Jen pointed up at the pine trees. “Christmas trees,” she said. Without much enthusiasm. Like it was just a thing she figured might be worth a try.
“I miss Teddy’s millions of dumb decorations,” Carly said.
Jen said nothing.
“Still not speaking to me?” Carly’s mom asked.
They sat at a booth in a cheap roadside pancake restaurant. Carly watched Wade try to find a spot to park his mega-truck, along with the trailer containing most of their stuff. What they still owned, that is. The place they were moving into was small. Or so Carly had been told. Over and over, the whole time they’d packed. They’d had to leave a lot behind.
Thank God he was driving a separate vehicle, Carly thought for about the twentieth time.
“Carly,” Jen said. “It’s Christmas.”
Like that hadn’t gone without saying. But of course Carly got Jen’s point. You can’t not speak to your mother on Christmas. Silently, inwardly, Carly disagreed. Potentially right down to the suggestion that this day deserved to be honored as a Christmas.
A car pulled out of the parking lot, giving Wade a chance to park his long load across three spaces. Too bad, Carly thought. Now he’ll be joining us.
“Wade says we should get there later today,” Carly’s mom said. “So it might not be much of a Christmas morning, but at least we can have a decent dinner. I mean, not a turkey or anything. But at least we can stop and buy a canned ham and some rolls or something. Eat in our new place.”
She stared at Carly and waited. Carly could see it in her peripheral vision. She didn’t look back. Instead she watched Wade pace down the sidewalk to the restaurant door. She could hear the clicking of his boot heels from inside.
“When do we get to open our presents?” Jen asked.
An awkward silence.
Then her mom said, “Little bit of a problem with that.”
Jen sighed. “You were busy moving, and you didn’t get us any. We got yours.”
“No, I got them a long time ago. Weeks ago.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Carly felt like Jen was half being herself and half channeling Carly. Saying what Carly would have said, but toning down the vitriol in the translation.
Wade sat down at the table. Jen said good morning to him. Carly said nothing and was careful not to look his way.
“I…got you girls gift certificates to your very favorite store,” their mom said.
“Oh,” Jen said. A downbeat “oh.”
Jen had filled in the blanks already. So had Carly. Their very favorite store was, of course, in Tulare.
“You don’t say good morning when I sit down?”
Wade. She heard the darkness in his voice. She could match it to a glare in his eyes from experience. From memory. She did not look up to confirm what she knew.
“Leave the girl alone, Wade. But what we’ll do, we’ll give you girls a little bit of cash. Can’t be much. You know. Things being what they are. But you can go into town—the new town—and get to know the place by looking around and picking yourself out presents. Won’t be anything too big, but then I’ll get my money back on those gift certificates and we’ll have more presents later on.”
“OK,” Jen said.
Carly said nothing. Just watched a woman with a leashed collie let the dog out of the car to sniff around in the parking lot. Watched it lift its leg on a bush.
“This is getting old,” Wade said.
“I told you leave the girl alone, Wade.”
“No. I’m gonna speak my piece here. This is Christmas morning, and your mom just told you what she’s doing to salvage Christmas for you girls in a tight squeeze, and you got nothing to say at all?”
“Wade, butt out. She’s my girl. Not yours. Get off it.”
“Damn her!” Wade pounded the heel of his hand on the table. Hard.
Everybody in the restaurant fell silent. Every neck craned to see. Carly watched the cook come out of the kitchen, a middle-aged man with broad shoulders. He stood watching Wade until it became clear that nothing more was about to happen. Then he shook his head and pushed back through the swinging door.
“Wouldn’t let my daughter treat me like that,” Wade said.
“Well, now there’s a surprise. I never would have known that if you hadn’t already told me about a hundred and fifty times. And what do I tell you every time?”
“That I can treat my own daughter how I want, but this one’s yours.”
“Right. Good job listening.”
The waitress appeared at their table, pad and pencil in hand. “Merry Christmas. What’ll you folks have?”
