The Seventh Most Important Thing

by Shelley Pearsall

  So Arthur had no choice, really. He couldn’t exactly tell his mom he was still hoping his dad’s accident had been a bad dream and maybe, if they waited, he would be there to put up the tree for them. That would sound crazy and sad, and it would probably make her cry.

  “Sure,” he said, keeping his voice as normal as he could. “No problem, Mom. I can do it.”

  “I’ll help you pull down the steps.”

  After the two of them had unfolded the narrow ladder that led to the attic, Arthur climbed up, while his mom stood at the bottom with a pencil-sized flashlight giving completely unhelpful advice.

  “Be careful,” she kept saying. “Your dad would always hit his head going up. And watch out for nails in the floor. You don’t want to get a rusty nail in your hand. There should be a light once you get up there. Look for the chain. There should be a chain to pull. But watch out for your head. You don’t want to hit your head.”

  “I got it, Mom!” he yelled, probably louder than he needed to.

  A lump rose in Arthur’s throat as he pulled on the light and saw all the stuff from their past piled in the attic: The cans of paint his dad had used when Arthur’s mom wanted the kitchen painted a bright banana yellow. Racks of clothes. Boxes of Arthur’s old Matchbox cars and racetracks.

  Arthur remembered how his dad used to spend hours with him when he was a little kid, playing with those cars. Putting the black plastic tracks all over the living room. Figure eights around the coffee table. Ramps on the sofa cushions.

  Did that kind of thing count at all in heaven? Would God care that his dad had been perfect at playing Matchbox cars, even if he’d had a lot of other faults?

  And then Arthur got mad at himself for wondering about such stupid things.

  “Are you doing okay up there?” His mother’s worried voice drifted up from below. The little dot from her flashlight flitted on the ceiling above him like an irritating bug. “Can you see the tree box and the lights?”

  Arthur dragged his attention back to looking for the tree. He finally spotted the box in the far corner of the attic. It said ULTRA-REAL ARTIFICIAL TREE and had a cartoon of a dancing elf on it.

  Arthur resisted the urge to kick the box.

  Instead, he hollered, “Got it, Mom!” and began pushing the big box toward the steps. He had no clue how he would get it down the narrow stairs. Probably his dad had carried it on his shoulder like a real man.

  Arthur knew there was no way he could do the same thing. His shoulder muscles were about as real as the ultra-real Christmas tree.

  He decided to try sliding it down the stairs. He told his mom to stay out of the way. One step at a time—with his arms grasping the slick sides of the box—Arthur made his way backward down the narrow, creaky steps.

  “Careful, honey,” his mom kept repeating, as if this would keep him safe. “What you’re doing looks very dangerous.”

  Of course this is dangerous! Arthur wanted to yell at his mother. That’s why Dad should be here doing it and not me.

  His father had always loved doing dangerous things (usually stuff he didn’t tell Arthur’s mom about until later). Drag racing with his buddies when he was younger. Carving the curves with his motorcycle. Doing spinouts in parking lots. Staying out late and drinking too much sometimes. Arthur’s mom often said Tom Owens’s biggest problem was that he never grew up.

  —

  Once they got the box safely into the living room, Arthur’s mom offered to help put the tree together, but he didn’t think he could stand having her around, fussing about every little thing. Plus, he just wanted to be sad and angry at his dad by himself.

  “That’s okay,” he told her impatiently. “I can do it.”

  “You sure you don’t need any help?” His mom looked like she was getting upset.

  Arthur sighed. “All right, okay.”

  “Wait.” She stuck her finger in the air. “I’ll go and make us some hot chocolate before we start.”

  Neither one of them mentioned how Arthur’s dad had often put up the tree while polishing off a six-pack of beer.

  While his mother was in the kitchen, Arthur started pulling the fake branches out of the box. The pile looked like a mangled tree puzzle when he was finished. Strands of old tinsel stuck to his shirt.

  When she returned with the mugs of hot chocolate, his mom burst out laughing. “Maybe we should decorate you instead.”

