell her.
Keith brings in the presents from Yo and sets them under the tree. It takes him five trips. He is on his best behavior and only says the H-word once and the S-word three times. He pushes open the screen door with his shoulder when he comes into the house and it swings back and smacks his butt.
"FFFshhhoot!” I hear him say. He is trying really hard.
Meagan and Kelly look impressed with all the earrings on Cherry ’s face and the colors of her hair.
“I took out my silver stud because it’s Christmas,” she says, and sticks out her tongue to show them the hole. They both stare into her mouth and then she leads them into the bathroom so she can show them the ring in her navel. Cherry has on a red top with sparkles and a long skirt.
She is so beautiful. I am bouncing because I bought her a present that I think she will really like. If she likes it a lot she might be my girlfriend.
There is a real tree in the living room. Gram and I never had a real one. Ours was made out of aluminum and had a color wheel that plugged into the wall. It was lit by a forty-watt bulb that made our tree change colors until the plastic fell off. We lost first the yellow, then the red, and last Christmas the green fell out. I tried to repair it with construction paper, but the light wouldn’t show through. Gram said it was okay because it already lasted for over thirty years.
Gary’s tree lights have red, green, blue, white, and yellow bulbs. They move and sparkle. I squint my eyes to make them shine. Sandy gives us all special cardboard glasses and when we put them on, they make the lights turn into bells and angels and stars. We all trade to see everybody else’s. I keep mine on even when I unwrap my presents. I am like a movie star. I get shirts, a giant box of Hershey’s Kisses, a Game Boy, which is cool, but I do not know how to work it, and lots of other stuff.
Cherry unwraps her present from me first. A pair of diamond earrings that I bought her from Zales. She is so happy she screams and runs into the bathroom.
“I think she likes them,” Sandy whispers to me. I think so too.
Gram always said the most h
appiness you can collect is when you give things to other people that you love. I have a lot of happiness in my heart as I sit with my presents in my lap and watch everybody else open presents I bought for them.
On the way home Cherry talks about her mother, I talk about Gram, and Keith talks about how cold it was in eastern Oregon growing up.
“Snow up to our assholes! Shit! It was cold!” Keith cannot help using those words now, because he held them in all night at Gary’s.
“When I was little, before my mom and dad started drinking, we had a tree, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins would visit. After they separated, it just wasn’t the same.” Cherry looks sad as she says this.
“Gram and I had a fake tree. We put it up the day after Thanksgiving and took it down New Year’s Day,” I say. “She put it in our back room when it broke. It was all silver. Remember, Keith? It was in the first load we took to the dump.”
After everyone went to bed, I laid stockings for Cherry and Keith in front of the TV. It is like a pretend fireplace. I am very good at stockings. First, you buy candy and oranges because they last the longest. Then you buy little stuff like key chains, pens, and crossword puzzle books, or maybe tiny flashlights and hand soap samples. I do good stockings.
I sleep on the couch and Keith and Cherry sleep in the bedroom. The thumping noise only keeps me up a little while. I am very tired. The next thing I know, I smell pancakes and Cherry is poking me in the ribs to get up.
“Santa came last night!” she sings.
And oh boy! Did he! Santa, which was most likely both Cherry and Keith, brought me my own laptop computer. Another stocking with my name on it was right next to theirs. I got a hat, new socks with sailboats on them, and a whistle that I blew until Keith yelled, “Shut the fuck up, Per!”
That’s okay.
Cherry showed me how to use my computer and I wrote down all the directions. She said she would give me computer lessons every day as part of her present. Christmas is always a good day. But this Christmas was double wonderful. Keith and Cherry went back to Diamond Girl after dinner for a smoke. I sat up until late playing with my computer. Before I went to sleep, I heard Gram’s voice.
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