Want something.
Shelby thinks she sees a tiny photo of herself clipped from a newspaper article about the crash pasted onto the card. The writer knows her so well. When she lost Helene, she lost her desire for life. Who is she to deserve something? How dare she want anything at all? She has a sort of burning feeling in her chest.
“I never really liked decorating the house,” her mom is saying. “It’s too much trouble. Who has time for that kind of thing? I always hated tinsel especially. You can never clean it up. Your dad got to the point where he forbade using it back when you were little.”
Shelby gazes around the room. Something is wrong here. “Where’s Dad?”
Sue is studying Blinkie. “This dog’s eye is infected.”
Nothing like changing the subject. Shelby goes with the flow. “The vet said he needs the eye removed. It costs a thousand bucks for the surgery, so I’m saving up.”
Shelby wishes she could heal Blinkie herself, that she had the skill and knowledge to take away his pain.
Sue decides to pay for the surgery as Shelby’s Christmas gift. Shelby insists she’ll pay it back, she even signs an IOU, but Sue tears it up. “I’m just glad there’s something you want,” Sue says.
Shelby is taken aback. “Did someone tell you to say that to me?”
“You mean like your father? He said he’s not giving gifts this year. He says it’s commercializing the holidays. Meanwhile he’s still at the store.”
“No. I mean like Helene.” That sounds so crazy Shelby adds, “Or anybody.”
Sue links an arm through Shelby’s. “Sometimes I think my mother is talking to me in my dreams. Who’s to say the dead don’t still speak to us and guide us? Maybe Helene does, too.”
It doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve with just the two of them in the dark house. Yet Shelby is glad to be home.
“What kinds of things does Grandma say when you dream about her?”
“She tells me to dump your dad.”
They both laugh.
“Anything else?”
“She says I’m lucky to be here with you and that I should get off my ass and start dinner.”
Shelby takes the dogs out. She sees a snow shovel and decides to make a path from the street to the house. By the time her dad’s car pulls up, she is more than halfway done.
“I usually hire the kid down the street to do that,” Dan Richmond says.
“I guess you forgot.” Shelby is so cold she no longer feels her fingers or toes. “Like you forgot this was Christmas Eve.”
Business is bad at Shelby’s dad’s menswear shop. People go to the mall or to some of the newer shops. It was his father’s store, and he’s always treated the inheritance like a curse.
“Yeah, well, some of us work,” he says.
They can see Sue at the window. She’s lighting a candle, the way she did when Shelby was little, an old tradition said to bring wanderers home.
“What made you fall in love with her?” Shelby asks her father.
“I’m not answering any trick questions,” Shelby’s dad says, and then Shelby knows her parents are married, but not really, and that her dad probably can no longer remember the reasons why. She wishes her mother had listened to the voice of her dead mother. People get divorced, they don’t have to stay together just because their stupid daughter had a car accident and a nervous breakdown and can’t seem to do anything right.
“Why don’t you just take off?” Shelby says to her father. “Close the store. Start a new life. Let her start one, too.”
Dan gives her a look. “My kind of person doesn’t do that sort of thing, Shelby.”
That’s the difference between them. Her kind of person does.
In the morning, Shelby is given her presents—a black sweater, a box of chocolate truffles, and unbeknownst to her father, a check for a thousand dollars so that Blinkie can have his surgery. She’s brought her parents a fondue pot. “I thought maybe you and Dad made fondue when you were first together.”
“I love fondue,” Sue says, hugging her.
When Ben comes to pick her up, he is carrying one of his mother’s apple-cranberry pies. He greets Shelby’s mom with a hug and accepts a cup of coffee. As usual, Shelby’s dad is MIA. “My mom had twenty-two people over last night and I think she had twenty-two turkeys,” Ben reports. “Not to mention all the pies.”
“You don’t celebrate Christmas,” Shelby reminds him. “You’re Jewish.” She has taken the postcard and slipped it into her coat pocket.
“But we celebrate eating,” Ben says. “Good food is part of a family get-together.”
At Shelby’s they’d had vegetarian lasagna and orange sherbet.
“Hey, Mr. Richmond,” Ben says cheerfully when Shelby’s father comes in from the garage, where he’s been sneaking a cigarette. “How’s business?”
“It sucks,” Shelby’s dad says.
“Dan!” Sue doesn’t approve of that kind of language in front of the kids, as she calls them.