The Hundred Gifts

by Jennifer Scott

  This time Bren didn’t keep the tears from rolling. Not like anyone would know the difference anyway.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She needed bigger pants. Not exactly the Christmas gift she had been hoping to give herself, but she supposed if she stopped gifting herself midnight bags of potato chips, the pants wouldn’t be an issue.

  Not that Bren had anything better to do at midnight. Not with Larry, Moe, Curly, and Ringo downstairs until all hours, farting around with hard rock versions of songs that should never hear an electric guitar. Songs like “O Holy Night” and “Christmas Shoes.” Terrible, terrible stuff.

  And they had added a singer. Or what you might call a singer if you didn’t actually know what a singer was. This man—Jeremy—was to singing what blackout-drunk people were to dancing. He couldn’t seem to retain the words to even the simplest Christmas song—songs most kindergartners knew by heart—and resorted to filling in imaginary words with a strange fnnn sound to them.

  Who wouldn’t be driven to the soothing arms of grease-saturated vegetables fried to a crisp and coated in sour cream and onion powder?

  Besides, buying new pants meant getting out of the house, for which Bren was grateful. Inside the house, she only waited for the phone to ring. For Paula to fire her for water damage. For Paula to fire her for complaints from the upstairs neighbor. For Paula to fire her for being a general, all-around disaster.

  • • •

  The square was the quaint part of Vargo. The traffic was slow and easily managed by stop signs. The stores were cozy and expensive. The coffee was made to order and the garland bells and snowmen and bows shimmered in the breeze. But beyond the square was the city, such as it was. Stoplights and strip malls and coffeehouse drive-thrus. And traffic. All of which was annoying during the summer, mind-numbing during the spring and fall, but which carried with it a sense of excitement and energy during the holidays. Bren didn’t mind being out in the holiday hullaballoo. Even if she didn’t have much reason to celebrate this year, nor much of anyone to celebrate with.

  Given that it was a weekday, and not really that close to Christmas, Bren didn’t have to fight for a parking space. She’d recently vowed to start parking farther away from doors, anyway, a feeble yet still defensible attempt at correcting the problem. But the wind was blustery that day, and had a hint of snow scent to it. She hadn’t watched the forecast in days, so she had no idea if it was actual snow she was smelling or just the hope of snow—of something, if only one thing, that reminded her of a normal, happy holiday. Even if white Christmases were actually pretty rare.

  She was wearing her winter coat—the big quilted one that she’d planned to get rid of three winters ago, but was still wearing. Three years ago she was easily two sizes smaller, and now she felt stuffed into the thing, her arms barely able to bend comfortably and the snaps periodically freeing themselves when she stretched at the waist. She tugged it around herself as she sprinted across the parking lot, one hand on her head to hold her crocheted hat in place. Her hair would be a disaster after this, but she wasn’t here for a fashion show. Did anyone ever even think about their hair while they were buying bigger pants?

  She nearly mowed over a bell ringer, who looked entirely too relaxed and cheerful to be out in this wind, and Bren was instantly ashamed. Another vow she’d made—to start carrying cash for the red buckets—remained unfulfilled. Upon closer inspection, the man ringing the bell was eighty if he was a day. Surely he was an icicle inside of his coveralls, yet he was still smiling and God-blessing everyone who walked by. Including Bren, whose response to the embarrassment of having nothing for the kettle was the same as it always had been—to duck into the store quickly and pretend she hadn’t noticed him at all.

  Of course, ducking into the store quickly meant she nearly bowled into the greeter, who stood far too close to the door, dressed in shiny satiny holiday finery, looking as if she were about to head out to a Christmas pageant, her moussed curls fluttering as one with the wind that suctioned through the vestibule.

  “Welcome to Saints Department Store. Our latest flyer,” she said, pressing a glossy into Bren’s hand. Cheerful. So cheerful. Probably related to the bell ringer. “Lots of great deals.”

