Page 1 of The Christmas Mittens
Chapter One
Monday, December 7
“Dad, did you see my pink sweater?”
I glanced up from the batch of French toast I was whipping up to find my daughter standing in the doorway of our kitchen, sleep-tousled hair and pillow marks on her cheeks, still in her pajamas.
“Gilda, why aren’t you dressed for school yet?” I asked, which was a daily query for the twelve-year-old, who was so very much like her mother in so very many ways. For example, being notoriously hard to wake up, while I, on the other hand, snapped awake at six a.m. sharp no matter what day it was.
I got the preteen eye roll. Oh yes, it had begun at ten and was well practiced by twelve. Sorry, thirteen in a few weeks. That distinction was vastly important, it seemed. Being a teenager was big with a capital B. I didn’t remember being so hung up on age when I was a twelve-year-old. Of course, I was a boy, so my greatest concerns were playing baseball and tinkering on the engine of my go-kart. Girls, and later boys I would discover, were not even on my radar unless they could pitch for the pickupbaseball games in the park or they raced karts. Funny how kids now seemed to be so much more mature than we were back in the good old days. Of course, when thirteen hit so did the hormones, which changed my perspectivea lot.Lord, I felt so much older than my thirty-six years.
“Because I stayed up last night working on my essay for American history.” She padded over the worn linoleum floor in powder blue slippers matching her BSX2 blue fish pajamas. The girl loved her K-pop, art classes, and school plays. “Ooh yum, I love your French toast.”
She sank into my side, her thin arms sliding around my waist. So grown up in so many ways and yet still seeking her dad’s morning hugs. I hoped she’d never stop needing my arms around her as the day began. Katie had been a big hugger as well. I’d not grown up in an overtly demonstrative household so hugs at the drop of a hat had been new for me at first, but now I lived for them.
“I know you do. Your pink sweater is hanging in the bathroom drying, so you’ll have to wear something else. Did you get your essay done?”
I bent my head to drop a kiss to her knotted, sandy brown hair, which matched mine, as did her blue eyes, so yay for dad genes. She smelled like bubble gum and raindrops.
“Mostly,” she said as I tried to stir eggs with one hand.
“Really?”
She sighed then shook her head. “I don’t get why I can’t use theHamiltonversion of George Washington instead of the real one. The real one is so boring and crummy.”
“Well, I wager Mr. Maloney wants you to learn about the real Washington, and that’s why he said you couldn’t use the stage production version.”
“But Christopher Jackson is so much cooler! And he can sing. And he’s better looking. Even you said you thought hewas handsome. Have you seen the real one?” She gagged dramatically. Gilda did most things dramatically. She loved to sing, dance, and act, and was known to break into song in the middle of the frozen food aisle at Aldi. “He’s so old and had teeth made from horses and slaves. Slaves, Dad!”
What could I say to that? “I know it’s hard for us to grasp that, but sadly, that’s how things were back then. It’s terrible, but we can’t erase the bad parts of our past if we want to learn from them.”
“Well, I think it’s horrible, and I told Mr. Maloney that, and he said that disliking the man’s dentures did not take away from the other things that he did to forge our country. I’m going to point out his horse and human teeth in my essay and say that they’re way below mid.”
What was mid again? I think it meant bad. Maybe?
“Okay, honey, you point out the teeth.” That was my girl. She was not one to back down—again, much like her mother—when she felt a wrong, even if close to three hundred years ago, was being committed. “But don’t forget to include the good things he did.”
She made a noise of dislike before pulling away to go find the milk in the fridge. “Still would have rather have Christopher Jackson on the cover page than old horse teeth…” she was muttering as she poured herself a glass of milk, then ambled off, at low speed, to shower.
“Shower fast!” I yelled over my shoulder, but I doubted she heard me over her rousing rendition of “Right Hand Man” as she entered the bathroom.
