Chapter 2
ANSON
D asher was the perfect place for two kinds of people—those who wanted to pretend it was Christmas year-round, and those who wanted to be left the hell alone.
Ten months out of the year, we got along just fine.
They pretended it was Christmas even when the snow had melted, the white blanket retreating to the mountain caps, melting into the streams and rivers that ran ice cold all the way through summer.
They played Santa Claus is coming to Town in August, and they left me the hell alone.
The day after Halloween though, things changed.
They got more aggressive. Christmas wasn’t just for the lights that people “forgot” to take down.
It wasn’t confined to speaker systems. No, it was deployed like a militia.
It stormed the town. It took Main Street hostage in Santa’s name.
The Christmas Committee stopped pretending like they were just a book club.
The gloves came off, and the mittens went on.
That still would have been fine—I believed in living and letting live.
Let them spend half the town’s annual budget on twinkle lights and biodegradable tinsel.
What the fuck did I care? But the problem was, that faction of town stopped leaving the other faction the hell alone.
Our unspoken agreement was breached for November and December.
The ten-month ceasefire was unceremoniously called off, and negotiations began.
I’d managed to avoid it so far, but I knew my time in the foxhole was coming to an end. Around six that evening, Linda Kelly had called me. The sound of my landline rang out like the first shot. I hadn’t answered, but she’d left a message.
“Anson, I know you’re busy, but my commercial oven is acting wonky, and I need your help.”
Linda Kelly ran a bakery that looked like it was transplanted right out of the North Pole.
The scalloped eaves of the shop were always lined with dangling icicle lights.
The two bay windows on either side of the door were always decorated by one of the local artists with scenes from whatever Christmas classic she was currently into.
Last year it was Frosty the Snowman. This year I had no idea, and I was trying to keep it that way.
Around mid-October, I stocked up on all the shit I usually got from town and tried to hunker down for winter.
Before I retreated, I made vague comments about going back east for a bit, trying to throw them off my scent.
Sometimes I even inquired about boarding my husky, Bear, as if I’d ever leave that dog.
“You’re not going to get me that easily, Linda,” I told the machine.
“And I know you’re in town because Tollin told me you helped her out with Mistletoe Cottage,” Lind added, as if she’d heard.
“No good deed,” I muttered to Bear.
But Bear was already standing by the door. He knew Linda’s voice, and he knew she always had freshly baked bone-shaped treats, just for good dogs like him. He was happy to go to the rescue. And eventually, I got around to thinking that maybe I was being paranoid.
The Christmas Committee had enough on their plate, they didn’t have time to devise little schemes like this to rope me into setting up their elaborate display in the town square.
And Linda’s oven might have very well been broken.
I’d told her the last time I fixed it that with the amount of baking she did, she needed to invest in a better one.
A five- or six-thousand-dollar piece of equipment would get the job done for a while, but if she didn’t want to keep calling me, she should lay out for a Blodgett, at least.
“How much are those?”
“Around fifteen.”
Linda had done some quick calculations in her head and decided that it was a better deal to keep calling me.
“I’m going to up my price this time,” I told Bear as I reluctantly grabbed my coat and toolbox. I’d walk to town rather than drive my truck that always had the full complement of my equipment packed into the back.
Bear was happy about that, too. A walk was great, and a walk to treats was even better. He ran ahead of me, his front paws doing an enthusiastic high kick through the new fallen snow for the first full mile before he calmed down and circled back to walk beside me.
I talked quietly as we walked, a habit I’d acquired in the last seven years.
Once, I’d been the kind of man who carried on a normal amount of conversation with his dog.
It was limited to good boy and don’t shit there .
Now, though, we talked philosophy, sports, current events.
Bear was my sounding board for everything from whether we were living in a simulation to whether the Minnesota Wild would take the Stanley Cup this year.
I fell quiet when we got to the edge of town.
It was lit up like a Christmas tree like always, but something was off.
And that something was giving me the undeniable feeling that I’d been tricked.
It was just too damn convenient. Here it was, early November, the time when the Christmas Committee kicked into overdrive, and Linda needed me to come into town.