  “Thank you,” Bren said, and took the flyer, though her first glance showed sales on candles and ornaments and platters. Precisely the things she didn’t need this year. Knowing that she wouldn’t be fighting to the death for a marked-down tablecloth threatened to set her into another fit of depression, and she had enough of that going on with the increase in derriere, thank you very much, so she veered through the juniors department and tucked the flyer down the back of a mannequin’s skinny pants.

  Served them right. Not even mannequins looked good in skinny pants.

  Saints had more than compensated for the cold outside. Within seconds, Bren felt a drip of sweat roll down her back, right into her waistband. Great. She always felt fatter when she was sweaty. Peeling off damp too-tight jeans was second in discomfort only to putting them back on again when she was done trying on clothes.

  The Jackson Five sang, at an impossibly high volume, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” a rendition Bren always felt was too manic for Christmas. Christmas was for soothing songs. Quiet ones with heavy undertones of reverence that bordered on sadness. Baby-rocking songs. Songs that lent themselves well to easy-listening voices and choirs and church ladies. Not that there wasn’t any place for happy holiday music. Who didn’t smile when Bing Crosby sang about Frosty? But it wasn’t Frosty you thought of when you thought of Bing, now was it? No, it was that half-agonized David Bowie duet, wasn’t it? Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum, pass the Kleenex.

  Ah, but even Bren recognized that perhaps she was just in a different place this year. A place where jiving to the Christmas beat required way too much energy and far more optimism than she had inside of her.

  And she was sick to death of the scent of cinnamon. When did cinnamon become so inextricably entwined with the birth of Jesus, anyway? And why did every department store, retail store, craft store, and auto supply store have to carry a heaping stock of reeking pinecones? Pinecones were supposed to smell like pine. Was she not the only one who realized this? There was no cinnamon pine tree. And from the looks of things, nobody was buying them, anyway. Always, the bins were overflowing with wafting bags of tree offal, and Saints’s bins were no different. Bren made a wide arc around them, suddenly aware that all she really wanted was to get the damn jeans and get out of there.

  A woman walked by, a coffee in one hand and her cell phone in the other, loudly stressing about a gift that she was, apparently, unable to find anywhere. Bren did not miss those days.

  Maybe Kelsey and Kevin had given her a gift after all. Maybe they’d given her the greatest gift—the gift of a stress-free holiday. Really, who could complain that their biggest holiday shopping frustration was finding the right pair of jeans for themselves? Nobody, that was who.

  She wound her way through the jewelry department, past the handbags—taking the time to inhale deeply and let the scent of leather cleanse her nasal passages—and into the plus-sized department. She didn’t like anything there. She never had understood why so many plus-sized clothes were so loud and unattractive. Big ugly flowers and decades-out-of-style paisley and so damn much elastic, as if overweight women had somehow lost the skill of buttoning a pair of pants. Not a belt to be found anywhere.

  Listlessly, she pulled four pairs of jeans off the rack and headed toward the dressing room.

  She had tried on only the first pair when her phone rang. Bren almost let it go to voice mail, but the sixteens she’d been trying on hadn’t fit, and in a fit of frustration she had stripped them off and plucked the phone out of her purse with every intention of turning it off mid-ring.

  Instead, she saw KEVIN light up across the screen, along with a photo of him arm in arm with her on his graduation day, both of them sq
uinting into the sun so hard and smiling so wide it looked painful.

  “Kevin?” she answered.

  “Swasdı mæ`!”

  Bren pulled the phone away from her ear and double-checked. There was her son, graduation cap in place, gazing back at her. Dear God, it was her nightmare, come true. A stranger, somehow in possession of her son’s phone, calling for help she couldn’t provide because she didn’t speak the language of whatever country he had lighted upon this time. And her telephone pad and pencil nowhere in sight!

  “Hello? Sir? Is everything okay with Kevin?” she asked in a panic.

  She could tell by the laugh that it was, indeed, Kevin. “Sorry, Mom.”

  “Oh, it is you! You had me worried. I thought some vicious person had stolen your phone and was calling for ransom.”

  He laughed again. “Still the same with your paranoia, huh?”

