“Teddy Cooper gave us that two years ago. He got it in a happy meal, said it was the “happiest meal of his life,” and so he turned it into an ornament so he could always remember.”
“Wow. Okay…” Clark scraped his memory for the last time he’d laughed as much as he laughed today, only to come up empty. Brushing that thought away, he picked up a tiny gold band turned into an ornament by an interlocked strand of clear fishing line. He dangled it so close to his eyes his lashes brushed the circlet of metal, trying to discern what it could possibly be. “What about this one?”
“Condola Walker. She broke off her engagement and that’s the ring.”
“What?” The urge to throw the ring across the room fought his urge to run into town and return the jewelry to this Condola person. Who would give up something so expensive when they could have just pawned it? Kate, unmoved by his indignation, rolled her eyes.
“It was, like, twelve dollars or something. Believe me, she was glad to be rid of it. Keep ’em coming. We’ll never get this tree decorated at this rate.”
Shaking off the abject strangeness of someone just giving away their engagement ring, Clark hung it up towards the top of the tree. It caught the light, spinning in the gentle breeze of the drafty old house. Even if he wasn’t inclined to like her—which he was, he’d admitted defeat in his battle against his affection for Kate—he’d still be the first to admit how impressive Kate’s instant recall of the facts of the town was. Like a close-hand magic trick, Clark all at once wanted to move in closer and step further back. Her confession about her childhood rattled him; the distraction of decorating didn’t prove as distancing as he hoped. She’d been so broken by her family that she’d devoted her life to everyone else in this town.
No wonder they all came at her call today. No wonder they decorated his house and cooked a banquet at her request.
“This one’s a tiny fake tree,” Clark said, twirling the small carving. Kate wedged herself between the wall and the tree, trying to decorate an unseen portion of branches, so this one demanded some description.
“Does it have little red baubles on it?” she asked, muffled by the tree between them.
“Yes.”
“That one’s from Mr. and Mrs. Simon. Their little grandbaby died, and Mrs. Simon built the coffin herself out of a tree in their backyard. She took a piece of the scrap wood and carved that.”
Clark cradled the tiny ornament in the palm of his hands, staring down at it reverently as he searched for a word to properly describe the empty cavern opening in his chest. He hadn’t felt this way in so long.
“That’s sad.”
“Don’t worry. There are plenty of funny ones in there.” Kate came to the rescue as Clark placed the tiny tree in a high place of honor upon the larger tree. “Do you see any paper flowers made out of thick paper? They should have music notes on them, if that helps.”
Digging around, he finally found not one, but about twenty of those flowers tucked into a shoebox in the bottom of one of the ornament crates.
“Yeah.”
“Those were given to us by Pastor Mark, but he didn’t make them. He caught a bunch of boys making paper airplanes out of hymnal pages, so he decided if they liked folding paper so much, they would take all two hundred of the out-of-date hymnals and make paper flowers out of them. They spent six days of Christmas vacation making those things.”
They carried on in this fashion for longer than Clark cared to admit; even worse, he hung on her every word. He actually invested himself in the intersecting and interweaving lives of these strangers. A born storyteller, Kate shared every story she remembered, dragging him deeper and deeper into the melting-pot mythologies of Miller’s Point.
His attention slipped only once, when he pulled out what seemed like the millionth star-shaped trinket. Only, this one was different. It struck him. Multiple shades of ugly green and brown glass had been melted together to form a sort of patchwork glass star. Its edges created an outline out of twisted wire. The most similar thing he could think of was a stained-glass window, but those were beautiful. This wasn’t quite beautiful. It was sublime, perhaps. Holding it up to the light, he let the color play on his face, losing himself in the warped surface of the star.
“What’s this one?”
“That’s one of mine,” Kate said, her voice dipping low. The pride she’d taken only a few minutes ago in her stories and shared histories vanished.
“What is it? Did you make it?” Clark squinted, coming up closer to a raised etching along one of the corners. He could hardly make it out. “Is this a whiskey label? I didn’t know you drank.”
“I don’t.”
“Was this like an art project or something?”
After hours of learning about her town and these ornaments, he should have known none of these were just anything. They all carried their own weighted tales. To think Kate’s wouldn’t was the height of foolishness.
“When my dad died, right after my eighteenth birthday, I went to his apartment and cleaned it all out. I hadn’t been living there for, like, two years. Emily’s family took me in. So, I went through the whole house, throwing almost everything away. And then I got to my old bedroom. It was covered in broken bottles, like he’d just thrown them all at the wall and let them shatter. There had to be a hundred of them. He used my room as a garbage can, basically.” She laughed a wry laugh.
It occurred to Clark then how unfamiliar they were, and yet how close at the same time. They’d only met yesterday, but they’d both exchanged their most painful memories without a second thought. Maybe it was the magic
