Twenty minutes later they’re standing in a scrapyard outside the city, and Elsa is hugging the hood of Renault in the exact same way you hug a cloud animal: with your whole body. She can see that the TV in the backseat is shuffling about, fairly displeased about not being the first to be hugged, but if you’re almost eight and forget to hug a wurse in a Renault, it’s because you’re less worried about the wurse than the poor scrapyard worker who happens to find it.
Alf and the fairly fat foreman argue for a short while about what it’s going to cost to take Renault away. And then Alf and Elsa argue for a fairly long time about why she never mentioned that she didn’t have a key to Renault. And then the fat man walks around mumbling that he was sure he left his moped here earlier and where the hell was it now? And then Alf and the fat man negotiate about what it’ll cost to tow Renault back to the house. And then Dad has to pay for it all.
It’s the best present he’s ever given Elsa. Even better than the red felt-tip pen.
Alf ensures that Renault is parked in Granny’s slot in the garage, not in Britt-Marie’s. When Elsa introduces them to each other, Dad stares at the wurse with the expression of someone preparing for a root canal. The wurse glares back, a bit cocky. Too cocky, thinks Elsa, so she hauls it over the coals about whether it ate the scrapyard foreman’s moped. Whereupon the wurse stops looking cocky and goes to lie down under the blankets and looks a bit as if it’s thinking that if people don’t want it to eat mopeds, then people should be more generous with the cinnamon buns.
She tells Dad, to his immense relief, that he can go and wait in Audi. Then Elsa and Alf gather all the red food bowls from the stairwell and put them in a big black trash bag. Kent catches them and fumes that the poison bloody cost him six hundred kronor. Britt-Marie just stands there.
And then Elsa goes with Dad to buy a plastic tree. Because Britt-Marie is wrong, Elsa’s family are no barbarians. Anyway the proper term is “baa-baa-rians,” because in Miamas that is what the spruce trees call those dumb sheep in the real world who chop down living trees, then carry them off and sell them into slavery.
“I’ll give you three hundred,” says Elsa to the man in the shop.
“My dear, there’s no bargaining in this shop,” says the man in the shop in exactly the sort of tone one might expect of men in shops. “It costs four hundred and ninety-five.”
“I’ll give you two fifty.”
The man smiles mockingly.
“Now I’ll only give you two hundred,” Elsa informs him.
The man looks at Elsa’s dad. Dad looks at his shoes. Elsa looks at the man and shakes her head seriously.
“My dad is not going to help you. I’ll give you two hundred.”
The man arranges his face into something that’s probably supposed to look like an expression of how you look at children when they’re cute but stupid.
“This is not how it works, my dear.”
Elsa shrugs. “What time do you close today?”
“In five minutes,” sighs the man.
“And do you have a big warehouse space here?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I was just wondering.”
“No. We don’t have any warehouse space at all.”
“And are you open on Christmas Eve?”
He pauses. “No.”
Elsa pouts her lips with pretend surprise.
“So you have a tree here. And no warehouse. And what day is it tomorrow, again?”
Elsa gets the tree for two hundred. She gets a box of balcony lights and an insanely big Christmas elk thrown in for the same price.
“You MUSTN’T go back in and give him any extra money!” Elsa warns Dad while he’s loading it all into Audi. Dad sighs.
“I only did it once, Elsa. On one occasion. And that time you were actually exceptionally unpleasant to the salesman.”
“You have to negotiate!”