  “It’s not paranoia. Bad things happen every day. It’s reality. You never know. And you were speaking a strange language.”

  “I was saying, ‘Hi, Mom’ in Thai. Is Kelsey not speaking the language yet? I would think she would have at least taught you that much. She’s been here a lot longer than I have.”

  This was something Bren had never considered. It was a terrifying concept—her kids having whole languages in common that she couldn’t even understand. As if the language of Siblings United Against the Parents wasn’t enough. “I don’t know,” she said. “You do? Speak Thai, I mean?”

  “Well, not fluently. Not yet. I haven’t really spent enough time here yet to pick it up as well as I’d like. I was hoping to practice on her.” He sounded disappointed. “I’d still rather speak French or Arabic.”

  She pushed her clothes off the corner bench into a rumpled heap on top of the jeans she’d just shucked off, and sat on it, the plastic cold against her underwear-clad bottom. “But you took Spanish in school.”

  “I didn’t really like Spain all that much,” he said. “It was too gray. Although Pavy thinks we should go back. She thinks it will be much more romantic if it’s just the two of us, without all the others.” Bren rolled her eyes. Pavlina. A girl he’d known for how long? A month? She was now Pavy, the romantic and worldly Pavy. Pavy thinks. Bah.

  And who were all these others? Kevin had embarked on this journey alone. It was what had worried her most about his going. Who would take him to the emergency room if a snake bit him on the knee and he was unable to walk to the nearest medicine hut? Who would flag down help if he flipped an ATV or fell into quicksand or had a heart attack or God only knew what other dangers might befall him? Now that she knew he had a group—Pavy and “the others”—she was almost even more frightened. What if one of these “others” robbed him? What if they were unruly? What if they fought and bullets flew? She had no idea what any of these “others” could be like. Bearded and filthy with foul mouths and smelly clothing. Shifty and intelligent with beady eyes and complicated schemes. Buxom and writhing with movie-star lips and an eye for gold. Bren could think of a hundred more, a hundred worse, things these “others” could be. A thousand, maybe. A million, while sitting right here on Saints’s cold bench—that carried the bum germs of more strangers than she even cared to think about—if only she put her mind to it.

  No. She refused to put her mind to it.

  “So does this mean you’re in Thailand?” Bren asked instead, wishing she’d brought the telephone pad with her. Hurriedly, she hunted through her purse for a pen and something to write on. She found an old candy bar wrapper and turned it inside out so the white paper side was spread across her bare leg, a stolen Marriott pen clutched in her hand.

  “Ko Sichang,” he said.

  Cozy Chang, Bren wrote. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a place. Not too far from Bangkok. But away from all those tourists. Just me and Pavlina and the monkeys.”

  “Monkeys? They have monkeys in this Chang place?”

  He laughed again. Bren was starting to dislike this laugh. It made her feel small, the same way he’d made her feel toward the end at home. As if he were so much more knowledgeable than she was. He probably was. No, he definitely was. But he didn’t have to show it so much. She never showed it when he was a little boy and she was the one teaching him everything. She never tied his shoes and then said, In your face, stupid! She’d been glad to share her knowledge with him. For as short a time as that had lasted.

  “Yes, there are monkeys and a jungle and the remains of Judhadhut Palace.”

  Jude had Hut, Bren wrote.

  “Mom, I’m telling you, there’s a whole world outside of Kansas City that you don’t even know. There’s just something so very intellectual about the ocean, you know what I mean? Connectedness, the whole universe. When I’m eating cashews right off the trees in Koh Phayam or drinking I-don’t-know-what with the chao ley in Koh Jum, I feel like I’m flowing through a universal artery. You know what I mean? It’s like . . . it’s . . . I can’t explain it. The only explanation I can give is that you just haven’t lived until you’ve snorkeled in the Andaman Sea. You haven’t been enriched until you’ve made love in the lagoon off of Koh Phra Thong.”

