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The first two stores we go to are a bust, and I start to question why I expected there to be any Jewish memorabilia in the middle of this nowhere town. But the third shop on Henry’s list is called Friedmann’s Toys, so if ever there was a Hail Mary equivalent for my people (a Hail Maccabees, perhaps?), this is it.
A bell rings as we walk inside, and I look up, seeing an actual bell, not just a sensor. It’s the day before Christmas Eve, and the store is understandably packed with anxious parents. We move through the narrow aisles, tan laminate reflecting the overly bright fluorescent ceiling lights, past rows of stuffed animals, books, puzzles, the store a maze in and of itself.
“How’m I doing as your friend so far?” Henry uses his height to our advantage, scanning over the tops of the short shelves between aisles.
“If you really need to ask,” I tell him, plucking a finger toy shaped like a duck off a hook, slipping it onto my pointer, and bopping him with it. “It’s already a losing battle.”
Henry looks down at me, his lips twisted to the side in amusement as he reaches for the duck. “Do you want to play another game?”
“Like our car game? Didn’t that get a little heavy? And uh…” I fix my eyes on the other finger toys in the row. A pig, a panda, a cow. I want to say intimate because that’s how it felt, but instead I opt for the safer term. “Personal?”
“This is the third store we’ve been to and everything’s blending together at this point for me, so I was thinking, what if we split up, and each pick out a toy that we think encompasses the other person? It’ll help us cover more ground to separate anyway and see if we can find something for Sara.” His lips are folded between his teeth, but the ask feels vulnerable somehow. He’s opening himself up to be playful if I just say yes.
“Ten minutes and then we meet back here,” I say, extending my right hand. He shakes it, then dodges left, disappearing down the aisle in two long strides.
I scramble away, turning in the opposite direction. I move quickly past Barbies and Bluey and Batman action figures. I spend a few minutes perusing the stuffed animals, until I see Henry’s dark hair over the shelf, approaching the aisle next to me, and flee.
In an effort to get as far away from him as possible so he won’t see what I’m doing, I head to the opposite end of the store. It’s there that I find a rich midnight blue train set. The box touts that although the design appears complex, there is only one path through.
There’s an elegance to it that reminds me of our sophomore-year biology teacher. Elegant can mean the simplest solution. Not that Henry is simple, but he’s concise.
And I have a memory of him and Kristine going to visit his Great-Aunt Jean one Christmas when we were small. He came home raving about how the fire station in her neighborhood had a toy train display he was obsessed with.
I grab the box with seconds to spare, and hope he’s been more successful with the other part of our quest.
We meet back up, and Henry has a large orange turtle about the size of my head pressed to his chest. Its plush, squishy body is a soft velour, with a shell made harder by the sparkly fabric covering it. Part of me wonders why anyone would decide that a turtle should be orange, but its little beaded eyes are comforting somehow.
“Me first,” I say, shoving the box in his direction.
He tucks the stuffed turtle into the crook of his elbow.
“The fire station trains,” he says immediately, his eyes full of affection. “That’s cheating. You can’t dip into our history.”
“I believe per the bylaws set—”
He cuts me off with a simple “Norah, I love it.”
“It wasn’t just that,” I huff, causing Henry to smirk. “You bring order to chaos. This week aside, I mean. A grounding presence. That’s how you always felt to me. When we were in the car the other day and I was driving…it’s how you still feel to me,” I admit.
Henry smiles warmly at that, then turns his attention to the turtle in his arms.
“Tough exterior, but soft underneath,” he starts, holding the stuffed animal up to me as an offering. “Playing the long game. Both cute,” he adds with a wink.
I hug the turtle to my chest.
“Any luck with a menorah?” he asks as we stand there, a little too close for just friends.
I shake my head and we both turn toward the front registers in defeat. The checkout line has grown threefold since we got here, the one employee, a man in his sixties with a full head of luxurious white hair, looking remarkably calm under the circumstances. We weave around, finding the end of the line right next to the clearance section.
“Hey.” He nudges me with his elbow. “Think that’ll work?”
Henry gestures to a box in the clearance bin. A menorah made of sky blue plastic on the cover, with little orange bulbs. I shove the turtle into Henry’s arms, then reach down to grab the box, flipping it around in my hands. It’s got LED lights and tiny switches for each individual candle. The side of the box advertises that the lights flicker like real flames too.
“Seems like a good option to me.”
There’s a little girl parallel to us in the curve of the long line, maybe two and a half years old, with jet-black pigtails that stick straight up in the air. She’s sitting on her mother’s hip, having an absolute meltdown, while her mom tries to stop her twin brothers, who must be five or six, from poking each other’s eyes out. The little girl leans her head on her mom’s shoulder, screaming as she looks back toward us with despair.
