“I’m fine. For heaven’s sakes. I have no problems, minus the burglary of my uterus. Aunt Yolanda and Aunt Zoe were here today. They brought me cinnamon rolls and fresh homemade bread and sweet butter. No need to whine or bluster about this type of thing. I’ve been in bed practically all day, and I love it. I could get used to this. Read the paper, that’s where you’ll find some true problems, but speaking of problems, have you heard that the Bunger Farmhouse burned down?”
“What? No. What happened?” The Bunger Farmhouse was an old building that we always rented for the Christmas show. We strung lights, brought in Christmas trees, added holiday decor, and set up tables with red and green place settings and flowers. “No one hurt?”
“No one hurt,” she said. “But it was close. Mrs. Bunger found out her husband, Albert, was cheating with a woman twenty years younger.”
I sighed. “What a cliché.”
“She didn’t like the cliché at all. She dumped gasoline and torched the building. He apparently said that he was going to take the Bunger Farmhouse in the divorce. It became totally consumed by flames and burned down to dust. She told me that she told him he could have it now.”
“Mrs. Bunger was always so sweet. Calm. Controlled.”
“That was her veneer. Her real self is out and about now. She told me that she didn’t realize how suffocated she felt in her marriage until Mr. Bunger took off. She said she’s learned that her normal was abnormal. Once the farmhouse burned down, she said most of her anger burned down with it. She’s been on two cruises so far and said both times she had two weeklong affairs. She said she’s never felt better, and the girlfriend has already broken up with Mr. Bunger. Mr. Bunger came back and said he wanted to be back together, and she told him, and I am quoting her directly, ‘I’ve had sex with five men since you left, and the worst one was twice as good as you in bed. No, thank you. I don’t want your limp sausage or your laziness.’ Plus, Mrs. Bunger got all the friends. Didn’t work out well for him, but it did for her.”
We chatted about the limp sausage and men’s denseness, and then I said, “So where are we going to have the Christmas burlesque show?”
“Brace yourself and gather your inner oomph. I think we should have it at Logan’s office, kid.”
I froze like a snowwoman. “No. I don’t need my inner oomph. No.”
“I think so, sweetie.” She squeezed my hand. “There’s nowhere else. He has a whole huge floor we can use. Ask him.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Remember to say please.”
“I can’t. I can’t ask him for anything.”
“Sure, you can, baby. On another holiday note, let’s have some cinnamon rolls. Heat ’em on up and drop some of that sweet butter on them. They’ll calm down my phantom uterus pains.”
We ate in her bed with the cats and chatted about Christmas and the upcoming O’Donnell family activities. Then I watched a home decor show with her, and she fell asleep. I tucked her in, turned off the lights, gathered up the cats, and left.
Downstairs, I flicked on her gas fireplace and lit of couple of candles—cranberry and vanilla—and their scents wafted together. I collapsed on the couch.
I thought of Logan for the hundredth time since I’d returned to Kalulell. Seeing him had turned me upside down. Everything I felt for him turned into a tornado of emotion. It was going to be hard to avoid him, too, so I could expect the tornado to return again and again.
I wasn’t slipping in and out of town. I was here for at least seven weeks. The Christmas tree lighting in town was coming up. I decided I wouldn’t go because he would probably be going. I would tell all my cousins I was having cramps. I sighed. That wouldn’t work. They would tell me to “take legal drugs, plus eat chocolate mint ice cream. It always works.” I would say I was in perimenopause. That wouldn’t work either. They would say, “Have a hot flash with your cousins!” I would say I was having a mood swing. They would laugh and tell me to “swing around the Christmas tree.”
Our own Christmas tree shone from the corner, the white lights twinkling on and off. It was ten feet high, skimming the ceiling. The Sisters put it up for my mom. All The Sisters love Christmas and start celebrating the day after Thanksgiving. Covered in white lights and ornaments we’ve had forever, the tree was a testament to tradition, to hope, to love between mymother and me and the love I have for my six aunts and their families.
The first Christmas that I wasn’t with Logan, when we returned from college, when we didn’t go to all of my family’s oddball Christmas activities together, as we had since grade school, I thought my heart would shatter. Christmas hadn’t gotten any better since then.
We used to make each other Christmas cards. It started in kindergarten. Over the years, I’d drawn different designs. One card had a picture of Mr. and Mrs. Claus, but they looked a lot like us. Another year, two elves holding hands and grinning were definitely us. I drew both of us in the back of Santa’s sleigh one snowy Christmas, and another year we rode together on a reindeer.
He would make me cards, too, because he has a talent for drawing, but I told him he had to write me a poem, too. His grade school poems were short and sweet and still make me laugh. In middle and high school, they were much better, funny but romantic. I still have all of them, along with the ornaments we exchanged for years, in an old cardboard box under my bed.
What did Logan do now on Christmas? Since he moved back to Kalulell, I knew he went to my family’s Christmas activities if I wasn’t there. He was so respectful. If I was in town for Christmas, he didn’t come. I had missed Christmases in years past because of… I didn’t even want to think of that.Of him. The mistake. The person I allowed to take me from myself. The soul-crusher.
Two cats crawled onto my lap. “Merry Christmas,” I whispered, and I said a bad word I shouldn’t say.Merry Christmas.
I couldn’t ask Logan to lend us his office building for the Christmas show, could I? I thought of the other buildings in town and in the country. Nothing. I would have to ask him. Ididn’t have a choice. And that would mean I would have a lot of communication with him. Talking. Back and forth. Questions. Answers. More talking. Time together. Staring up into those eyes. Wondering yet again in a lustful way what he looked like naked all these years later. That would hurt. Good God, it would hurt. But it would undoubtedly inspire a rush of passion, too, that I’d have to hide from him so I wouldn’t embarrass myself.
The Christmas lights twinkled. I wanted Christmas to be over. I hadn’t felt the Christmas spirit since Logan and I broke up.
I cried that night, holding my cats, my tears trickling through their fur. They didn’t seem to mind. Seeing Logan made me feel more alone and lonelier than ever.
I hardly slept, the moon shining brightly into my bedroom, my cats clearly upset by the blackness of my loneliness.
8
