Christmas in July

by Alan Michael Parker

  We walk, and I think she’s surprised by how far, across the soccer practice field to the fence that isn’t a fence, just a gate opening into the woods, and then we’re walking on the footbridge. I love this footbridge, how it elevates me, keeps me above the leaves and the branches when I walk in the woods, how the little creek never gets me and the bugs and the critters are kept safe. It’s humanity at our best, I want to tell Christmas.

  The bench was donated in honor of Sergeant Robert C. Finnegan. Christmas runs her finger along the raised words, tracing the plaque.

  “Here,” I say, sitting to join her.

  She slides a few inches away and slumps a bit more, hunches those shoulders, and then pulls her hat down, hard, almost to her jawline. It’s an ugly hat, a woven thing she must have gotten at the thrift store, although it’s possible the hospital gives cancer kids hats.

  “What are we doing here?” she says.

  “Lunch,” I answer as cheerily as I can, which is not very. “I…I’m sorry,” I say.

  “She’s a bitch,” Christmas says, and means Aunt Nikki. “That’s possible,” I say, and giggle a little. “You’re weird,” Christmas says.

  Weird’s good. I feel like we’re beginning to understand each other. Maybe we can eat. I take out my snap-lid lunch container, which has a leftover piece of pizza that I’ve cut up, to make it fit. I offer her a piece.

  “I’m not hungry,” she says.

  Of course she’s not. What was I thinking? She’s probably throwing up everywhere, on her Aunt Nikki and all over the carpet, and on herself. She’s losing, leaving her body, emptying herself; that’s what dying is like, when you empty out so much that even your outside empties out, and then you’re gone.

  Or it’s nothing like that. “I come here a lot,” I say.

  Christmas lifts her head. “Same bench.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Do you want to put your name on it?”

  “What?”

  I’m digging into my purse, feeling for and then finding the knife I took from Fremont, who took it from someone else, who took it from someone else, who took it from a bad dad or grandfather, who left it lying around. I take out the knife, slide it out of its leather holder, a heavily tooled sheath. It’s a long knife, maybe five or six inches of the scary part, the handle dark wood, the blade serrated, the teeth like little ridges or something down the blade to the point. It’s a very nice knife.

  “Whoa,” Christmas says.

  I jab the knife hard into the wood between us, dig it in. “Right here.”

  “Whoa,” she says, but she reaches for the handle. She wiggles it and then unsticks the knife from the wooden slat, looks at the blade, then begins to poke into the wood, little pokes, but getting into it, then jabbing and then, finally, carving with clear purpose.

  We don’t speak for a long time. “I’m sorry that you’re sick,” I say. “Does it hurt?”

  Christmas stops for a moment, gives me a funny look. I’m no good at people, I think. She doesn’t like me.

  “No,” she says, and we both know she’s lying.

  I take a bite of cold pizza, chew. It tastes awful: I think I’ll never eat again, and that will show everyone, I’ll go on a hunger strike, if Christmas won’t eat, if that’s how she’s going to die, then I won’t eat, too. She’s so brave.

  She’s digging the knife into the wood, hard, white-knuckled, then dragging the blade tip through the gouge. She digs again into the same wound she has made. I watch. She’s carving an X.

  If I have to do it alone, okay, I will fix everything. Even if no one makes me, I will stop making mistakes, stop falling, I will help everyone be happy: Mom, Dad, Fremont, Lucas, Janet. Making other people happy will cure me, I think. So what if no one comes home to me.

  The X that Christmas digs feels like my name too, I think.

  I will change everything, call Mom back, tell her the truth, insist. Why is Mom the one I need to feel better?

  “Make sure to put the date,” I tell Christmas in July. “You were here.”

  “Can I have this?”

  She wants to keep the knife. I think of all the reasons it’s a bad idea, no. There are too many ways this could go wrong. I think of the other reasons.

  It’s a moment. The girl has to bear more than any of us. Life’s a bad idea for Christmas.

  “It’s yours,” I say.

