By Victor Greto
I squirreled my 8-year-old body just under the scent of the Christmas tree my mother and older brothers had put up the night before.
I liked the smell of the blanket my Mom had spread across the steel legs of the stand that held the tree in place. It smelled as soft as her hug after I got out of the bath.
Already there were presents under it, but those were boring, grown-up ones, clothes and colored socks and stuff Mom wanted to give to Dad. We’d get ours the next morning.
Dad wasn’t here because he was sick, Mom said, and that when Santa Claus came Dad was going to come, too. That would be her present because she knew we couldn’t give her anything.
“Be careful under there!” Mom said as I wriggled my body further under the tree, and I felt it shake.
Tinsel strands tickled the small of my back, but I wanted to reach a very small present that Mom had put there.
I felt Mom’s hand on my foot, shouted, “OK!” and began to burrow my way back.
“Leave that back there,” she said, when she finally saw what I had in my hand.
I let it go, and her hand remained on my foot as I continued to back out.
I turned and looked at her.
Mom’s face was impossibly young, her skin a rich coppery gold. Her black hair framed a slender face, and her sharp nose and thin lips reminded me at the time of a movie star, but reminds me now of love.
This is a moment in time, observed by a much older person hopeful enough to believe he is there, when Dad wasn’t home for the weeks leading up to Christmas, but returned home Christmas Eve.
Here is the next moment: Mom scooped me up in her arms and walked to the kitchen table.
She put me into the large kitchen chair after kissing my cheek, and walked over to the sink to make dish noise. I stared at her back.
We were off from school, of course; we’d been off for a week now. Even my older brothers were back from college or high school. But they were not up yet. They slept late, as late as Dad slept when he wasn’t working, and when he was home.
“When’s daddy coming home?” I asked.
The dish noise stopped, then started up again.
“Tonight,” Mom said.
“Christmas Eve!” I shouted.
The dish noise continued.
Christmas Eve was better than Christmas morning. Happy anticipation, and my brothers teasing me in the only positive way they ever did.
“Think of the Christmas tree!” my brother Vincent sang for more than a week now, his arms forming a circle encompassing a load of goodies. “And all the presents around it.”
Christmas always included a load of goodies, some new but most of them used.
Mom started this long before. After the excitement of Christmases past had worn off and we returned to school, all those must-have presents we ripped open and played with constantly for about two weeks fell into disuse.
After a couple of months, most of them disappeared with barely a gripe from us.
The following year, they reappeared under the tree, sometimes wrapped, sometimes not. But it was fun all over again, and we played Skittle Pool or Rebound or Rock ‘em-Sock ‘em Robots or Monopoly or Scrabble because we hadn’t for months.
That was as much part of the ritual of Christmas as waiting the night before Christmas to put up the tree. I realize now my parents waited that long to get a tree because the lots that sold them had marked them down.
But waiting a day or two before Christmas made the tree-trimming a great event. It involved the entire family. Even Dad added a trinket or two, although most of the time he sat in the lounge chair smoking cigarette after cigarette.
Mom placed each strand of tinsel so carefully on the tree that, by the time we all were done, it looked like something you’d see in a store window. My oldest brother Francis lifted me up to stick the angel on the top.
This year, because Dad was coming home Christmas Eve, Mom insisted we decorate the tree the night before he came back.
“Six weeks to the day, ain’t it?” Francis said when he finally came down from sleeping. Mom was placing a plate of eggs and toast in front of him.
“Could be,” Mom said, her voice and her eyes looking away.
Francis’s face over the plate looked a little like Dad’s: His nose was like Mom’s, but his eyes and the creases around them looked just like Dad’s. In fact, when Francis smiled, I used to just concentrate on his eyes so it was just like looking at Dad.
The last time I saw Dad he wore his boxer shorts (light blue and speckled) and ran outside into the street. Francis and Vincent couldn’t talk to him, so they followed him out and brought him back in, Francis holding one arm and Vincent holding the other.
I sat on the couch and just looked. I was so scared I became self-conscious of how wide my eyes felt when they looked at the three of them.
Dad was overweight, and his belly hung over the elastic band of his boxers. He also looked desperate, as if he were trying to say something so important he just, just, just couldn’t, sort of like when I wanted to answer what the teacher asked but just wasn’t sure if I was right and didn’t want to look dumb.
While they were bringing Dad in and my eyes were wide, I felt Mom breathing next to me. Her hand suddenly took my left arm, pulled me up from the couch. She told me to go upstairs to my room.
After that, Thanksgiving started to come, and Aunt Carla and Uncle Stan came over for the day, but everyone knew Dad wasn’t there, and no one talked about it. Not even me. It felt like if I did, it would have been like talking about God outside of church.
