Page 3 of Lake
“Or yours.”
I laughed as he shook his head at me.
Once the bacon was on the plate, he got to working on the scrambled eggs.
“Like most kids, I loved Christmas. But it wasn’t about all the gifts. My mom always went the extra mile to keep the whole Santa thing alive.”
“Pish,” he grumbled, the spatula whipped through the air and a piece of egg landed on the counter. “I always told my Gertie that if we had kids we weren’t going to let them buy into that nonsense of Santa.”
“What?” I screeched, my eyebrows going up to my hairline with shock. “What about the magic of it all?”
“Kids don’t need to be lied to in order to see the magic in it all. Magic is in the love that comes with each gift. The appreciation that someone knows you well enough to get you that one special thing. Why the fuck should you let some fake, made-up fat fuck take that away? I wanted my Gertie to know how much I loved her. Me. And I would have wanted my kids to know the same.”
While his words made sense, I wasn’t quite sure I agreed. But it wasn’t like it mattered because the idea of kids was nowhere in my thoughts. Not even the outer, possibly-one-day ones.
“You should never hide how much you care about someone. Love… love can be endless, even when the life ends. Love goes on for eternity and while you have that person by your side, you should never let them question how much they mean to you.”
I nodded even though his back was to me and he couldn’t see it.
His wife had been gone for twelve years and it was clear that not a day went by that he didn’t think of her and miss her with every beat of his heart.
“But go on. Santa shit,” he said snapping me out of my head.
“Yes,” I said then cleared my throat. “So there was the whole bake cookies from scratch and leave them out thing. But then after we went to bed, she would scatter the soot from the fireplace all over the carpet. And place a few ornaments on the floor. She even went as far as leaving a few scattered strands of white hair from a cheap wig. I mean, at the time I thought it was real.”
“And you believed it all?”
“Yep,” I said with a firm nod and a smile. “Until I was ten.”
He turned to me then with a shocked look on his face. His eyes looking even bigger behind his thick glasses.
“Even though the kids made fun of me at school, I still believed in the whole thing,” I said remembering the parts of my childhood that always made me smile.
Sometimes, I still wished I was that ten-year-old boy. What I wouldn’t give to go back to then. To have everything back.
“Breakfast is ready,” he said setting down the plate full of bacon, biscuits, and steaming hot eggs in front of me before taking his seat on the opposite side of the table.
He looked at me for a long moment before digging in.
“So what was your favorite gift as a kid?” he asked like he saw into my soul and realized all the things I didn’t want to talk about.
“Oh, that’s easy.” I took a bite of my bacon because I couldn’t resist it any longer. “A fishing pole when I was seven.”
“You like to fish?” This brought excitement to the old man’s face.
“No, never learned how.”
“So then why was it your favorite?” The confusion was clear as day in his voice.
“Because with it came so many possibilities.”
Possibilities that my father would take us to my grandfather’s cabin and the three of us would spend the day out on the lake. Possibilities of becoming the son that he always wanted. Possibilities of making great memories.
“You’re telling me that the possibilities of one gift meant more than the memories you didn’t make with that gift?”
“Yeah, because to a seven-year-old kid, the idea that one thingcouldhappen meant that a million different things could. It opened up things that I never even imagined before. So why should fishing be the limit?”
“You’re a strange fuckin’ kid,” he said then shoveled a forkful of eggs in his mouth. “But also very smart and wise.”