  WAR

  A wife, a best friend—they don’t die. No one expects to outlive them. I was going first, but now here I am and there’s no one to notice. That’s the surprising part. Monica’s gone, Tony Malone’s gone, and I’m seventy-three with the pills and the bad foot, and I’m working the register at Bing’s Hardware and Garden Center thirty-six hours a week, as I always have, where they let me sit down. I would like to tell someone I’m still here, but I don’t know who.

  I outlived all of the dogs. Monica gave the dogs the same name, each Mini Schnauzer named Geraldine to preserve our memory of the very first Geraldine, to keep that sweetheart alive, Monica would say. Geraldine was never a sweetheart the way Monica remembered, but Monica died with those nice memories, so she can keep them, it doesn’t matter to anyone but me.

  All of those dogs, all four, they were the same breed but unpredictable. They were people, not like our kids but more like adopted kids, never turning out the way you think. All girls, our dogs—that’s what Monica wanted.

  The second Geraldine wasn’t the same; she wouldn’t go outside for the longest time, she liked to sneak into the hallway to pee, so she didn’t seem much like the first Geraldine, who did everything right, Monica always said. We shortened the second Geraldine’s name from “Geraldine Two” to “Two,” and then of course the third one had to be “Three,” and then “Four” became a kind of joke, like yelling when you hit a golf ball. “Four!” We’d call the dog for her dinner, and that was kind of funny—or so I thought, and Monica did too, she laughed. But right around that time Monica wasn’t laughing at much of anything anymore, and then she got angry, and then it got worse. Two, Three, and Four would never compare to Geraldine, according to Monica. Monica had to be right. Sure, I would say, there will never be another Geraldine.

  At the end, Monica talked a lot about the first Geraldine. The memories were better than the feelings, I think.

  I liked Two the most—she never stopped being bad. But I outlived them all, which I guess isn’t much to brag about. Dogs die a lot, and at some point, even if you’d like to, you can’t get another dog, you’re too old, you live too long. You’re in your efficiency making dinner or you’re working thirty-six hours a week, and it wouldn’t be fair. My new home care health worker, whose name is Jana—they don’t stay on the job either, I make that little joke to myself—says I could get a grown dog, but a puppy’s not a good idea. Even then I might have to consider retiring from Bing’s, to be fair to the dog. I say working at Bing’s is retiring, and she laughs. Well, she sort of laughs: she’s too busy to laugh. All these people rushing by me.

  I remember where most everything is in the aisles, usually, but with my laminate, I know exactly where everything is. No one seems to mind that I check my chart. Looking up something looks helpful, official. Sometimes, when Hakim forgets, he asks me to check on my chart.

  I know the difference between kinds of string, rope, twine, cord, and cable. I’m good at being good. I smile. I like to put on my uniform, black pants and the little red vest, even though it doesn’t zip up anymore, and to see my nametag there, Richard, and the big service button that they gave me—Mr. Bing Jr. himself stopped by for the party, the day the three of us got our service buttons, including Julie McLaren, who retired. She was extra nice. I’m not going to retire for a while, I’ve decided. I like to hear the door shush open, the way the air inside and outside are always different. The customer looks lost and I help, I can help. I’m helpful. Being helpful is being someone for a little while.

  A girl walks into the store, which sounds like the start of a joke, but it isn’t, a
nd I hear the air but I don’t look up right away, I am doing my drawer. My drawer’s a mess, I want to say to Sal—who was once married to a Bing, so they say, and always screws up my drawer when I’m at lunch, putting twenties with tens and checks with coupons under the rack, where none of it goes. So I have to redo my drawer every day after lunch, and some days a few times more, if I take a long break, or if I leave the register for any reason. So I’m looking down before I’m looking up, and there’s the girl, but even I know that everything’s different because of her. She comes into the store like some sort of earthquake in Japan. We don’t have earthquakes at Bing’s.

