Chapter 17 – Adrian #2
“Have you ever done this before?” I ask Cora as we herd Pearl toward the barn with the carts and saws. Thank goodness they provide what you need. It didn’t even occur to me to bring my own.
Cora casts me an incredulous look. “No. You?”
I shake my head. “When I was young, we had a plastic tree. Once my mother left, we didn’t really do Christmas anymore.”
We walk slowly, letting Pearl lead the way. After a few moments of silence, Cora says, “Christmas was always something different, year to year. I liked the real trees better than the fake ones.”
“Your grandmother didn’t have a particular tradition?”
Her face shutters. “No. She was always changing it up.”
“Mommy, look at all of the Christmas trees!” Pearl has circled back to grab Cora’s hand, and she’s finally looked up from the puddles and noticed the world around her. “Are we going to get one?”
“We are.”
“Daddy’s going to cut it down?”
“Yup.”
“Are you really?” Pearl asks me, highly skeptical.
“Absolutely.” I was born and raised in the city, and I’ve never chopped a tree down before, but it can’t be that hard. I’m not the only man out here today who looks more stockbroker than lumberjack.
There’s no one greeting customers, and no directions except “all trees must be over five feet” and “all dogs must be leashed,” so I follow the crowd and grab a saw and a two-wheeled cart.
“Lead the way, ladies. You pick, and I’ll cut.”
“Come on, Mommy. This way.” Pearl takes off uphill, into the rows.
“Slow down,” I call after her. Cora is not only stiff from yesterday, but she’s carrying Winnie on ground still dusted with yesterday’s snow. I take Cora’s hand and tuck it in the crook of my elbow. Last thing we need is a slip and fall.
“What about this one?” Pearl has stopped next to a white pine.
“I don’t know. The needles are so long.”
Pearl pets a branch with her mittened hand. “But they’re soft.”
That tree is drooping now under only the weight of its needles. It would not be my pick.
Cora runs her gloved fingers along a branch. “So soft,” she agrees. “But maybe we should keep going. We’ve hardly seen anything yet.”
“Okay. Come on!” Pearl takes off again.
That’s Cora. Where my instinct is to shut a bad idea down, hers is to question, redirect, reframe.
I understand that you can’t use business tactics with children, but I can’t seem to graduate past merely not being an asshole with them.
The best I can do is keep my mouth shut, which is not good enough for parenting.
I honestly believed it would come naturally.
I didn’t know fatherhood would involve so much not doing what was done to me.
Nathaniel Maddox would’ve said, “No. What are you stupid? That one’s garbage.
” But then again, he would never be here, trekking through the slush to do unnecessary manual labor.
We follow Pearl through the blue spruce and end up in the balsam firs where Pearl stops in front of the saddest, spindliest A Charlie Brown Christmas tree. It doesn’t help that the trees around it have been chopped down, so it’s standing alone in a small clearing.
It’s a cold, clear day, mostly calm, but when the wind blows, it gusts, and the poor little tree looks like it’s about to topple over.
“I like this one!” Pearl declares. “It’s so cute.” She goes to hug it, and since the branches are so sparse, she’s actually able to do it.
Cora is distracted, wiping some drool from Winnie’s chin.
Pearl grins at me hopefully.
I channel Cora. “Maybe, uh, maybe that one needs some more time to grow. It’s kind of, um, stunted.”
Cora flashes me a look.
“I mean it looks a little frail.”
Cora raises an eyebrow.
Pearl gently pats the sad tree’s branch. “Are you frail?” she coos. “I love you. You’re a good tree.”
Cora begins to wander around the area, checking out the neighbors. We’re on the verge of the next plot of trees, which are bigger and denser.
“What about this one?” Cora asks. She’s standing in front of what comes to mind when you think of a Christmas tree. This one is almost seven feet tall and dark green with a perfectly proportional triangular shape.
I circle it. No gaps or dead patches. We’re not going to do better.
When I come back to the front, Pearl has her face buried in the thick branches, breathing it in. “It smells so good! Smell it, Mommy.”
Cora wafts the scent toward her nose. She can’t bend forward and risk the branches poking Winnie.
“So, we agree? This is the one?” I feel like we’ve looked long enough to make the drive worth it, and I’d rather not have Winnie out in the cold much longer, even though Cora has her bundled up.
Pearl looks back at Charlie Brown, and her face falls. “But what about that one, Daddy?”
Cora wanders over to it and inspects a sagging branch. “Daddy’s right. This one needs a little more time to grow.” Her voice is tinged with sadness, and Pearl picks right up on it.