  Not really amused, Arthur brushed himself off. “Where do you want to start?”

  “I’m not sure.” His mom stared at the project in front of them, looking lost.

  They decided to begin at the bottom. Arthur’s mom untangled the musty, attic-smelling branches while Arthur kneeled on the floor and stuck them in the tiny holes of the fake-tree stand.

  After he’d put about eight branches on one side, the whole tree fell over. An explosion of needles and branches landed on Arthur’s back.

  He swore under his breath. His mom laughed. In fact, she collapsed on the sofa, laughing so hard Arthur worried that maybe she was going nuts. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard his mother laugh like that.

  She sounded like a crazed hyena.

  “Stop it, Mom, or I’m quitting,” Arthur said, feeling more teed off the longer she went on. The damn tree had fallen on him. His dad was dead. And his mom was completely losing it.

  “Oh, I’m not laughing at you, hon. I’m just laughing at…” His mom sat on the edge of the sofa and tried to catch her breath. “I don’t know…I guess at how everything in our life keeps falling apart, no matter what we do. Then, to top it off, even our sad old Christmas tree goes and falls over on us.”

  “Not funny,” Arthur said in an irritated voice. “And it fell on me, not you.”

  “Knocked out by a Christmas tree,” his mom said, with just a hint of a smile.

  “Stop it.”

  “KO’d by Christmas. Ho, ho, ho,” she added.

  And then she dissolved into laughter again, and Arthur found himself unable to keep from laughing too. He didn’t even know why. There was a huge lump in his throat, and he wanted to cry or hit something—and yet here he was, laughing with his mom.

  It was official. They really had lost their minds.

  —

  “Okay, we have to get the tree up before your sister comes back from her friend’s house,” his mom announced, trying to regain her composure. She pushed up the sleeves of her blouse and took charge. “You hold the tree, Artie. And I’ll stick the branches in.”

  With the two of them working, the tree project went faster. It wasn’t until they were halfway finished that Arthur and his mom realized the branches were different sizes—smaller ones for the top and larger ones for the bottom.

  “Well, how were we supposed to know that?” Arthur’s mom looked annoyed as she stared at the half-built tree, hands on her hips.

  Once he stepped back, Arthur could see that their Christmas tree did have a funny shape. More like a green hedge than a tree.

  “Well, who cares,” his mom snapped. “We are just going to stick these branches wherever we damn well please.”

  Arthur wisely kept quiet while his mom finished jamming the branches into the trunk, mumbling to herself.

  —

  The lights and decorations were the final steps.

  Arthur’s dad had always been a perfectionist about the lights. Maybe it came from being a mechanic, but he’d been fanatical about making sure every wire was hidden, every bulb tucked into the branches. There couldn’t be any dark spots. Black holes, his father had called them.

  Arthur and his mom were not perfectionists. They strung the lights around the tree in less than five minutes. There were a lot of dark spots and black holes.

  But none of that seemed to matter to Barbara.

  She got home as Arthur and his mother were cleaning up. They had just finished putting the extra tree branches into the box and were picking up all the scraps from the carpet when Barbara came barreling through th
e front door with the usual armload of dolls she carried to her friends’ houses.

  “It’s our Christmas tree!” Her eyes widened in surprise at the sight of the sparkling tree—well, hedge—in the living room.

  “Your brother put it up,” their mom said proudly. “We still have to decorate it.”

  “Thank you, Arthur!” Dropping her dolls in the middle of the hallway, Barbara raced across the living room. Her blond head dove into Arthur’s stomach. He didn’t want to look like a wimp, but she had a pretty hard head for a seven-year-old. He tried not to wince.

  “It looks like magic with all the lights,” his sister said, clasping her hands and stepping back to stare at the tree again, as if she had never seen one before. “Let’s turn everything off so we can see it better.”

  Arthur’s mom switched off the living room lamps.

  As they stood there in the darkness, with little sunbursts of light from the tree shining on their clothes and faces, Arthur felt strangely hopeful for a minute. It was as if their old life had briefly flickered back on, like an old movie—as if none of the bad things had happened to them yet.

