“I’ve got it, Mom,” she said.
“I’m not doing it,” Emily said. She was thumbing away at her phone. “Last year it took me a week to get the sap out of my hair and we found a dead fox carcass under the tree. It was gross.”
“I’ll do it,” Conn said, tightening his grip on the saw’s handle.
“Really, Mom and I can do this,” Cady said.
“Is it tradition?”
“I’m happy to include someone else in this particular part of the tradition,” Patty said.
“Hold back the branches for me,” he said.
“Not in that coat!” Emily yelped, surfacing from the world of pixels and likes.
“I left my other coat in the car,” Cady pointed out. “I have to wear something. It’s freezing.”
Conn unbuttoned his jacket. “Wear mine,” he said grimly. Never in his life had he sat through so many costume changes. The only person still wearing her original outfit was Patty.
Cady gave the branches a good shake, sending snow sliding to the ground like shingles off a roof. Conn went to his knees in the dead needles carpeting the dry, hard soil under the tree, and started sawing away at the base. Cady’s mom kept her tools in good order so it didn’t take long, but by the time he finished and the tree tipped over into the snow, his hands, hair, and shirt were covered in evergreen sap. Cady didn’t look much better. While her mittens took the worst of it, his coat and hat were also smeared with sticky residue.
“Yuck,” Emily said.
“How do we get this off?” Cady said to her mother.
“Goo Gone,” Patty said.
“Let’s get the tree on the sled before we start thinking about getting sap off our clothes,” Conn said.
The tree was awkward, but not heavy, so they had it secured to the sled in a couple of minutes, but Conn, who had the heavier trunk end ended up with more sap on his hands. Emily and Patty set off for the barn, leaving Cady and Conn to haul the tree along.
“This is so outside your job description it’s not even funny. What’s the bodyguard version of combat pay?”
“No idea,” Conn said. His nose was running, his socks, shoes, and jeans were soaked, and the sweat was beginning to dry on his shirt. “It’s fine. Kind of fun, even.”
She gave him a wry smile. “Did you buy Christmas trees every year, or did you have fake ones?”
“Depended,” he said curtly. His grandmother had a fake tree she hauled out and put together, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she straightened the branches and handed them to Conn to slot into the metal stand covered in brown paper to mimic a tree trunk. Most years his uncle didn’t have one at all. Shane’s family picked one up at one of the lots that sprang up around town, and strapped it to the top of whichever minivan his mother was driving at the time. He laughed.
“What?” Cady said.
“I remember going with Shane to get a tree once. His little sister had a stomach bug, so his mom couldn’t go, and his dad was working. So his mom gives him forty bucks and sends Shane to get it. But Shane had gotten grounded for sneaking out of the house, and his dad revoked his driving privileges. His mom didn’t know about the grounding, because he was already on thin ice for something, I forget what, but it was probably something he’d done with me. So he calls me up, we drive to the lot, get a tree and tie it to the roof of the car. But Shane’s scoping out this girl working at the lot, so he’s not paying really close attention to his knots. We’re halfway home when I take the corner off Forty-third and Lake too fast, the twine snaps, and the tree flies into the intersection and takes out a row of metal trash cans.”
“Oh my God,” Cady said, laughing.
“It was an unholy noise. We were lucky we didn’t cause an accident. The cans and the tree are rolling around in the street, we’re stopping traffic in all four directions, and the lady who owned the cans comes out of her house in a flowered housecoat with her three Chihuahuas. She’s giving us hell about the cans, the other drivers are honking, and the dogs yapping at us the whole time. So we back up to the tree, hustle the cans back to the lady’s driveway, open the back doors, we jam the whole thing into my car, and drove the eight blocks home, me driving and reaching back to hold one door and him crammed in the backseat with the tree holding the other.”
“What did his mom say?”
“Nothing. She was holding someone’s throw-up bucket. His dad was just getting home from work when we pulled into the driveway. He looked at us and said ‘I don’t want to know.’”
Cady smiled, and got a firmer grip on her part of the sled’s strap. “How do we get it home?” Conn asked.
“They deliver.”
“Not a good idea right now,” Conn said.
Emily and Patty both perked up. “Strap it to my car?” Cady said in a hurry.
“It’s going to scratch the paint.”
“And look like Chevy Chase getting the tree home in Christmas Vacation,” Emily added.