When Bear and I passed the thirty-foot fir tree in the town square, I noted grimly that Linda Kelly’s husband was standing with a couple of the other men from town with expressions that ranged from perplexed to pissed off.
Yeah, I’d been had.
Bill Kelly raised his hand to me. I nodded back and kept on.
Linda’s windows were Grinch-themed this year. I met the wry, aggravated green eyes of the title character and felt something like kinship. The difference was, though, Whoville had left him alone.
“Anson!” Linda cried when I walked through the door, Bear on my heels. “I tried to call you.”
I let the door shut behind me and set my heavy toolkit down on one of the absurd little round tables that could barely fit two chairs underneath and two coffees on top.
It rocked under the weight. “Oh yeah?” Skepticism scraped the illusion of polite inquiry right off my tongue.
“Let me guess. The oven just started working again, right?”
“It is the damndest thing. You know, if you got a cell phone?—”
Ignoring that, I rolled my wrists and flexed my fingers. “Glad to hear it, Linda. I’ll head on back.”
But Bear was already scarfing down his first treat, and Linda had a second one in her hand. She knew as well as I did that Bear wasn’t going anywhere until he got his second treat. She smiled a diabolical, twinkly smile and slid it into the pocket of her apron.
“Since you’re here…”
“No,” I said flatly, and sat down. “Coffee and a scone please, Linda. You know my bullshit fee.”
Annoyed that I wasn’t just trooping on out to help Bill figure out whatever the hell was wrong with the tree lights, she picked out the smallest and most delicate cup from her collection of Christmas China.
When she handed it to me, it fit neatly in the palm of my hand and held approximately a thimble full of coffee.
I tossed it back like a shot. “Double or nothing now.”
She plopped the pot and an equally tiny plate on the table. The scone overrode the edges of the plate, obscuring the painted scene of three children building a snowman. “Anson…” she paused, waiting for me to fill in my last name.
“Linda.” I crammed a bite of scone in my mouth and topped off my coffee.
“—would it kill you to have a little Christmas spirit?”
I tried to look like I was considering her question as I chewed and swallowed. When I was able to, I said thoughtfully, “You know, Linda, I think it might.” She scowled deeper. It was about as intimidating as Mrs. Claus saying dagnabit! because she’d burned the cookies.
I finished the scone in two more bites, took another shot of coffee, and stood up. “Come on, Bear.”
Bear made a hopeful whinnying sound deep in his throat that Linda couldn’t resist, even if she was mad at me. She fished the treat out of her apron pocket and petted the thick fur of his neck while he scarfed it down.
“Well, feel free to show your face around town this year,” she said grumpily, like she always did. “We have our Christmas tree lighting tomorrow… hopefully.”
“It’s too early for Christmas tree lightings, Linda. It’s early November.”
“You know the Dasher way, Anson. Are you coming or not?”
“Might be heading back east,” I said noncommittally.
“Tollin’s had those sweet little muffin babies practicing Oh Christmas Tree since Labor Day. They’ll be so upset if we can’t get those lights working.”
“Wrong angle, Linda. Rugrats aren’t my thing.”
“ Tollin will be so disappointed, too.”
I could tell by her expression—flinty eyed, like a hunter peering through the trees to see if his shot had hit its mark—that she thought she was onto something. I grunted out a laugh that surprised both of us. “Like I said, Linda. Rugrats aren’t my thing.”
“Tollin is twenty-six!”
I shook my head, unable to believe I’d fallen for the bullshit oven story. I knew better. Dasher was making me soft. In my old life, I’d have smelled the con from the first ring of the telephone and?—
Fuck it. It didn’t matter what I would have done then.
That was a different life. I’d put it so far behind me that sometimes it felt like a messy, surreal fever dream.
At least, it felt that way until it appeared in my actual dreams, real as the cold steel of a gun in my hand, sharper than a blade sliding between my ribs.
“I’m going back east for a couple of months, Linda,” I tried again. “I’ll be back in January. Why don’t you ask the actual electrician in town for help?”