“What if it doesn’t? What if no one ever wants it?”
“Then it’ll get to live a long life outdoors in the sunshine. That doesn’t sound too bad for a tree, does it?” Cora smiles at Pearl encouragingly.
Pearl will not be bamboozled. “But it’ll never get presents and lights.” Her blue eyes round as she turns to me, and my stomach twists. “It’ll be alone.”
Cora strolls back to the big tree. “No, it won’t. Look at all these other trees. It’s surrounded by so many friends.”
Pearl is wavering. She pads after Cora and takes her own turn around the big tree. “This one can have so many presents.” She’s talking herself into it.
I start gauging how I’ll attack the sawing. I don’t like bringing security on outings with minimal risk, but I could really use an extra set of hands.
Pearl glances back at Charlie Brown. On her face, pity wars with desire. It’s obvious that she’s seconds away from convincing herself that Charlie is good enough. Hell, no. Not my child saddling herself with a stunted tree because she feels bad for it. I’m making an executive decision.
I kneel in the frozen mud and shoulder my way past bushy needles. “Cora, can you take Pearl outside the falling radius? Just in case this doesn’t fall the right way.”
In the excitement of watching me roll on the ground, contorting myself into a good angle to saw the tree’s trunk, and incidentally abandoning every shred of dignity, Pearl forgets about Charlie.
I forget about him myself as we have our perfect tree shaken and wrapped.
Cora and Pearl get hot chocolates and a dose of microplastics from some Styrofoam cups while I tie the tree to the roof of the Range Rover.
I don’t immediately process what Pearl is talking about when she says to her mother, “Do you really think he’ll be okay?”
Cora doesn’t miss a beat. “Of course.”
“But there was nobody close to him.”
“Some living things like having more space.”
Pearl nods. “Like Daddy.”
Cora darts me a glance. “Yes. Daddy likes space.”
“But he’s not lonely,” Pearl says with total confidence.
Cora twists to look at Pearl. Or to avoid looking at me. “No. He has us. Just like the little tree has the whole tree farm.”
Pearl is satisfied, and she turns her attention to Winnie, sleeping in the car seat beside her with her head tipped back like a drunk. “Winnie’s cheeks are pink.”
“So are yours,” Cora says.
“And yours, too,” Pearl observes.
“And mine,” Cora agrees.
“Daddy, are your cheeks pink?”
“Are they?” I ask Cora, presenting my face for inspection, daring her to meet my eye.
She tries to keep her expression disinterested, but she flushes under her pink cheeks when our eyes lock. “Yes, Daddy’s are, too.”
She’s not blanking me out anymore. I still affect her. Something in my chest unwinds for the first time in weeks.
Cora gets the kids settled while I doublecheck the job I’ve done strapping the tree to the roof.
Once we’re on our way, Cora puts on the holiday radio station, and the car grows quiet.
Pearl drifts off to sleep. Cora watches the scenery go by out the passenger side window, her mouth tightening as she remembers her troubles.
More flurries begin to fall, and Pearl’s words come back to me. Daddy likes space. But he’s not lonely. The way she said it, “space,” she must’ve talked to Cora about this before. Was she asking why I work so much? Why I’m not the one who takes care of her, day to day, like Cora does?
I hadn’t planned it this way. I wanted a family. I was going to be different from my father. My kids weren’t going to raise each other.
Was it just easier to fall into the usual roles? Cora’s always been happy to be a stay-at-home mother. I’m very, very good at my job. Isn’t this just what men and women do when they get married? Divide the labor?
Or maybe—maybe Cora and I are both hiding. She’s sheltering in this marriage from a life that’s been a shitstorm, and I’m doing the marriage with one foot out the door, hiding behind my work, because I’m incapable of doing what she does so naturally.
I am lonely.
And I don’t like space. I’m just bad at being human.
It’s a helluva thing to confront while driving your family back to your beautiful home with a Christmas tree tied to the roof.
The mulled wine that Vera has waiting for us doesn’t make it feel much better.
Neither does eating dinner together without incident for the first time in weeks.
But after Cora and the girls are asleep, I have Martinez come up to the house to keep an eye on things, and I drive back to the tree farm. I wake the guy who runs the place, and after his dogs bark my head off and he bitches me out, he takes my money and lets me borrow a saw.
It takes a while to find Charlie Brown. Honestly, I’m not one hundred percent sure that I do find him, exactly, but I do carry a spindly-ass Douglas fir over my shoulder back to the Range Rover.
I let him ride shotgun back to the house and set him in a stock pot of water in the foyer so Pearl sees him first thing when she comes downstairs tomorrow.