She looked to Jen first.
“Two eggs over well with pancakes, please.”
The waitress turned to Carly next.
“Bacon and scrambled eggs with rye toast. Please. And merry Christmas to you, too.”
“Ah,” Wade said. “It speaks.”
“Enough, Wade,” Carly’s mom said. “I’ll have the short stack. Wade, what do you want, honey?”
“Steak and eggs. Over easy. And a new stepdaughter.”
The waitress pretended to smile. Or tried to, anyway. “Well, I’ll bring you the steak and eggs, anyway.”
She hurried off.
“Steak and eggs?” Carly’s mom turned her irritation fully onto Wade. “Steak and eggs? You just had to order the most expensive thing on the menu? I was about to give the girls twenty-five dollars each for Christmas, and you just single-handedly cut it down to twenty.”
“I like steak and eggs. I wanted steak and eggs. Damn it, it’s Christmas, and what have I got here? Steak and eggs isn’t asking so much.”
A few heads turned again.
“Fine, we’ll talk about it later. Just shut up before you get us kicked out of here. Probably the only place open for miles. Maybe the only place open in the state. So shut up and don’t blow this for us.”
The energy around Wade turned so tight and so dark that Carly involuntarily twitched her shoulders as a way of letting it move through her.
Later, after breakfast, as they trudged out through the parking lot together, Wade leaned over close to Carly’s mom and spoke, his voice measured but chilling.
“And you don’t ever tell me to shut up again.”
“Oh, my God!” Jen shrieked as they drove through the gate in the white picket fence. Following Wade and the trailer. “You call this small?”
Carly looked up. The house was twice the size of their old rental in Tulare.
“This is Wade’s brother’s house,” their mom said. “He’s letting us use the guesthouse until we can get it together to afford something better.”
“Oh,” Jen said.
They stopped behind Wade in the driveway. Wade honked. And waited.
A few minutes later, a man stepped out of the house. Carly figured he was literally Wade’s identical twin.
“Oh, crap,” she whispered to Jen. “Two of him!”
“I heard that.”
Carly caught her mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror, then looked away.
Jen rolled her window down. The air felt light and cold. Carly briefly wondered if it ever snowed here.
She watched Wade walk up to his brother, arms out as if to embrace him. Wade Two, as she’d already named him in her head, stuck his right hand out to shake. But what kind of brothers shake hands? Carly thought. Especially twin brothers. These two, it turned out. Wade dropped his arms and shook.
“Just wanted to say hi,” Wade said. “But we’ll get right out of your hair again. Let you enjoy Christmas in peace.”
“Yeah, that’d be good,” Wade Two said. “It’s not locked.”
Then he turned and walked back into the big house.
“Runs in the family,” Carly whispered to Jen.
“That one I didn’t hear,” her mother said. “But I don’t want you whispering to your sister. I got a good idea I wouldn’t like it.”
“Who’s he going inside to have Christmas with
?” Jen asked their mom. “Has he got a whole big family in there?”
“I don’t think so. Wade said his wife and kids left him. I don’t know why he wants to be by himself.”
Carly exchanged a look with Jen but said nothing. Because it all pretty much said itself.
“It’s one bedroom?”
Carly blasted the words out to no one in particular. Then, realizing she’d just scraped close to speaking to her mom, she sat on the floor in the corner and said nothing more.
Jen stood in the middle of the one main room, looking around. “So, I’m guessing you guys get the bedroom. Right?”
“Well, of course, honey. You know we need privacy.”
“And we don’t, of course,” Carly barely breathed. It was not meant to be heard by anyone but herself. And it wasn’t.
“Where do we sleep?” Jen asked, her tone riding the edge of exasperation.
“Wade’s brother is loaning us a fold-out couch.”
“I have to share a bed with Carly?”
“It won’t kill you, Jen. It’s just for a while.”