  Barbara, who could be a real pain in the butt sometimes, had this sweet, angelic expression on her face. His mom was smiling and not crying. And the tree didn’t look half as bad as he’d thought it would.

  It had to be the lights, he decided. That’s what made the difference.

  Without realizing it, Arthur had discovered the first important thing.

  EIGHTEEN

  Arthur got two weeks off from his probation for Christmas.

  Of course, he still had 112 more hours to serve, so it wasn’t really a gift or anything. Officer Billie gave him the news. He wasn’t expecting her visit.

  In fact, when Arthur looked out the window and saw a cop car pulling into their driveway late on Monday afternoon, his first panicked thought was that something bad had happened to his mom and Barbara.

  They’d gone shopping after school because Barbara needed new shoes and his mom needed a nice dress to wear for a big job interview she had at a dentist’s office on Wednesday. The dentist was looking for a full-time receptionist. If his mom got the job, it would mean she could quit her two lousy part-time waitressing ones. Arthur was trying not to hope too much, but he really wanted her to get it.

  When Officer Billie stepped out of the car, Arthur released the shaky breath he’d been holding. At least he knew everything was okay with his mom and Barbara—even if it probably wasn’t okay for him.

  The officer was carrying something as she came up to the front door. From a distance, Arthur couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked like some type of round container. He figured it was from the Junk Man. Returning something else he didn’t like.

  As he fumbled to open the door for Officer Billie, Arthur wished he weren’t wearing the wrinkled jeans and undershirt he’d thrown on when he got home from school. He also hoped he didn’t have peanut butter on his teeth from the sandwich he’d been eating.

  “May I come in for a minute, Mr. Owens?” Officer Billie said in her official cop voice when he finally got the door open.

  “Sure, okay, yes,” Arthur said in a rush, stumbling backward to let her in.

  As the officer stepped inside and took off her cap, Arthur glanced around nervously, worrying what she might notice. The collection of dirty glasses on the coffee table? Barbara’s paper dolls strewn all over the living room? The misshapen Christmas tree? The stacks of unopened and unpaid bills drifting out of the bookshelves?

  “I have come on official and unofficial business,” Officer Billie stated, remaining squarely in the middle of the hallway. “First, the official part: I have not received any further complaints from Mr. Hampton, so I assume you followed his directions successfully on Saturday. Is that right, Mr. Owens?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I guess so,” Arthur replied carefully, wondering if the officer had any clue what the directions were.

  “Well, I expect this will continue to be the case,” Officer Billie said crisply. “However,” she continued, “Mr. Hampton has informed me that he will be away for the Christmas holiday, so he has requested that you be given two weeks off from your probation. Your work for him will resume on the first Saturday in January. Is that clear?”

  Arthur nodded.

  “Here. I’ve written down the date for you. Saturday, January fourth.” Officer Billie handed him a piece of paper. “And now for the unofficial business.” She held out a cookie tin with a rocking horse on the top. “Every Christmas, I make caramel corn for my kids. It’s my specialty,” she explained. “Merry Christmas.”

  Arthur had no idea how to reply. Officer Billie wasn’t the kind of person you’d expect to get a gift from. Especially not something she’d made. It also took him a minute to realize that when the officer said “my kids,” she probably wasn’t talking about her real kids—she meant juvenile delinquents like him.

  “Stop.” Officer Billie’s hand went up as the awkward silence continued. “When someone gives you a gift, it is polite to look them in the eye and say in a clear and appreciative voice, ‘Thank you very much.’ ”

  Arthur forced his eyes upward. “Thank you very much.”

  “You’re welcome,” Officer Billie replied. She pointed one of her square fingers at him. “Share it with your family. And don’t mess up over the next couple of weeks. A lot of people mess up over Christmas. It’s a tough season. Don’t let me catch you being one of them.”

  Arthur nodded. “Okay.”

