“Okay, try me,” he said, and smiled.
“Boy!” I said, and shot him a piercing look that didn’t affect him in the slightest.
“So what is it, Abby?”
“You’d cry, too,” I said, “if you didn’t have any money of your own, and you had to buy your father a Christmas present, and there was nobody you could ask for money, and you didn’t know what to do,” I said, and started crying again.
“How about asking me?” Mr. Stenner said.
“Daddy wouldn’t want you to pay for his Christmas present.”
“Well,” Mr. Stenner said, and paused, and then said, “I didn’t mean I’d give you the money.”
“Huh?” I said, and reached for his handkerchief again.
“Because, frankly, I don’t want to pay for your father’s present.”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, he doesn’t want you to, either.”
“I didn’t think he’d want me to.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Fine.”
“So... I still don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“I could lend you the money,” Mr. Stenner said. “How much money do you think you’ll need?”
“Well, I saw a key chain with his initial on it that cost five dollars and twenty-five cents.”
“Five twenty-five, huh?”
“Yes,” I said, and nodded. “That’s a lot of money.”
“I think I can manage it.”
“But how would I pay you back?”
“How does ten cents a week sound? There’re fifty-two weeks in a year, and if you gave me ten cents a week, you’d have paid back five dollars and twenty cents by the end of a year. How does that sound?”
“It sounds like I’d still owe you a nickel.”
“I’d be willing to forget the nickel.”
“It also sounds like a very long time,” I said.
“It is,” he admitted. “What do you say?”
“I think it’s a good idea,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, “it’s a deal.” He shook hands with me, and then he smiled and said, “But give me back my handkerchief, okay? That’s not part of the deal.”
So that’s how we resolved the matter of Daddy’s Christmas present.
It was the night we’d come back from buying the Christmas tree at the empty lot where they were selling them for some benefit, I forget which one. Mr. Stenner left the tree outside in the snow, leaning against the garage wall, and then he came inside blowing on his hands, and asked if anybody would like a fire. My father was always ready to make a fire too, of course, but his weren’t as good as Mr. Stenner’s. That was because the flue or the draft or whatever was probably better in this house than in my father’s. Anyway, we were all sitting around the fire when Mr. Stenner suddenly said, “Lillith, do you have any pictures of yourself when you were pregnant?”
“Why?” my mother said.
“I just wondered what you looked like then.”
“I think I have some.”
“Could I see them?”
“Well... yes. Sure, Peter.”
My mother came downstairs a while later with a shoebox full of pictures, and we began looking at them together. There were pictures of me when I was a baby, and pictures of my mother when she was fat as a horse, and pictures of Daddy, too, looking almost like a teen-ager.
And suddenly my mother began crying, and she hugged me to her, and Mr. Stenner just sat there looking stupid and not even realizing he had caused it all, the jackass.
Christmas Day sort of started out to be fun.
My father had given me a tape recorder, and as I opened each of the gifts from my mother and Mr. Stenner, I recorded all of my reactions, so I could play the tape for him later.
“Oh, Daddy!” I shouted into the microphone. “It’s a giant Raggedy Ann doll, you should see it! Oh, I love it, I love it, just a minute, Daddy,” and I clicked off the machine until I’d unwrapped another gift, and then click went the little button again, and I shrieked, “Daddy, it’s a hair dryer! It’s all pink, and it has a comb and a brush and a spot concentrator, wait till you see it, Daddy!”
Then, after all the gifts had been opened and the wrappings burned in the fireplace, I asked Mr. Stenner to listen while I played back the tape.
“Thanks, I heard it the first time around,” Mr. Stenner said, and went out into the kitchen.
I followed him and said, “But you didn’t hear the tape. Will you listen to the tape with me?”
“I’ll listen to part of the tape.”
“Why can’t you listen to all of it?”
“Because the boys’ll be here any minute.”
“If we have time to play all of it before the boys come...”
“No, I don’t want to hear all of it,” Mr. Stenner said.
“Why not?”
“Abby, just play some of it, okay?”
“Well, okay,” I said, and shrugged, and put on the tape.
The boys arrived at a little past noon.
My mother had told me that when she and Mr. Stenner finally got married, the boys would be my stepbrothers. I wasn’t too sure whether I liked that idea. I didn’t think my mother liked it much, either. Whenever the boys were around, she got very quiet. Jeff was the oldest of Mr. Stenner’s sons, and he didn’t look like Mr. Stenner at all. My mother had told me that Jeff resembled Mrs. Stenner, but I could hardly remember what Mrs. Stenner looked like. All I knew was that Jeff had sort of reddish hair, and a beard that was part red and part gold, whereas Mr. Stenner’s hair was brown and he didn’t have a beard at all. So I guessed maybe Jeff did resemble Mrs. Stenner instead of his father. Not that Mrs. Stenner had a beard.
The second son was named Luke. He never looked into Mommy’s eyes. It was almost as if by not looking at her, he would not be seeing her. I knew exactly how he felt. Lots of times, I’d close my own eyes and wish that Mr. Stenner would be gone when I opened them. It never worked. In the kitchen, while Mommy was fixing the salad, Luke suddenly asked, “How old are you, anyway, Lillith?”
Mommy turned from the counter top and looked into his face. “I’m thirty-six,” she said.
“Pop’s forty-three,” Luke said.
I knew what he was thinking. Mr. Stenner was too old for Mommy, that’s what he was thinking. Daddy was just the right age, thirty-eight.
I decided I was going to like Luke.
The Christmas tree was hung with neckties.
The ties belonged to my father. I’d been to visit him the weekend before and had come home with a dozen or more of his old ties, which I’d knotted together, end to end, and wound around the small tree in the living room.
“How does it look?” I asked Jeff, the oldest son.
Jeff stepped back from the tree, put his hands on his hips, and cocked his head to one side. “Let’s say it’s an unusual tree,” he said.
“Those are her father’s ties,” Mr. Stenner said.
“First tree I’ve ever seen with neckties on it,” Jeff said.
“Might set a trend,” Mr. Stenner said, and smiled.
“What’s so funny?” I asked. “There’s nothing funny about ties.”
They were talking about the house. They were all sitting in the living room after Christmas dinner, and Mr. Stenner was putting another big log onto the fire, and my mother was saying how lucky we’d been to find a house like this on such short notice. My mother was looking into the fire, and didn’t see the glance Luke directed at her. I saw it, though, and knew at once what it meant. In Luke’s eyes, our finding a place to stay hadn’t been good fortune at all. Luke would have considered all of us luckier if we’d stayed where we belonged — Mommy and me in our house with Daddy, and Mr. Stenner home with his wife and sons. Never mind this. What was this supposed to be, anyway? They weren’t even married, who were they trying to kid here?