“Shit, this ain’t gonna be easy,” Wade said. “We’ll have to put a TV in our bedroom. I’m gonna feel like a prisoner in there, and if I sit out here with these two kids, I’m gonna feel like a whole other kind of prisoner. This place would fit us great if it was just the two of us.”
Jen came and sat on the floor, her hip bumping up against Carly’s. Ducking the gathering storm.
“Well, it’s not, Wade. When I met you, did I lie and say I was childless?”
“No, but—”
“Then just shu—” Carly’s mom stopped herself. It was unlike her. But the tone in Wade’s voice when he’d said she was never to tell him to shut up again—that was not easily forgotten. “Let’s just have a nice Christmas,” she said. “Much as we can. What’s left of it.”
“You want to have a nice Christmas? Give those girls their money and send ’em into town. I already need room to breathe.”
“What do you think’ll be open today?”
“I don’t care. They can window-shop.”
“Well, get their bikes out at least. It’s too far to walk.”
“Bikes are buried. All the way at the front end of that trailer.”
“Well, they can’t go into town, then. Can they?”
“I’m gonna go nuts trying to unload with them standing right here. Every place I walk they’ll be right in my way.”
“They live here, Wade. I’m telling you, they live here, too.”
“And I’m telling you I wish they didn’t.”
Jen jumped to her feet. “We’ll walk,” she said. “Just go ahead and give us our Christmas money. We’ll walk into town.”
“It’s like three miles, honey.”
“I don’t care.”
“Each way.”
Jen looked down at Carly. To see if she was game. Carly nodded. Of course she was willing to take a six-mile walk. Even though she never had before. The trick was figuring how not to end up back here.
“OK. It’s your life.” She doled out a twenty-dollar bill for each of them. “Give this to your sister who isn’t speaking to me. And tell her merry Christmas.”
Jen walked over to where Carly was still sitting. Cross-legged on the hardwood floor in the emptiness. It was hard for a place to look small with nothing in it, Carly thought. But this place managed.
Jen held the twenty down to Carly. “She says—”
“I heard her.”
As they were walking out the door, Carly heard Wade say, “Thank the Lord they’re gone. Not a moment too soon.”
“What’d you get?” Jen asked when they met up again on the corner near the ice-cream store. “How’d you know already what you wanted?”
Carly took it out of her pocket and showed it to Jen.
“A phone card?”
“Yup.”
“They have prepaid calling cards for only twenty bucks?”
“They even had cheaper ones. But I wanted all the minutes I could get.”
“You going to call your friends back in Tulare?”
“Yeah,” Carly said. “That’s what I’m going to do.”
“I’m going to have a great big chocolate sundae with my money while you do that. I don’t know what to spend the rest on. Yet. But I sure want that sundae. Give me the energy to walk all that way back.”
“I’ll meet you in there,” Carly said.
She walked to the pay phone at the end of the block. Her feet were already swollen, making her shoes uncomfortable. They weren’t meant for that kind of walking. And she didn’t have anything better. It was going to be a long walk back.
If she could even bring herself to go back.
She punched the numbers on the card into the pay phone, then touched Teddy’s cell phone number by heart.
Six rings.
“Hi, this is Ted—”
“Teddy?”
“—I can’t pick up right now, but leave a message.”
“Oh,” Carly said. “I thought it was really you. Oh, crap. Teddy, this is Carly. I just called to say merry Christmas. I’m in New Mexico. We’re in the new place. Should’ve brought the address, but I don’t know it yet. I’ll call again. So…that’s all, I guess. Just to say merry Christmas. And that I miss you.”
Carly hung up the phone. Stood in front of it, staring at it, for a time. As if it might have something more to offer. Then she hobbled back to the ice-cream store. Jen stood outside, staring through the window. Steaming up the glass.
“Should’ve known they’d be closed,” Jen said. “You were fast.”
“Nobody was around.”
“Oh. Yeah. Christmas.”
