‘Whatever, sweetie. Have Samantha pick it. She knows about that sort of thing.’
Stella had Christmas on the brain, lately. The night before, when we were preparing for Samantha’s arrival-which amounted to, basically, cleaning the toilets, doing the dishes, going through Stella’s closet to decide which robe she would wear-Stella remarked that the air seemed full of yuletide excitement. ‘It’s Samantha Eve,’ she proclaimed. The real Christmas holiday would be here in three months. Last year, Stella had been well enough to come with me to get a tree, and we decorated it together, pulling out old ornaments of my grandmother’s that Stella had found years ago in the basement when she took over ownership of the house. It wasn’t lost on me that my father’s hands had probably touched each and every ornament, the glass balls and Styrofoam cones and ancient garlands. There was even an ornament of my father’s young, smiling face in a heavily gilded frame. There were his eyes. There was the crooked incisor. The smattering of freckles on his forehead. Your life will be uncomfortable and often sad, I said to my six-year-old father’s faded image. Your daughter will run away from you. This is the first Christmas the two of you are apart.
On that Christmas Day, Stella and I exchanged gifts-among other things, she gave me a small, cloth voodoo doll that had little afflictions and hardships written across its body, words like paper cut and audit and depression. I stabbed five white pins into the doll’s head over the words good hair day, but put the black pins aside in a dish on the credenza. We watched White Christmas and Holiday Inn. She was so healthy a year ago, so whole. She’d gained back some weight, her latest CT scan had been clearer, and she wasn’t on any treatment for a month. What would Christmas be this year?
Samantha swooped back through the double doors, wheelchair-less. We snaked through Wal-Mart to the Housewares section, leaving Stella behind. Samantha ran her hands over fabrics as she walked-first an entire row of plaid shirts, then pink bathrobes, then black blazers with brassy buttons.
‘I haven’t been in a Wal-Mart in a long time,’ she said. ‘Northglenn has these darling little shops that are much better. A woman I recently sold a house to has a knitting store in town-adorable. The store, I mean. It’s so chill in there.’
She flicked her hair over her shoulder. ‘The house I sold her was adorable, too. One of those brand-new ones Chris built-the walls totally white, everything pretty and new, nothing damaged yet. You can just put your stamp on it, you know? Make it your own, much easier than an older home.’
‘So, is it weird being back here?’ I interrupted, making a turn at a vacuum-cleaner display. One of the vacuums was tipped on its side, and someone had abandoned a sixty-four-ounce plastic Coke cup on the edge of the platform.
Samantha shrugged. ‘I can hardly remember being here, it was so long ago. Oh! Do you guys have a Foreman grill?’ She pointed to one on display, lifting its plastic lid.
‘We’re not big grillers.’
She clunked the grill top back down. People watched her as she strutted through the store, her skin luminous and healthy, her heels tapping against the linoleum. I wondered what really happened at real-estate conferences. Did they honestly get awards? Last year, Stella and I were leaving breakfast at Mr H’s, a restaurant connected to a hotel about fifteen miles outside of Cobalt. There was a corporate award ceremony taking place in the hotel’s only conference room. Stella peeked in and said that everyone was just sitting there, morose, like they were at a funeral. ‘What do you think they would do if I ran into the room and did a somersault?’ she whispered giddily. ‘Do you think anyone would laugh?’
‘So is it shocking to see Stella?’ I asked Samantha.
‘Do you think she would like these ones?’ Samantha talked over me, holding up a box of Oneida long-stemmed wine glasses. She noticed me glancing at the price tag on the shelf. ‘I can pay, of course. It’s totally my treat.’