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“Daddy, look!” Em exclaimed, shoving a picture in my face. “I’m drawing our new house for Santa.”
“That’s awesome! Look, you even drew the garbage can.”
“That’s you.”
“Oh! I was looking at it wrong.”
“Daddy, I’m drawing a picture for Grandma,” Ada said. “It’s Pebbles!”
“Grandma is going to love that.” It looked like a green Koosh ball with fangs.
“Daddy,” Em said, a frown furrowing her brow. “How are we going to show Santa my picture?”
“Well...” I sat up and unwound my scarf. “We could mail it to him? Or we could visit Elfwood and—”
“You can give it to him when we have Cookies with Santa!” Ada enthused.
“Yeah! Cookies with Santa!” Em exclaimed.
Ada gasped. “I need to draw a picture for Santa too!”
They both fell back to their drawing, working with a furious energy they never displayed when it came to homework or household chores.
I rubbed my forehead, trying to dislodge the faint headache building there.
Cookies with Santa.
Right. Because Cass was going to dress up as Santa and eat cookies with the girls, and while he was doing that I was going tonotthink about how I’d lied to him when I was seventeen, and how he’d apparently tried to call me and make up. And I wasnotgoing to spiral into an existential crisis about that call having been mySliding Doorsmoment...and what would my life be like now if I hadn’t missed that train? Or if I had. I didn’t really remember anything about that movie, to be honest. Only that my boyfriend at the time, who had loved it and told me it was a classic, had been outraged when I’d pointed out that Gwyneth’s hair, although perfectly cute by 1998 standards, kept making me think she was about to demand to see the manager of fate.
It didn’t matter if Cass had at one time been the love of my life, and a stupid new phone number had possibly changed the trajectories of both our existences—I had two more loves of my life now, and I was going to give them the best Cookies with Santaever.
And when the girls were having their first real Christmas Valley Christmas, and Cookies with Santa had successfully been transplanted here from our old home in Boston—which was more than I could say for me—I was going to smile and take photos and make sure carols were playing in the background, and definitely not think about Santa being pegged by my high school geometry teacher.
ChapterFive
One of the December tree-lighting ceremonies was on Christmas Eve, and that was the big one. An entire town’s worth of people who ought to have been home sharing quality time with their families, or at least getting drunk alone, gathered instead in the town square to watch the lighting of Bruce the Spruce–a twenty-foot-tall blue spruce whose trunk was carved with the initials of every pair of Christmas Valley teenagers who’d ever dated. Also Mom and Linda’s. In addition to over three hundred softly glowing C-9 bulbs, Bruce sported a mailbox where children could put their Christmas wishes. But according to Mom, every year more and more of those wishes were “wang” and “ballsack,” and the mayor was considering retiring the mailbox.
The other December ceremony involved a smaller tree named Beth (short for Bethlehem) and took place, for reasons nobody could explain, on the eleventh—right outside the old Mercantile Bank. The old Mercantile Bank hadn’t been an actual bank since the 1960s. Instead, the mock-classical late Victorian building now housed, naturally, a year-round Christmas market where you could stock up on all the necessities of the season, like wreaths and glass angels and hideously overpriced wooden nutcrackers that were as tall as small children.
“Daddy!” Em said as I put the girls in the car, “it’ssnowing!”
It really wasn’t. The wet sludge that made the windshield wipers squeak in complaint was more sleet than snow, but at least it wasn’t heavy.
We parked a block away from Main Street, and I went to grab umbrellas from the trunk, only to be struck by a blinding flash of yellow: Dr. Stephen Florris’s Dollar General bag. It was still there, like a heart beating under the floorboards of my cellar. I could almost see the recrimination in Peachblossom’s dead, glassy eyes on every beat:thief, thief, thief. I shoved the bag aside, grabbed the umbrellas, and slammed the lid of the trunk down.
It popped up again.
Thief!
I slammed it again, making sure it caught this time.
“Okay,” I said to the girls. “Let’s go and buy some hot pretzels!”
They cheered as we set off towards Main Street.
Hot pretzels were the only reason I was here at all. Okay, so maybe I was here a bit so that my girls could experience the magic of a Christmas Valley Christmas, but it was mainly the pretzels. Even as a kid, I hadn’t really gotten into the whole Christmas spirit thing. Mostly because Christmas Valley was so soaked in everything Christmas that it was hard for the actual holiday to stand out. Or maybe it was because when I was eight years old and told Santa that what I really wanted for Christmas was for my dad to come home, the guy’s jaw dropped so far I could see the twinkling lights of his grotto reflected off the gold fillings in his back molars. I’d been suspicious of Christmas ever since, but that didn’t mean I was going to deprive my kids of any magic they could find in the season. And I didn’thatethe plaster reindeer that lined the sidewalk in Main Street, or the fact that every lamp post was garlanded in tinsel. And the multitude of blinking lights in the storefront displays did make an otherwise cold, bleak evening seem a little warmer.
Main Street had a carnival atmosphere tonight. There were food trucks parked along the length of it, and barriers blocking off the traffic so that people could wander back and forth across the street freely. Half the town must have been here, buoyed by community spirit and Robinson Farms’ hot mulled apple cider.