Now that I could return to stirring eggs and cinnamon, breakfast went much faster. Gilda was late, as usual, but managed to catch her bus. Just. It was always a dash to the corner. Katie had been perpetually late as well. I joked that the only times the woman had been on time were for our weddingand the day Gilda was born. Back then, her tardiness drove me bonkers. After she had passed unexpectedly eight years ago from a brain hemorrhage, I found myself longing for those mad races she made every morning to get to work at the Grouse Falls Library.
Once the child was off, I returned to our little house on Blue Bonnet Drive to tidy up before I moseyed to the shop. The house was one of many cookie-cutter homes built by the now-defunct foundry that had, at one time, employed a few thousand people. The town had never really recovered from that economic loss fifteen years ago. We had no large industry here in Grouse Falls, and little by little, the younger people were leaving to find work in larger towns like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. Not that anyone blamed them. I was lucky I had inherited my father’s small engine repair shop as well as his love for fixing motors. I’d never get rich working on riding tractors, chainsaws, and snowblowers, but it was good work for a guy who never went to college. Blue-collar for sure, but there was not a damn thing to be embarrassed about in being a man who worked with his hands. I’d done okay. Bought a house, cramped as it had been, got married, and had a child. We’d been happy if not rolling in cash. Then Katie passed, and things got much harder. The hospital bills began rolling in, funeral bills, and burial plots. Things you never really thought about much in your early to mid-thirties. With no family to rely on—her folks and mine were all dead—it was just me and my daughter trying to move on with no wife or mother.
It had been rough.Reallyrough. But Gilda and I had made it. Somehow. We were happy for the most part. Sure, there were lonely nights, lots of them. Yes, I wanted to find someone to fill the void that losing Katie had left, but the pool of dateable men and women was low in Grouse Falls. Low as in nonexistent. No woman here could match Katie, and there were zero queer menthat I knew of in our charming village of roughly fifteen hundred people. That meant I was flying my bi pride flag outside the shop and from my porch during June all by my lonesome.
As I washed dishes and made myself a ham sandwich for lunch, I ruminated on what the hell I would do when Gilda left for college. I’d known that centering my life on my child was probably not healthy. She would leave. Obviously. We raised our chicks to fledge. But when that happened, my nest was going to be incredibly barren with no mate to share it with.
“Okay, enough. Don’t borrow worry, as Katie used to say.” I slapped some mustard on my rye bread with determination.
It wasnotgoing to do me any good to mull over the unknown. Live for the moment. Right. And that moment was now.
Locking the front and back doors of my two-bedroom, one-bath prefabricated steel home, I stepped out into a cold November morning with my lunch bag and my tote of yarn. Our house sat on a street lined with others just like it. The homes were built in the late-’40s to accommodate the influx of workers at the GF Foundry, which had grown massively during World War II, making parts for planes, tanks, and a wide range of other military goods. The boom continued through the ’80s but then began to wane as global competition and technological advancements took over the market. Even a foundry as large as GF had fallen under the rising costs combined with the higher wages that the steelworkers’ unions rightfully earned. Overseas workers were much cheaper. It took another ten years, but the doors were locked when I was just a teenager. Many of my school friends had moved off with their folks, and businesses had buckled one by one as the mom-and-pop shops fell under the heel of the megacorporations and supermarts.
Ugh. My mood was as gray as the wintry sky today. I fell into these funks when the days grew shorter. Seasonal affective disorder, I suspected. But I’d never been diagnosed becausethere were zero mental health clinics here. Also, I had no insurance so driving to a bigger city to see someone was not happening. Maybe I could buy one of those light boxes in the spring when sales spiked up a bit. For now, I’d just deal with the blues. My income had to go to bills and food, and also to save up for my daughter’s thirteenth birthday on December 25. My best Christmas present, I called her, much to her embarrassment.
I made my way to my two-car garage, rolled Gilda’s bike to the side, and slid behind the wheel of my beloved old Subaru. Four-wheel drive was the only way to navigate here in the Allegheny Plateau, a subrange of the Adirondacks. Winter did not mess around up here near the New York border. It came in hard, cold, and stayed far longer than anyone wanted.
