Chapter 15 Holly
HOLLY
She was totally lying.
Being confronted with Rob at his most belligerent and angry, even with Jace on her side, had rattled Holly more than she wanted to admit.
She had a feeling that her nerves were anything but subtle, as she tried to find things to talk about on the drive back to the ranch and ended up babbling about Christmases when she was a kid.
Jace listened as if he found her fevered rantings about favorite childhood gifts the most fascinating thing he’d ever heard, and held her hand most of the way.
As they turned into the driveway, Jace asked, “Do you want to set up a Christmas tree today?”
That’s right, they had talked about that, approximately a million years ago. “Sure.”
After she took her purchases up to her room and petted the dogs, they walked up to the Christmas tree farm, where her dad was just closing things up and putting up the chain across the gate.
Seeing them approaching, he hastily stuffed something into his pocket; Holly didn’t see exactly what it was, just a brief flash of color.
“You two have a good day in town?” he asked gruffly.
“It was great, Dad.” Once again she teetered on the edge of telling her dad about Rob, then veered away. Maybe after being told off in no uncertain terms, he would stay away now, and the whole thing would just die down.
“We’re looking for a Christmas tree,” Jace said.
Dad glanced between them. “Is this one of those role play things? Are you two pretending to be customers?”
Holly felt herself turning bright red at the words ‘role play’; she was confident her dad hadn’t meant it that way, and yet. “Dad!”
Jace also flushed to his ears. “I mean, Holly wants a Christmas tree, so we were going to try to find one.”
“Oh.” For a minute her dad looked caught off guard in a way that Holly was unused to seeing him. “Yeah, of course. You two pick out the best tree on the lot. I’m sorry, honey. It’s been so busy I didn’t even think—”
“I know,” Holly said. She stood on tiptoe to kiss her dad’s work-roughened cheek. “Don’t worry about it. We’re going to pick a great tree, and then head down to start supper.”
It was snowing again lightly, and they walked around the Christmas trees in the slowly gathering blue dusk.
“What about this one?” Jace asked, pointing to a perfectly symmetrical Fraser fir.
“I hate to choose one of the really good ones,” Holly lamented. “We could get a good price for that.”
“Which one do you like?”
Holly hunted around and pointed to a slightly lopsided tree. “We can’t sell that one, at least without a discount.”
“Come on, you don’t really want the Charlie Brown tree. If your dad didn’t want you to pick a good tree, he would have said so.” He slipped a hand into one of hers. “Remember, he said the best tree on the lot, so let’s go find it.”
After some discussion, they settled on a lovely Scots pine with beautifully upright branches.
It was near the back of the lot and concealed by some less aesthetic trees, so Holly was willing to admit that it might be overlooked by a casual browser and cutting it wouldn’t be too much of a loss to the tree farm.
Jace wielded the chainsaw, and between the two of them, they carried the tree down the hill with a ceremonial air, hoisting it above their heads as they brought it into the yard.
“Our noble pagan sacrifice!” Holly cheered.
“Freshly cut!” Jace said, after a slight hesitation, as if he hadn’t had much experience with improvised comedy routines.
“Dad!” Holly called into the living room through the half-open door, while Jace tried to maneuver the tree up to the porch without hitting anything. It was a lot bigger than it had looked on the lot. “We need to find the tree stand!”
“Way ahead of you, honey,” her dad said.
Holly opened the door to find that the corner where they always used to have the tree had been cleaned out, and the tree stand was waiting for it, with the folded tree skirt and several colorful boxes of ornaments sitting next to it.
Her dad stood beside them, in his apron with a dish towel in his hands, looking a little nervous
“Oh, Dad.” Heedless of the snow she was tracking on the floor, Holly crossed the room to throw her arms around him and give him a huge hug. “You’re the best, you know that?”
Her dad turned pink and tried to fend her off. “And you’re sticky.”
“Oh, no.” She was still wearing her white town coat; it looked like she’d gotten a patch of sap on the sleeve. “I should’ve changed. Bother. Oh well, it’s a sacrifice, after all. Let me get out of this, and I’ll be in to help with dinner.”
“What I want you to do is stay in here and set up the tree,” her dad told her firmly. “I’ll handle dinner. Lord knows I’ve done my share of cooking since you girls moved out, so it’s not going to hurt me.”