  Officer Billie put on her cap. “Have a good evening.” She pulled the door closed behind her with a firm, official-sounding thud.

  After she left, Arthur leaned against the door, still holding the caramel corn and feeling kind of shaken up. People could surprise you, he thought.

  NINETEEN

  Officer Billie was right about one thing, Arthur discovered. Despite having the least sweet personality of anybody he knew, she made awfully good caramel corn.

  And she was also right about another thing.

  Christmas was a very tough season.

  The one bright spot was that his mom got the receptionist job. The dentist called a few days before Christmas and told her she could start in January. After his mom got off the phone with her new boss, she sat down on the kitchen floor and started crying into a dish towel because she was so happy. That’s what she told Arthur when he came running into the kitchen to check if she was okay—she was crying because she was happy.

  Sometimes he gave up trying to figure out his mom.

  —

  Christmas Day was a different story. If it had been up to Arthur, he would have pulled the covers over his head and pretended it was a regular day. But Barbara and his mom were counting on him.

  So when Barbara poked him in the arm at about six o’clock and whispered loudly in his ear that Santa had been there, he managed to say “Good, let’s see” in a fake excited voice. He followed his sister’s polka-dot robe downstairs.

  “Merry Christmas, guys!” Arthur’s mom said extra cheerfully as they came into the living room. She’d put on bright pink lipstick, even though it was six in the morning and nobody else was around. “White Christmas” was playing on the record player. The air smelled faintly of burned cinnamon rolls.

  Arthur could tell his mom was trying hard to make Christmas nice for them. But it seemed strange. Like they were actors in a play. Or aliens on a planet that looked exactly like their own, only it wasn’t.

  Barbara squealed as she tore open her gifts of baby dolls, and paper dolls, and Barbie dolls—and more dolls than Arthur could be bothered to pay attention to. He’d already been warned about the gifts. How there wouldn’t be many and most of them would be for Barbara. Money was still tight.

  He handed his mother the small gift he’d wrapped for her. “Here, Mom.”

  “For me?” she said, looking surprised.

  “It’s nothing, Mom, really.”

  His mom opened the tissue pape
r slowly. Inside, there was a small metal flowerpot in the shape of a watering can.

  “It’s a flowerpot,” he explained, just in case she didn’t get it.

  “I know what it is,” she said, still acting surprised. “But you shouldn’t have spent money to buy me anything this year. Not with all that’s happened. I was fine with nothing.”

  Arthur shrugged. “That’s okay. It wasn’t much.”

  Because the truth was—it was free.

  He’d found it on the same Saturday that he’d found the mirror. It had been stuck in a trash can with a bunch of broken clay pots and garden stuff. The silver spout was what he spotted first.

  Once he’d managed to pull out the rest of it, Arthur knew it would make the perfect gift for his mom. She always kept a row of African violets on the kitchen windowsill.

  He was pretty proud of how it had turned out too. He’d glued the shaky handle back into place and polished the metal with some of his dad’s chrome polish. It looked brand-new. If the person who had thrown out the flowerpot could see how nice it looked now, Arthur was sure they would have kept it.

  “Well, thank you,” his mom said, squeezing his shoulders with one arm. “However much it was. I love it.”

  —

  As it turned out, Arthur’s mom surprised him with a gift too. She handed him a flat box wrapped in green paper. When he opened it, he found his dad’s silver-dollar collection. Six mint-condition peace dollars displayed in a black frame.

  “I saved these for you. I know your dad wanted you to have them,” his mom said softly.

  A thick lump rose in Arthur’s throat as he remembered looking at these silver coins with his dad. He’d taken them to elementary school a bunch of times for show-and-tell. He’d written a research report about them in third grade called “All About Money.” His dad had often said, “One day, when I’m gone, I’ll pass them on to you.”

  Now that he had them, Arthur didn’t really want them.

  Not now—or ever.

  “And I got something for you too, Arthur. Open it! Open it!” Barbara flopped on the sofa next to him. For once, he was grateful to his sister for interrupting something.