“This is the worst. Worst. Christmas. Ever.”
“It’s pretty bad. But she tried. You know? She didn’t know we wouldn’t be living in Tulare by Christmas when she bought us those gift certificates. She tried, at least.”
“She failed. How’re we supposed to live in that little box with her and Wade and no room and no privacy?”
“Maybe it’s not for very long.”
“How are we supposed to live there even tonight?”
“Oh, crap, I don’t know, Carly. She’s trying.”
“She’s failing.”
“You’ve got to talk to her sometime, Carly.”
“That’s what you think.”
For lack of anything better to do, they began the long walk home. At least, it seemed like a long walk at the time.
NEW MEXICO
February 28
Carly sat at the table, eating cereal for dinner because nobody had cooked. And reading the box. Despite the fact that there was nothing interesting on the box. In fact, if someone had asked her what was written there, she wouldn’t have been able to say. Wade emerged from the bedroom and plugged in the coffeemaker. Strange, she thought, how much of a morning routine they seemed to have in the evenings.
He sat down at the table. Carly carefully kept her gaze glued to the cereal box.
When she finally looked up, he was staring at her. It felt alarming. “What? I’m eating cereal.”
“Seems like you’re always here. Wherever I go in this house, there you are.”
“This closet, you mean? Besides, I’m never here. I ride my bike from school to the Internet café, and I sit there for hours because I don’t want to be here.”
“Every time I look up, you’re looking back at me. That’s all I know.”
“Look, it’s not my fault that we’re still living in this sardine can two months later. If you’d go out and get a job like you keep saying you will…”
Then she pulled back, wondering if she’d gone too far. She risked a glance at Wade’s eyes. They said yes, she had. But his mouth said far less.
“Nobody’s hiring in my field.”
“Then work in some other field.”
“I’m not gonna do just anything.”
“My mom does. You think she likes ringing up groc
eries and taking breakfast orders? She works whatever two jobs she can get.”
The dark of Wade’s eyes darkened. “Liked you better when you were a mute.”
Carly’s mom came striding out of the bedroom.
“Where’s Jen?” she asked.
Carly just kept staring at the cereal box. Reading the same part for the third time. About how the cereal was baked with love. She pictured a big factory where everybody’s feet hurt and nobody could wait another minute to take their break. Love. Sure. We all buy that.
“Your mother is talking to you,” Wade said, a thin veneer of calm brushed on over his dark rage.
“Forget it, Wade. Leave it alone. I’m going in to the market early so I can grocery shop before work. When I get home tonight, I expect help carrying the groceries in.”
“Tell your mother you’ll help,” Wade said.
So much for leaving it alone.
Carly nodded.
The door slammed behind Carly’s mom. Carly heard her car start up.
All of a sudden Wade had her by the left wrist.
“Ow!” she yelled. “Hey! Ow!” The more she yelled, the harder Wade twisted. “Hey! You’re hurting me!”
“I’ve just about had my fill of you,” he said. Eerily calm.
They were on their feet now, Carly moving backward, trying to pull out of his grasp. The harder she pulled, the tighter he held and wrenched. Carly waited for the sickening crack of a bone break, but it never had a chance to happen.
“Let. Me. Go!”
He did. Too suddenly. With a sharp push that sent Carly stumbling backward into the brick of the fake fireplace. The corner edge of the brick struck hard against the right side of her back. Her head missed the same fate by inches.
She looked up to see if he was coming after her. But Wade wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking at the front door.
“How long you been standing there?” he asked.
Carly followed his gaze to see Jen frozen in the open doorway. Letting the cold in. Her mouth open but no words coming out. Her eyes wide.
Carly seized the moment to escape, jostling Jen on her way by. She grabbed her bike from the spot where it leaned against the guesthouse, mounted it at a run, and pedaled fast in the direction of town. It hurt every time she pushed with her right leg. It hurt a lot. But she just kept pushing. She could see her breath as she pedaled.
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