  Monica worked twenty-plus years for Hutchinson’s, at the front desk, taking phone orders and making arrangements at the walk-in according to the FTD book, and helping customers choose which flower and which spray went where in the bouquet, if the book wasn’t to their liking. Even though Hutchinson’s did more than flowers, Monica only wanted to do flowers, and Hutchinson agreed. Working there, she had her theories: she could tell when a customer was going to let her arrange the baby’s breath, she’d say, although there wasn’t a lot of difference between the people sending an engagement spray and the people sending condolences, that was the hardest to guess right. She would see how some people screwed up their faces, they were feeling so much when they came into Hutchinson’s—and she would guess what they were feeling, and she said she was right a lot. It was like working for a doctor, Monica said, because of who wanted flowers and when, guessing the good news and bad.

  It wasn’t like working for a doctor, I knew that. But I kept my mouth shut. I’m not much of a talker. I’d just as soon read another military history during my break than talk to anyone ever again.

  From my stool at Register One, I say to the girl who walks into Bing’s what I say to every customer: “Welcome to Bing’s. Can I help you with something?” And I think about my Monica, and what Monica would say, is the girl here for a funeral or a wedding, and how do I tell?

  The girl doesn’t look at me. She’s tall but in the middle of growing up, with pointy elbows and her hands in her pockets even though it’s warm inside, the A/C already clunking hard today, and instead of walking she’s kind of shuffling, bending over, and she’s wearing a hat, and that’s funny in July, and she’s the skinniest girl I’ve seen in the longest time. She’s so skinny I have a thought: I think I should send her on into light bulbs, she looks like a lamp that’s gone out, in her black watch cap. We sell those caps too, but not too many in the summer.

  She doesn’t answer, a lot of customers don’t answer, especially the ones who see their pictures on the security video right next to the registers—they walk in and their faces get big on the screen, they’re walking toward their faces getting bigger, and they look different, and then they walk under their faces and that seems to make them get quiet. But since I’m helpful, I say the second thing I always say to customers, “Let me know if you need anything,” and no matter it’s my job, my voice comes out a little pinched, and then the words seem to end quicker, I know it’s because of her, and something’s wrong.

  She slouches past my register, and I smell her. Teenagers smell bad. Then I realize, it might not be her: I’m smelling myself, my hands, and my Italian hoagie from lunch, which I have every Tuesday, it’s the special at Ragazzi’s. Oil and vinegar and oregano and salami and American—those are my favorites. The hoagie comes wrapped in waxy paper and you can see the oil and vinegar through the paper, and that’s the best. I smell my right hand, the one I waved: I smell like a hoagie. I should probably go wash, but instead I just use the antibacterial. With my arthritis, I try not to do too much.

  I pull out my laminate. Light bulbs are on aisle seven.

  Saxon Hills was Italian way back, before it was anything. There were farms off Highway 252, big green fields of cabbages, then beans, and then the pumpkin fields, my favorite in the fall, and those farm trucks with the open slats you could hang from in high school, which Tony Malone and I would do, hook an elbow through the slat and swing on his father and Little Uncle Louie’s farm truck. We would drink beers, hanging onto the six-pack with the plastic rings, ripping off one beer at a time, shaking it before handing it over, and swing from the truck as someone else drove, maybe Tony’s brother, I don’t remember, as we bounced in the truck down the rutted farm road. It was the best time a boy could have, the end of a day after working as a picker—that was hard work, but I could do it with my foot, no problem—and the taste of the beer like the sun itself going down, if the sun were cold in your mouth, nothing ever better.

  Tony Malone’s been in my thoughts a lot since he died. That would be two years this March. I probably think about him more now that he’s dead and we’re not watching the Steelers every Sunday—which I can’t explain, how I think about him, which Monica, who’s dead too of course, would have a theory for. He’s like someone sitting behind me, now, rather than next to me. Like a guy on the bus to the city who’s making a little noise and doing something funny with his hands, using a little penknife to cut up and peel an apple, maybe, or pressing the buttons of his cell phone, which he just bought but doesn’t know how to use. Like me, only it’s Tony Malone, who always was called Tony Malone, both names, one of those people who gets both names every time. He got both names his whole life, because his names make a name together, like George Bush. I can’t imagine ever calling George Bush just George.

