The Hundred Gifts
Page 31
Oh, the food they’d had back then. Homemade stollen. Carefully carved geese so juicy that whole tablecloths were ruined. Venison sausages and greens and casseroles and hot, buttery braided breads. The drinking. The music. The laughter. The visits from friends and relatives and the revelry through the night. The fire that smoldered for hours, Elise’s nephews forever dredging up pocketfuls of acorns and tossing them into the flames just to hear the pops and watch the girls squeal when an errant shell would skitter right out of the hearth and rattle across the den floor. The shimmery garland that reflected the firelight and danced light and shadows off of cheeks, and the smell of pinecones soaked with cinnamon oil, with just a touch of the stench of melted lard from the bird feeders the girls had made prior to soaking those pinecones.
Elise brushed her hands together and stood, stretching her back.
The memories. It had all been so perfect. So just-so. So as she liked it.
Except for one thing.
Robert.
The stony silences. The hushed, drunken insults. The withheld intimacy and the yelling and the way he always seemed on edge, as if she’d ruined his life by tethering herself and her children to him.
“Can’t you please just relax? Have a drink. Eat a cookie,” she’d begged him time and again. “It’s Christmas, after all.”
“To hell with your Christmas,” he’d growl, climbing the creaking steps to the bedroom, leaving her curled up in front of the dying firelight with itching arms and the garland shining onto her face in a darkened, empty room, her feet tucked under her, her shoulders shaking mournfully.
Robert hated tinsel. Thought it was trashy. Thought it beneath them.
She hadn’t decorated with tinsel in years. Probably not since the girls had last come home for Christmas anyway, so what did it even matter?
“Well, to hell with you, Robert,” she said aloud now, all these years later, shrugging off the memory and brushing her hands together once more, only this time with feeling. “I happen to think tinsel is beautiful, and this year, by God, we will have tinsel.” She bent and hoisted the mostly empty box and lugged it down to the basement, where she scooted it back underneath the metal shelves. When it was in place, she stood and rummaged through a plastic tub on the shelf just above where the Christmas box went. After a few moments, and one panicky skipped heartbeat when she could have sworn she saw a telltale fiddle shape on the back of a spider tucked inside a broken ornament in the bottom of the box, she emerged, clutching a fistful of silver strands.
The phone rang just as she reached the top of the stairs, and she paused as if to answer it, then thought better of it and jerked her hand away from the receiver as if it were alive. It might be one of the girls. Calling to say they couldn’t make it again this year. Calling to wish her a Merry Christmas a couple of days early. Calling to put their unwilling children on the phone to spit out an awkward thank-you for the mailed gift that they probably didn’t like and most likely had already returned for money or a gift card they could use to buy something they really wanted.
It was Christmas—of course she wanted to talk to them. She would call the girls later. All of them. She had to. And she’d make some other calls too. But first, the tinsel. Before Robert had anything to say about it.
She bent to check the oven on her way back through the kitchen. The cookies were browning beautifully. Just a few more minutes and they’d be perfectly soft in the middle with the tiniest crunch around the edges—just as the girls always liked them. The mulled wine she’d put on the stove in the morning had begun to percolate, sending a cloud of heavenly spicy orange scent into the room. She supposed she’d drink plenty of it later. She supposed she’d need to, when the weight of everything that had happened over the past several hours pressed in on her and she was faced with her own demons, demanding that she look at the truth.
“Well, good fortune,” she announced to Robert as she passed him on the way to the den. She held up the tinsel and shook it. “I still had some from years ago. It’s a bit dusty, but it will do.”
She breezed right past his recliner and into the den, tossing strands of tinsel gleefully toward the tree while she was still steps away from it. Pieces that didn’t snag on a limb fluttered to the floor, creating a shivering river of reflected tree lights.
“I know you don’t care for it,” she called. “But maybe just this once you’ll leave it be.” She artfully arranged a few strands, cocking her head to one side to study her work. “Maybe you’ll get used to it. I’m sure you will.”
After a few short minutes, she was done. She placed her hands on her hips and smiled wide—something she rarely did (her mom had taught her from day one that farmers’ wives have nothing but hard work and poverty to smile about, so what was the point?)—thoroughly enjoying her handiwork. The tinsel draped off the tree’s branches like silver molasses, and for the briefest moment she had a mind to wrap her hair into a tight ponytail and pull on a pair of kneesocks and lie underneath, see if the magic was still there.
“Well,” she said, wiping the corners of her eyes, not even realizing until she made the motion that there was wetness there. She swiped a knuckle past the tip of her nose as well. “I think it’s beautiful. A tree all three girls will love.” She kept staring at the blue spruce, even as she backed into the front room, and absently reached down and tweaked the stockinged toes of her husband’s left foot, perched on the recliner, with a familiarity born of decades of marriage. “Don’t you, Robert?”
But Robert didn’t answer.
She knew he wouldn’t.
He was dead.
Photo by Lacey Crough
Jennifer Scott is an award-winning author who made her debut in women’s fiction with The Sister Season. She also writes critically acclaimed young adult fiction under the name Jennifer Brown. Her debut YA novel, Hate List, was selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a VOYA Perfect Ten, and a School Library Journal Book of the Year. Jennifer lives in Liberty, Missouri, with her husband and three children.
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