Page 30 of Holiday at Home
Never mind.
I’ll do it myself.
“Everything okay?” Violet asks.
“If you can call anything that happens with my family okay…” I close my phone and shove it in my pocket. “God help the people at that resort—the guests, the staff, the ski instructor—especially if Nana Holiday finds him attractive.”
Violet cocks her head, rust-red hair falling over her shoulder. “I’m not sure I know what that means. And I’m not sure I want to know.”
I point a finger her way. “Exactly.”
The living room has disappeared in an army of totes and bins we pulled from the attic, all of them markedChristmas Stuff.On the mantle sits the card I made Violet yesterday for the mocha, and the one I left on her porch this morning with a pair of warm fuzzy socks, bright, bold, red and green with jingle bells at the ankles because Violet needed a break from bleak and black.
“It’s a lot,” she says, looking at the disaster in front of us. “Like, a lot a lot. Right?”
“Nope, that’s the wrong attitude. Did my warm fuzzy socks teach you nothing?”
“Were they supposed to?” Violet asks on a laugh, looking down at her red and green clad feet.
“Yes, Violet, yes. Everything is a lesson. And this one was: colorful vibes fix everything.”
She gives me a skeptical look. “Somehow I didn’t get that.”
“Obviously. So here I am, having to repeat the lesson. Let’s turn on some Christmas music, have a glass of wine, and look at these boxes as an opportunity instead of a challenge.”
“You should be a motivational speaker.”
“Babe, Iama motivational speaker. Look how motivated you are. Just look. I see it on your face. You’re the most motivated you’ve ever been.”
“This is true,” she says, laughing. “I’ve never been so eager to get you to stop talking.”
With the help of music and wine, we dive in, lifting lids off totes, moving things into the appropriate rooms, then start with the tree. Once it’s assembled and the lights are strung, we pick decorations out of their tins. Violet smiles at some of the ones from her childhood, cooing over things her grandmother made, or her mother, or a handprint from kindergarten. I watch and listen, happy to be part of her stroll down memory lane.
Happy just to be near her.
Okay, wow. That is a side effect of this little venture I did not see coming.
“Oh my goodness, look at this one!”
Violet passes an ornament my way: a picture of the two of us, young and in love, wearing matching holiday sweaters, my arm around her shoulder in front of the tree in this very room.
“Look how young we were.”
“Just babies. Man, I felt grown-up, though.”
We were happy. That much is clear in the picture—beaming, thrilled to be in love. Over the years, my memory had dimmed on how good we were together.
How important she was to me.
How important she apparently still is to me.
“This belongs in a place of honor,” I say, handing the ornament to Violet.
She purses her lips, cartoonishly examining the tree before placing it on a branch at the bottom near the back.
“Oh, ouch.” I place a hand to my chest. “Really?”
“Consider yourself lucky it’s on the tree at all. It didn’t make the cut the last three years.”