  Richie Addabrazzi and Tony Malone, we were a pair. His mom always called me Reechee. She had an accent, she was from Italy, not like these people today who come to the United States. She worked harder than Tony Malone and I did, picking in the pumpkin patch, and then she would cook us dinner—or she had already cooked before we started, I guess I don’t really know which. We would eat when it got too dark to work. Every weekend in October, picking. Tony Malone used to tease her about it, because his mom was pretty much a terrible cook, she hated cooking, even Italian dishes. I can’t say I noticed, food just tasted good to me. But she was a different kind of person, that Mrs. Malone, which I did notice when I got older and she got really old. Maybe because Tony’s father was Irish Catholic and she married him anyway. She’s still around—she’s in assisted living but doing good, especially for ninety-three. I visit every other Sunday, and last fall we watched a couple of Steelers games together, even if I did have to tell her what was happening. I wore my favorite Bradshaw jersey.

  Of course, we are all going to die, some today, tomorrow maybe, that’s how it is, which is why I think about better things. But you can’t think about Tony Malone without thinking how he died—run over by a little kid on a bicycle, hitting his head like that. A bicycle, for Chrissakes. He was a veteran, he was seventy-one years old, he had survived everything in life, and he was killed by a girl on a bicycle. That poor little kid who killed him, too, what that little girl has to think about the rest of her life, how screwed up is that.

  My foot kept me out of the service. I was born this way. The fifth metatarsal’s missing from my right foot, that’s on the outside; the pinky toe’s gone too, and even though I have always worn orthopedics, since there’s an ankle ligament missing, the foot drags, it dragged even after the operations. You can tell by looking at me—that’s all it takes, a look. You can tell everything by looking at a person, they don’t have to talk. I can’t run fast and I have hip problems on the other side, with the wear and tear hard on the muscles that go across my body. But I never complained, I don’t like complainers, even if I would have liked to have seen what Tony Malone saw in the service. It’s true that I complain about not having been to the Vietnam, but only to myself. I would have liked the war.

  People assume I’m not smart because I don’t like to talk, and because of my foot. They’re backward: I think more, and I have more time to think than any one of them, not like those people who talk forever. Monica would say that she could see me thinking. A lot of the time, that would make her kind of pissed with me, because Monica liked to talk and she tho
ught talking and thinking made for one another. She would say, If you’re thinking something you should say it, Richard.

  If a man doesn’t talk, he gets to be right. That’s what I would say to Monica, if she were here.

  If that girl gives you a thought about what she’s doing, and it’s bad, you should say so, Richard. That’s what Monica would say. Speak up. If no one can hear you, they’ll stop listening. If they stop listening to you, you’re not there.

  The tall, strange girl is moving real quiet around the store and there are six of us working: me; Walonda, the part-time accountant, doing the books together with Sal in the office up the little stairs; Frank, the store manager, probably on the phone with his girlfriend; Mark in the Gardening Center; and Hakim in the back somewhere. We’re down a couple of people today: Jack has jury duty, and Dee went to the beach this week with her grandkids. Those of us here, we’re all in our vests (except for Frank), and we’re all proud to be at Bing’s. That’s how I see it.

  I think Hakim’s in the back, but he likes to wander the store. He has worked here since he started high school—I’m pretty sure he’s nineteen now, so that would be almost three years—and he’s planning what to do next, but he doesn’t know what that is. He has a year to go in high school, because of when he started. He talks to me a lot, and he doesn’t always need me to answer like everyone else does. He’s funny because of all he doesn’t know. But I know a lot about him, because of him being such a talker: his family, sisters, the war, his coming here, catching up to American ideas, the ones that don’t make sense, and his own ideas. He and I are responsible for cleaning the graffiti: if kids paint the walls outside, first thing that happens when we come in, Frank gives us the bucket and the Wipe-Out. We hook up the pressure washer, and we wear our lined latex gloves and rubber boots we keep in the metal shed by the paving stones. It’s been happening more—the store’s being sprayed more because of the neighborhood changing. Hakim doesn’t mind, he’s good like that. Hakim’s a Muslim from Ethiopia. “I know about neighborhoods changing, Mr. Richard,” he says. Hakim calls me “Mr. Richard.” He calls Frank by his first name, we all do, but me, Mr. Richard.