  Bren’s face burned with a blush. She crossed her legs, suddenly feeling too naked to just be sitting around in a public place. When did her son—her sweet-faced little boy—begin “making love”? And, more to the point, when did he begin feeling comfortable talking to his mother about it? Her pen hovered over the candy bar wrapper, trembling slightly. He’d spouted so many words, she couldn’t keep up. She thought he might have said something about a thong, but it was too close to the “making love” comment for her to possibly have concentrated enough to get it on paper. And there was no way she was going to have him repeat all of that.

  “Are you still there? Mom?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here,” she said. “Um, it sounds like you’re having a wonderful time. Is Cozy Thong your favorite place? You sound very excited.” She winced, her use of the word excited in describing his time at the place where he is clearly “making love” a dreadful, and scandalous, choice of words.

  “I don’t know. I still have to get to Bhutan. I mean, how can you hike the mountains of the happiest place on earth and not feel some sort of connection to humanity, some sort of centering? I think Pavy and I could really take our relationship to a new level there. You know what I mean?”

  Bren blinked. “Disneyland?” She wrote down Disneyland. And then, next to it, possible wedding???

  “What?”

  “You said the happiest place on earth. Isn’t that Disneyland?”

  “What? I don’t know. No, Mom, pay attention.” And there it was again—that condescending tone. “Missourians,” he added scornfully. Bren felt stung. “No, Bhutan. It’s in the Himalayas. It’s supposedly the happiest place on earth. They’re all zenned out over there or something, I don’t know. I’ll find out. After the first of the year, that’s where we’re heading. I got a job back in Rome—crazy place, would not recommend it—and we managed to save up enough to get us most of the way there.”

  “Most of the way? What’s most of the way?”

  “I don’t know. Depends on how we decide to go. Pavy and I aren’t planners. That’s so very American, I think. You know what I mean?”

  Bren wished more than anything that he’d stop asking her if she knew what he meant. Of course she didn’t know what he meant. She didn’t understand why suddenly asking a reasonable question made you a Missourian, said with such contempt. And she didn’t understand what was wrong with being a planner, or being American, for that matter. She didn’t understand when her son became so above it all, he and his “others.” He and his lovemaking Pavy with her cozy thong.

  “So we’re planning to head up to Pak Kret in a few days, make it an extended visit. You know where Pak Kret is, right?”

  “Of course I know where it is,” Bren snap
ped. She may not be as worldly as her children, but she at least knew where her daughter lived. She had joked to Kelsey while helping her pack that a place called Pack Rat was perfect for her. Kelsey had not appreciated her humor.

  He laughed. “I was just making sure you didn’t think it was in Universal Studios or something.”

  Bren glared, but she had nothing to glare at, so she settled on glaring at herself in the mirror. She could hear noise of the fitting room filling up around her. Voices, happy voices, women thrilled to be out shopping, just as she and Kelsey might have been if this were a normal Christmas. If Kelsey hadn’t abandoned her.

  There was a soft knock at her door.

  “Yes?” Bren asked, sitting up straighter, snatching her too-small jeans off the floor and draping them over her lap modestly, as if the knocker had X-ray vision and could see through the door.

  “Excuse me, ma’am? Are you all right? You’ve been in there for a while.”

  “Who’s that?” Kevin asked. “Are you not at home?”

  “Nobody,” Bren said.

  There was another knock. “Ma’am? Are you okay? Should I get someone?”

  “I should let you go. I thought you were at home.”

  “No, no, it’s fine. I’m fine.” Then, realizing she’d said this last bit into the phone, said it again, louder, to the door. “I’m fine.”

  “I can call when I get to Bhutan.”

  “Everything’s fine; I’m just doing a little shopping, is all.” Suddenly Bren was desperate to keep him on the line. He may have been treating her like a down-home servant, but he was still her son, and hearing from him was still rare enough for her to not want to let it go easily. “I can talk and shop at the same time.”

  “Ma’am, if you’re not trying on clothes, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the fitting room,” the voice on the other side of the door said. Why would they not just leave her alone? What was wrong with giving someone a little bit of privacy?