“You good?” He drew back to look directly into her eyes.
“I have a story for you. Come sit with me. I made some hot cocoa. I’ve been chilled all day.”
He shrugged out of his coat, hanging it on the back of a chair. She had the fireplace going, and the Christmas tree was alight with sparkling bulbs.
She handed him a mug of cocoa before joining him on the couch.
“I don’t know where to start,” Mauve said.
“At the beginning?”
She laughed. “But where does the story start? That’s the real question. But anyway, in a nutshell, my mother left my father eighteen months ago. They’re divorced. And she’s in love with her high school sweetheart. They’re getting married, and she’s moving to upstate New York, where he works as a heart surgeon.”
“Whoa.”
“I know. I’m reeling.”
“So she left all those months ago and never told you?”
“She said she wasn’t sure how to. I mean, I kind of get it. How do you tell your daughter you’ve left your husband of thirty-five years and became reacquainted with your high school sweetheart? Which, by the way, and this is important to me, she left my dad months before the high school reunion.”
“That’s where she met … what’s his name again?” Jason asked.
“Doctor David Davidson. Mom says his parents were eccentric.”
“That’s hilarious.”
“Apparently, her Doctor David Davidson suggested they stop here on their way to his house so she could finally tell me what was going on. I got the sense that he wants her to be a bigger part of my life.”
Things were starting to fall into place. “This explains the ornaments.”
“Exactly. She found them cleaning out the attic before she left my dad. I should have known something was up when that box arrived. I hadn’t seen any of those ornaments except for the Christmases I unwrapped them. My mother never put them on the tree.”
“Do you know why?”
“I’ve been thinking about this nonstop. She’s lived her life like a woman who puts plastic covers on her furniture, a drawer full of the ‘good’ candles she’s saving for a special occasion, the nice towels reserved for guests that never come. She didn’t wear her favorite dress because she didn’t want to ruin it. In that same way, she was saving the ornaments for when I married. But they just sat in those boxes all these years, when we could have been enjoying them. It’s such a waste.” She sighed, her shoulders rising up to meet her ears for a second. “She just decided one day to start living, I guess. And that meant she had to leaveher husband. He loved keeping her down and small, pinching pennies and saving all the good stuff for later.”
“I wonder why?” Jason asked.
“I’ve no idea. All I know is that she was right to leave. She’s still young. She has decades to look forward to. With Doctor David Davidson.”
“Makes you think a bit, doesn’t it?” Jason asked.
She nodded, looking into the fire. “All those wasted years. She should have done it earlier.”
“But how could she leave, really? No job. Two little girls.”
“That’s right. She was stuck. She tried sometimes, you know, to choose something she wanted even though it might set him off. Earlier, I was thinking about the Christmas she bought new lights for our tree. My sister and I had asked for white lights instead of the colored ones because that’s what all our friends had. Mom bought them without telling him and, when she pulled them out of the new box and asked my father to string them on the tree, it was like she’d just told him she was having an affair. He tore open the box, ripped the lights out, and threw them at her. Then he kicked over the tree my mother had just gotten into the stand.”
“He kicked over the tree?”
“I know. It was an absurd reaction. He walked out, slamming the door, and drove off somewhere, leaving us all in tears. That’s how he was—angry all the time. A quiet, simmering rage.”
“About what?” Jason asked.
“I’m not entirely sure. Everything, maybe. His lack of power in a world which had no use for him. He often said, ‘no one cares about the working man.’ I think about him sometimes, laying tiles in rich people’s houses and then coming home to his modest house full of bitterness. A ‘cracker box,’ he called it. The only thing he could afford. And always, under those statements, was the implication that, without a wife and two kids, he couldhave had the life he wanted. Regardless, Mom tried to make our home as nice as she could with limited funds. Garage sales. Bargains after the holidays. So clever, really. Millie and I never felt like we were poor. We shared a bedroom. She liked pink and I liked yellow, so my mom painted the room in half. She sewed curtains for my window in yellow. The other in pink. She somehow managed to find a braided rug that combined the two colors. Little things she could afford from her occasional work during the holidays. And that Christmas, she put the tree back up after he kicked it down. She told my sister and me to dry our eyes. She strung the lights, without any of the cursing we could have expected from him. Then we put our decorations on it—not the nice ones in the boxes from my grandmother—the ones my mother had made herself.”
He placed his hand on her knee. “I’m sorry.”