I was being an asshole there. Her son, Kross, was the town electrician.
He was a former golden boy quarterback turned NFL washout turned apprentice electrician.
He’d barely been out of the apprenticeship when the actual electrician died, his partner moved away, and Kross was the only one left to take over.
Which is to say, he was a shit electrician. You blow a fuse? Kross is your guy. Anything else? You’d do better to make sure you had fire insurance and let it work itself out.
As my jab registered, Linda’s eyebrows snapped together and she opened her mouth, ready to give me a piece of her mind, but Bear and I were out the front door before she had a chance.
I paused outside to zip my jacket up to the top.
The wind had grown teeth while we were in the warm cozy shop. Typical Minnesota.
It bit at my knuckles and clawed at the exposed inch of my throat over my zipped-up jacket.
I couldn’t help seeing Bill and the other town patriarchs, hair blown sideways in this voracious wind, puzzling over the mess of cords and trying to figure out why the hell it wasn’t working.
Kross was standing a couple of feet away from them, arms crossed, a surly expression on his face.
“Evening, Anson,” Bill said when he saw me watching them.
He didn’t have Linda’s optimism that I was here to help though.
He just sounded tired and annoyed. Something about that compelled me more than Linda’s trickery.
Bill was a good guy, and if he didn’t get these lights working, the whole town would blame his son.
I didn’t like the kid myself. He still acted like he was throwing game winning passes instead of fucking up the wiring all across town. But I liked Bill just fine.
With a disgruntled sigh that only Bear could hear, I changed course and headed over. “What seems to be the problem, Bill?”
The problem was that the town’s electrical grid wasn’t meant to power fifty miles of twinkle lights, so we switched the tree to a generator and it worked fine.
“I thought we were going to have to replace the damn lights,” Bill said, holding his hand over his heart like the very idea gave him chest palpitations.
“I told you I tested them,” Kross muttered.
I headed off then. I wasn’t interested in witnessing another Bill and Kross Kelly public argument. It was bad enough that news of them had reached even a hermit like me.
After a few short blocks, Bear and I left the bright, twinkling town behind us and walked into the pitch-dark forest. The moon was behind a thick layer of clouds tonight, so there wasn’t even the silver gleam of snow to light our way.
Bear and I didn’t need light, though. We could pick our way through the forest as easily as we could move through our own cabin.
The trees were as familiar as our furniture.
We avoided the places where the gnarled roots bunched up like arthritic knuckles gripping the ground, same as we avoided the bad step on the staircase to the loft.
We were halfway back when I saw the car turn onto the unpaved trail that the Christmas Committee was trying to rename Mistletoe Lane.
I followed it with my eyes, noting that the owner didn’t have tire chains on yet.
I could tell from the way the headlights jounced as the wheels didn’t quite grip the road through the fresh layer of snowfall.
Curious, I slowed to a stop at the place where the trail split into two branches.
One path would lead right to Mistletoe Cabin, and the other would take us the last mile to my own cabin–the one that I steadfastly refused to name despite mounting pressure from the committee.
I could tell by the way Bear was lifting his muzzle and leaning forward that he was curious, too.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if his acute hearing picked up on the fact that it was a motor we hadn’t heard before.
“It’s the new neighbors,” I murmured to him. My dog had been my closest confidante for so long that it didn’t feel strange to talk to him like he was a friend anymore. “A woman and a little girl. Remember, we built her bed a few days ago?”
The red glow of the car’s taillights were dim embers, shining through the trees now. Still, the night was so quiet and empty that my ears picked up the sound of Tollin’s laugh, the high-pitched voice of a child, and then the quieter, weary syllables of my new neighbor.
Now Bear really wanted to go down that path.
He wanted to meet these new people, particularly the little one.
There was a time when I would have headed over to carry in boxes.
Wouldn’t matter that I didn’t know her. You didn’t leave a woman with a young kid to unpack her car alone, especially not at night with fresh slick snow on the ground.
But that was another life. In this one, I’d already done more than I wanted.
The damn tree was lit, wasn’t it?