December 23rd
Another Christmas with Granddad, who’s too far up his own ass to even notice we’re here. Last year, he promised us he’d get Wi-Fi, but of course he didn’t. There’s no signal at all. This place is a complete dead zone.
“What are we supposed to, like, do for the next three days?” I asked Mary Katherine, his new wife. I respect that she’s closer to his age but that doesn’t make her any better than his last wife, Yvonne, or the one before that who died after giving him a kidney. Mary Katherine gives him blood. “I’m type O negative. That makes me a universal donor,” she told us over lunch after we arrived yesterday.
Mom and I looked at each other.
Mary Katherine obviously didn’t get the memo that I can’t handle wheat. “Work around it,” she said, which wasn’t easy because the only thing she served was a quiche with bacon in it, which I also stopped eating last month.
When Mom said, “This is yummy,” the way she does, Mary Katherine thanked her, but I knew that the quiche was frozen. People who actually cook don’t put garlic salt on the table.
Since we were last here, Granddad’s dog died. It was a bull terrier so inbred that it was allergic to its own teeth and had to have every one of them pulled. All it could eat was bread crusts soaked in eggnog. Now Granddad has an orange cat with long hair and a pushed-in face named Reginald. He jumped up on my lap during lunch, and I couldn’t help but notice that he’d been declawed. “To protect the furniture,” Mary Katherine said, as if their furniture is all that nice.
“So Santa’s cat doesn’t have claws?” I said.
“They’re probably around here somewhere,” Mary Katherine told us. “Just not in his, you know, hands and feet.”
“Well,” Mom said, trying not to make any waves, “he’s an indoor pet.”
“I was making a joke,” I said. “Get it? Santa . . . claws?”
Mary Katherine said that, if I wasn’t going to eat my crust, I could put it outside for the birds, and throw away the soda cans while I was at it. The wife who gave Santa a kidney used to recycle, but now everything just goes straight into the trash. That’s where I saw the box the frozen quiche came in. It was a brand we don’t have in America. I couldn’t read the logo, but next to the writing was a drawing of a shivering penguin.
December 24th
We had cereal for breakfast, and, when there wasn’t enough milk to go around, Mary Katherine held the carton up to the faucet and mixed what little there was with water. Then she set it down in front of me as if she’d just run to the store and now I needed to thank her.
I was going to say something, but Mom gave me her “don’t you dare” look. People who assume that Santa is rich never spent a night in his freezing-cold house. When I was seven or eight, I asked him where he got his money from. My exact words were, “Who pays you?”
He told me he got a small, annual stipend from Jesus Christ our Lord—that was the word he used, “stipend.”
“Does He pay you with money?” I asked.
“Well, what do you think He pays me with?” Granddad said.
I thought it was against the rules or something for Jesus to touch money, so I said, “Jewels and gold.” And that was the only time I ever heard my grandfather laugh. In movies and books, he can’t keep a straight face for more than a few seconds at a time, but in real life he has no sense of humor whatsoever, and rarely looks you in the eye when he’s talking to you.
Mom hasn’t seen him since we got here. Me, I caught sight of him for all of ten seconds. Reginald fell asleep on my bed last night, and, at around 3 A.M., Santa came in to get him. I woke up as he was heading back out the door and, when I started to say something, he said, “Good to see you too, Prescott.” No one calls me that but him.
December 25th
We’ve had to whisper all day. “Your grandfather was working until six this morning and is exhausted,” Mary Katherine said whenever I so much as turned a page in a magazine. Santa has all these ancient, back issues of Crawdaddy, which is about rock music. According to Mom, he played bass for a while, though she didn’t say for who or for how long.
“Sh-h-h,” Mary Katherine said when I asked for details.
He finally woke up around 5:30 P.M. We could hear him in the next room, grunting his old-man grunts. Just as we started to smell his pipe, Mary Katherine went in and busted him for smoking in the house. “You know the rules,” she shouted. “Take it outside!”
You could tell that he’d had it with her. “Can you just for this one goddam day let it go?” I heard him say.
He was still in a crabby mood when he came to the dinner table. Mary Katherine served baked ziti with three cheeses, obviously frozen. The noodles weren’t gluten-free, and when once again she told me to eat around them, Mom said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” not directed at me for a change but toward Mary Katherine, who stomped into the kitchen. We could all hear her in there, tearing through the freezer.
“So,” Granddad said, starting in on his ziti, “how was your trip in? Any trouble with your flights, et cetera?”
Mom said we were an hour late leaving K.C. and, though she worried we’d miss the first of our two connections, we didn’t.
“Good,” he said, taking another bite. “You hear stories about airports now and it all sounds pretty exhausting.”
From the kitchen, I heard the ding of the microwave, and half a minute later Mary Katherine slammed a pizza down in front of me. I think she maybe doesn’t understand what “gluten” means, but I didn’t make a big deal out of it; just scraped off the toppings and ate those. There was no dessert. No salad. By six-fifteen, Santa had gone back to bed. Then it was lights-out.
December 26th
I’d never have thought to start keeping a diary if we hadn’t been at Granddad’s, where there is literally nothing to do. So maybe that’s something that came out of this trip. After we had breakfast this morning, Santa called us into his home office and made a big deal out of giving us presents. Mom got a mug with his face on it. I got a short stack of what turned out to be Greek drachmas and the dialysis machine Granddad used before his late wife gave him her kidney.
“What does he want with that?” Mom asked.
Santa said that kidney disease could very well run in the family.
It was pretty obvious that he was just trying to clear out his closet. The drachmas were totally useless, as Greece has been on the euro since before I was born. As for the dialysis machine, it was the size of a mini-fridge and was super heavy—dirty, too, with a sticker of a Minion on it.
“Not that it’s an issue, but, just, how the fuck did you expect him to get this home?” Mom asked, her face turning sort of purple. I’d never seen her like this.
Granddad started to scold her for her language and she said, “No, you know what? I’ve had it! Year after year, we fly up here on our own dime, we stay in your shitty house with whatever rude, sorry bitch you’re married to, and leave after seeing you for five minutes. So why don’t you take your Christmas presents and shove them all right up your ass?”
“Daughter!” Santa said, as if he was hurt, but as Mom said, after Mary Katherine dropped us off at the airport, there’s nothing that either of us could ever do or say that would hurt that man’s feelings.
“We don’t mean enough to affect him one way or another,” she told me. “I’m sorry, Scotty, but that’s the plain truth of it.”
During our first layover in Frankfurt, she said that, while she didn’t ever need to see her father again, I was free to do whatever I liked. “I’ll fly you up next Christmas if that’s what you want, and we can meet up later somewhere fun.”
I’m thinking, though, that it’s not really necessary. Let him come to us for a change. Or not. I’m fine with my last memory of him: Mom and me in the back seat of the station wagon, Mary Katherine storming out of the house with the car keys in her hand. Through the parted curtains, I could see Santa in his office chair. He lit his pipe and, as the smoke began to curl and drift upward, Reginald jumped onto his lap, and settled in. It was like a picture—just perfect. With falling snow and everything. ♦