When Christmas started to come, Mom and Francis and Vincent started to talk about Dad around the dinner table, but their sentences consisted of, “I saw him last night, he looked better,” or, “This might be a short stay this time.”
Mom didn’t say much, her head bent over her salad, her face dark against the green of the leaves and the silver of the fork.
During these times, I’d get lost in looking at Mom. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her; sometimes she noticed, but most of the time she didn’t.
“We’re getting him at two,” Francis said that Christmas Eve morning.
Mom nodded. She would stay with me, she said, which made me smile – no, grin – when I thought that she would rather stay with me.
“He’ll be different,” Mom said to me after Francis and Vincent left.
I was sitting at the kitchen table watching her make pizza – the thick kind that everyone , especially Dad, liked. I didn’t like it at all. She had just finished putting the dough in a pot with the towel wrapped around the top waiting for it to rise.
I knew Mom also would make salad and cucumbers with vinegar and oil, and during dinner she would dole it out to all of us and herself, and then give Dad the rest in the bowl she served it in.
“Like how?” I asked.
“Different,” she said, and then sighed. “Tired.”
I’d seen Dad tired before. Every day after work, just after dinner, he’d lay on the couch with the TV on and start snoring. He’d be there for at least an hour. I liked to watch him, and if he had his hand out – the fingers of his hand curled, the thick gold band on one of his fingers – I crawled over to him and rubbed the palm of my hand on his fingertips because it felt good.
“Like…?” I said.
“No,” she said. “Different tired.”
Mom looked different tired, too. “Oh,” I said, although I didn’t mean it.
Mom walked me into the living room and we held hands and looked at the tree, which she had plugged in so we could watch the winking lights. It seemed weird to do this during the day, but she didn’t say anything, so I thought it was a good thing to do, and her hand felt warm, so there was nothing to say, really, except look at the tree and feel warm.
When I looked at her, I saw her eyes tracing the outline of the tree, and then fix themselves on the presents.
Mom’s already dark eyes grew darker, but they also started to – and this is weird to say, I know – but it was like they started to swim, as if they were about to turn into liquid. I shook, but still couldn’t help but smile at her. I knew that she could feel my smile on the side of her face, because she smiled, too, and looked at me, sideways.
When we heard the front door open, Mom stiffened, but she was fine. I could tell by her hands, which remained strong and dry. She hugged me and turned, and there Francis and Vincent and Dad stood, moving their feet like they were in front of the teacher after being called to the front of the class.
I was still holding Mom’s hand, but I didn’t think of her. I just saw Dad, who looked impossibly sad and as impossibly thin. His skin seemed to hang on his body, and his bare hands, loose at his sides, seemed terribly lean and naked.
“Grace,” he said to my Mom. It was a sigh, really, but it was definitely Dad’s voice, the same one he had when he was happy and fatter.
“Marco,” she said, and I felt her hand squeeze mine, and she said, “Dad,” because that’s what she called him around us. She did not go to hug him, and she and I walked toward the kitchen to get dinner ready.
We ate a late afternoon dinner, which we never did, but it was Christmas Eve and everything was different.
I picked at the top of my pizza, which looked like the armor plate of a bloody animal. But everyone else, including Dad, chomped into the slices’ thickness as if they were biting into steak. Dad ate hungrily, and Mom smiled. I also picked at the salad – I loved cucumbers in vinegar and oil – standing on the chair so I could see everyone from above where I always saw them.
Dad’s hair seemed thinner than its usual wavy thickness, and it was stark white, which made him a different person. His hands, when he held his pizza, were as thin as his body, and the nails and sides of his thumbs were frayed.
Dad didn’t say anything, but he never did during dinner; they all made eating noises, and I looked at Mom, who ate and chewed slowly.
After dinner, she asked me to go bring Dad the gifts she had put under the tree the night before.
The bigger gifts, toward the front, were easy to get, and when I carried them into the kitchen Francis and Vincent helped me put them on the cleaned table.
Dad smiled and tore them open, and they were what we had thought: socks and clothes for his thinner shape.
Then I went back to the tree and burrowed deep to get the little gift I had tried to grab earlier that day.
Dad’s big hands fumbled with the small gift that had lain in the back of the tree.
He looked up at Mom even while he fumbled.
The green and red paper off, we saw the gift was a battered ring box. He opened it.
It was Dad’s wedding ring, fitted down a size.
Dad stared, swallowed, and placed the now-open ring box on the kitchen table.
He took the ring out of the box and fitted it on a slender finger of his left hand.
Finally, Dad’s sad face looked up, a shadow of a smile tugging at the edges of his lips.
I couldn’t look at him anymore, though. I wanted to see Mom. But I couldn’t see her. Her back was to me as she said, “Merry Christmas, Marco,” leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
(© 2021 Victor Greto)