“You really are the best.” She went to help Jace squeeze the tree through the front door.
Set up, it reached all the way to the ceiling. Even as tall as he was, Jace had to climb up on a box to wind the seemingly endless strings of lights around the tree, while Holly tried to untangle them.
“How many of these are there?” Jace asked, as she handed up a string of blue and silver lights.
“I don’t think we can fit them all. There was one year Noelle requested a silver and blue tree, so we have the lights for that, and we also have all of the colored ones, and there was a year Mom decided to do a pink and white tree .
..” She delved into the box again, marveling to herself that the crushing sadness had begun to fade into a softer nostalgia.
They finally gave up on stringing lights before the tree’s branches vanished entirely, put up some garlands, and then turned to the boxes of ornaments.
In the middle of this, her dad came in with two plates.
“Oh, Dad, we can stop for dinner,” Holly protested, scrambling to her feet.
“Don’t you even think about it.” He set one plate beside her knees and the other on top of the pile of boxes next to Jace. “It’s all finger food. Chicken nuggets and hot sandwiches. I figured you two wouldn’t want to stop what you’re doing.”
“Did I say you were the best earlier? Now you’re really the—what was it that Ivy used to say?
I think she got it from some kids’ movie we used to watch.
Cream of the crop, tip of the top? The very tip top.
” Holly pushed Rocket’s nose away from her plate.
“And you’ll be even more tip top if you take these starving beasts with you. ”
Dad whistled to the dogs and took them back to the kitchen. Holly was a little surprised that Cupcake went with him, rather than staying with her (and the possibility of treats), but the small dog and her dad really did seem to have warmed up to each other.
“You can help us, you know!” Holly called after him.
“Don’t worry about me, hon. I’ll be out in the barn for a while after dinner.”
After her dad was back in the kitchen, Jace said quietly, “He sure does spend a lot of time in that barn.”
“I know. He likes working with his hands. But it’s also an escape,” Holly said, low.
With a chicken nugget in one hand, she opened a box of ornaments, and abruptly felt punched in the chest by the lumpy handmade candy canes and misshapen nativity animals lying in a cushion of shredded paper.
A bittersweet ache stung her chest. “Christmas is a hard time of year for him to deal with. It’s just so tied up with Mom for all of us. ”
She ate a few chicken nuggets to push down a lump in her throat.
“What are these, anyway?” Jace asked, picking up a brownish blob from the ornament box with some pointy parts sticking off. “Is this a, er ... okay, I was going to say a brown snowman, because I know it’s not poop. At least I don’t think you’d have a poop ornament on the tree, but who knows.”
Holly almost choked on a chicken nugget.
Grateful for his obvious but sweet effort to cheer her up, she took the blob from his fingers.
“It’s a donkey. At least I think so. Ivy made a whole nativity out of modeling clay one year.
Of course, she was five at the time. We always put them up every year anyway, although when we all got older, it was mostly to annoy her.
” She pulled out a blue and pink blob. “I think this one is the Virgin Mary. Or maybe it’s a wise man. It’s sort of hard to tell them apart.”
They went on hanging ornaments, each misshapen piece of baked clay or squashed and faded paper chain bringing a memory with it.
There was a set of lumpy, homemade candy canes of braided and baked salt dough, flaking with age, each with a child’s name written on it.
“This was before Merry was born,” Holly said, holding one in her hand.
“So there are only four of them. We made her one later, but I don’t know where it is. It doesn’t seem to be with these.”
The handmade ornaments were mixed in with a variety of store-bought ones, wooden stars and nutcrackers, angels and reindeer, shatterproof balls still in their original box.
They rarely kept glass ornaments, at least few that survived the procession of younger siblings and childhood pets, although Holly did find one stained-glass pineapple in a metal frame.
“Oh, this was mine,” she said, giggling, as she hung it up. “It was one of those glass fusion kits. Shaped like a pineapple. I don’t think it was supposed to be a Christmas ornament, but it looked like it would go on the tree if you put a hanger on it.”
Although Jace seemed enthusiastic about encouraging her childhood memories, she began to notice that he wasn’t offering any of his own in return.
“What were your childhood Christmases like?” she asked, as he stood to drape a paper chain on the already loaded branches.
“Not much like this, I can tell you.”
“I’ m still curious. I don’t mind hearing about it.”