She still looks peaked to him, and she was out on the frigging court with him in the raw night air. He flips up the volume again and steps on the gas. She knocks it down again.
“Put me out on the Main Road once we get to town, okay? Unless you want to go parking?”
“No,” he says, reaching for the volume button again. “And don’t bring it up again. And don’t touch this button again either.” She sticks her tongue out at him. He ignores her.
She trips down the hill, cutting steadily down through backyards to cross Depot and skirt her own block, into the fringe of swamp and trash woods along the banks of Mill Brook, over the abandoned tracks and to the Mill. She gropes the candle and matches cached just inside the door and lights her way to the cubby. Fixing the candle in the neck of an old bottle and wrapping her coat around her, she curls up on the dirty old mattress on the cot. She could find a party and be warmer—get high too, of course—and not have to go home. Anything beats going home. But the very mildness of the night seems to recommend this choice, just as finding Samgod on the outdoor court and reclaiming his sweatshirt struck her as an omen, a cosmic whisper assuring her he’s hers. Hadn’t she cut off Nat’s move like a chain saw through butter?
His sweatshirt still smells of him. When she is wearing it, she feels as if she has crawled inside his skin. She knows things about him. How scared he is. Of her. It’s a trip having power over him. Knowing he’s cherry. He’s going to be a pushover. Then she’ll have all his magic, all his strength.
The damp chill holds her in a trough of shallow sleep, dreaming a dream she cannot recall when she wakes in a frigid, silvery predawn, her upper lip wet with mucus, a curious tension in her groin. Like a cramp.
14
Sick as a yellow dog on Christmas Eve, Reuben gives up and lets Sam take him to the ER.
“What happened to the glovebox?” he asks, on seeing cardboard taped over the doorless compartment.
“Oh.” Sam grimaces. “It fell off.”
Reuben closes his eyes. Given the kid’s proclivity for misjudging his own strength, it’s a safe bet Sammy’s managed to rip it off. Too embarrassed to mention doing it—no doubt he was going to quietly repair it without a word.
The doctor scolds Reuben and sends him home after sinking a spikeful of high-octane antibiotic into his hip. Twenty-one days of a cephalosporin-class bug-killer turns out to be a ninety-buck pop. Reuben gropes his way into the pharmacy to use his bankcard to cover it. He dozes off on the ride home. And sleeps through the rest of the day and the evening.
Sam and Pearl put the tree up and decorate it—a considerable project involving stringing cranberries and popcorn and other obeisances toward tradition. When the holiday is over, the tree with its natural garland intact will go outside to feed the birds, who won’t care that the popcorn has gone stale and the cranberries gooshy and bitter. While they are hanging the ornaments and putting presents under the tree, Indy grabs at all the shiny going by. It’s a year or two too soon for her to have even the vaguest understanding of the festivities but she enjoys it at the most primitive level and without reservation, self-consciousness or expectation.
Observing her, Sam envies his baby sister’s purity of experience. He cannot help missing Reuben’s participation. He misses Frankie, he misses the Christmases of his early childhood—he even misses the latter Christmases after his parents broke up. There had always been the small and reassuring traditions like the popcorn-and-cranberry garland even as the family itself fractured, diminished and most recently, grew again. His stepmother’s gaze meets his and he understands she is feeling the same shadow of Christmas Past.
“My mother always said it never really felt like Christmas to her in Florida,” Pearl says, pausing to dig a raw cranberry Indy has pried from the garland out of the protesting baby’s mouth. “Wish she could be here now.”
“Want to look at the old albums?” he asks.
Her whole face lights up. “Let’s. I’ll make some cocoa.”
Christmas is unwrapped in slashing sleety snow. At four-thirty in the morning, Sam is on the phone, sleepily switching the service to Maxie Sweetser in Greenspark. Maxie doesn’t mind; he loves bad weather. It keeps his three wreckers paying for themselves and keeps Maxie out of the house when his in-laws are infesting the place. Jonesy turns up at five, offering to work, and Sam tells him Maxie is already covering them. They have a cup of cocoa together, wish each other Merry Christmas and Jonesy departs to spend the rest of the day with his girlfriend.
The bad weather intensifies the warmth and closeness of the indoors but it is not suffocating, only a reminder to be grateful for shelter. Sam grabs the excuse to call his mother, who now lives fifty miles away, to tell her he can’t make it over to see her because of the weather. She seems to be as relieved as he is.
Deliberately he says nothing about Reuben’s illness. It isn’t her business anymore. She has to get her gossip about his father’s life now from Karen, on the rare occasions mother and daughter see each other. The last time Sam answered—or rather didn’t answer—a question from his mother about Reuben was when she asked if it was true his father was seeing a colored woman.
“Colored?” Sam had responded incredulously. “Hold on, I’ll look.” And had walked away, leaving the phone off the hook. An hour or so later, he picked it up again and the line was dead, so he guessed she had found something
