In the living room, Karen unwraps her gift while chattering at Bobby. “I told you they’d have popcorn and cranberries on the tree, didn’t I? Daddy always says it’s traditional but really”—she addresses Reuben—“you’re just too cheap, Mommy always said you were just like your old man, only”—now she turns to Bobby—“my grandpop decorated his last Christmas tree with his brains.”
She runs down just as Sam is about to strangle her. It is a vintage Karen performance. She’s too loaded to understand what she is doing to her father, who has sunk back onto the couch, grey in the face and looking as if he wants to throw up.
Karen shakes out the handmade sweater—Ma Lunt’s work, made to order in the same blue as Karen’s eyes, with enough room in the front for all of her endowment. Dumping the box on the floor, she jumps up and yanks her T-shirt over her head. She’s not wearing a bra and for a moment she is naked from the waist up, her oversized breasts rising and falling in all their breathless centerfold extravagance. She is oblivious to the stunned embarrassment of the three men. Then she pulls on the new sweater and shakes her tits at Bobby.
“Like it?” she teases, glittery-eyed, running her palms over her breasts.
But it is only a reflex, and she leaves Bobby standing there grinning uncertainly.
“Daddy,” she demands from the kitchen where she has opened the refrigerator, “ ‘d’ja drink all the booze already? There’s not a single fucking brew in here.”
Coming up behind her, Sam lifts her hand from the fridge door and closes it firmly. “There’s no booze in the house. No coke either. No pot. No pills—”
“Sammy,” his father says, following them into the kitchen, “maybe Karen and her friend would like to stay to supper.”
Karen looks at him blankly, then turns on Sam. “Fuck you,” she says. She grabs the corner of the bike jacket he is still wearing and yanks down on it. “You may be bigger than me but you pissed the bed until you were eleven, you moron, so don’t you try to pull that shit on me.” She struts toward Bobby, who is holding her discarded shirt and clearly wishing he were somewhere else. She points at Sam. “Dimbulb, over there, he couldn’t fucking read until he was fif’—”
“Karen,” Reuben interrupts, taking her by the elbow, “that’s enough. You’re loaded, honey. Why don’t you sit down in the living room with your friend for a while and settle down and then we’ll have a meal together? You two stay overnight. Stay out of this rough weather.”
She shakes off his arm violently. “Just leave me the fuck alone! I don’t know why I bothered to come here. I thought on Christmas maybe I’d get treated like a human being. No fucking way in this house. It’s the same old shit from my prick brother and you—‘there’s no booze in the house,’” she mocks. “You’re the one who doesn’t dare have it around, you’re the one with the problem, and every fucking time I come through the fucking door, you lay it off on me. Karen’s fucking loaded again.” Her face is wet and blurry. “Bad old Karen.”
Reuben tries to embrace her but she jerks away from him, raising her hands in a warding-off gesture.
“Enough,” he says, backing away. “I love you, Karen. It hurts us all when you’re like this. I’d like you to go now. Come see us when you’re sober.”
In the silence, Pearl makes a choking noise, and Sam realizes behind the hand covering her face, his stepmother is crying. She hates to cry almost as much as she hates scenes. Reuben moves toward her, putting his hand on her shoulder.
“I’m outta this shithole,” Karen says.
With an automaton clumsiness, Sam lurches after her. She slams the door of her friend’s rusty Maxima between them.
Bobby shuffles up, mild brown eyes cloudy. “Sorry, man. I didn’t know what the situation was.” He hesitates and scratches his head. “I just met Kare last night.”
Sam raps on the window and Karen rolls it down angrily.
When he stoops to speak to her, he’s startled to see how exhausted and pale she is. She’s looking very hard-used for just nineteen. It softens his heart toward her.
“Dad’s sick as a dog. Why don’t you sleep it off and come by and see him tomorrow? Tell him you didn’t mean all that garbage.”
“Go fuck yourself,” she snarls. She struggles with the sweater and he looks away as it comes flying out of the car and lands on the ground.
Sam picks it up. “And Merry Christmas to you too, Kare,” he mutters.
The leather of the jacket is stiff in the cold and he has to fumble at the pockets to get his fingers a ways into them. A rigid edge of paper stops his fingertips in the left-hand pocket. It’s thick like oaktag. Then a fingertip slides over a satin surface and without seeing he recognizes it as a Polaroid snapshot. He pulls it out as he trudges up the back steps and the porchlight shows him a picture of the horsebarn at the farm. He flips it over and on the back is printed: Look Inside.
The puppy. He can see it in his mind’s eye, a bright-eyed little beagle huddled in a box with a blanket and a chew toy, and nearby, to keep it warm, one of the electric space heaters his father’s been using to heat the farmhouse while he works.
The kitchen is empty. He hears the television in the living room. He props himself against the frame of the archway, two fingers behind him clipping the snapshot out of sight. Reuben and Pearl and the baby are on the couch together under a quilt, in the dreamy blue passivity of television light. Not paying any attention to the tube—it’s just a sound machine, like waves at the beach—all three have closed their eyes. Reuben opens one eye at Sam.
The only sound is
