Here is the beginning of Chapter Nine of Father of the Year, the story of my first two years after my then wife left me with our two kids. Here I write about my first Christmas newly single.
Christmas was looming like an iceberg and I had to commit myself to some fancy navigation. Christmas was when I had proposed and nine years later Christmas was when she told me we were terminal. Ava knew that she, her brother and her mother were flying back to her grandmother’s in Social Circle, Georgia, for the holidays.
Are you coming too, daddy?
Of course I’m coming, baby. I’ve told you before. I’m just flying out later.
And you’re staying the whole time?
I’m staying for Christmas and then I’m going to New York to see some friends.
I wish you were staying the whole time.
I know you do, sweetheart. But if I don’t see these friends they will be sad.
That seemed to hold her reservations for the moment. She nodded.
I flew in no the 24th and Carmen and I slipped out to the Mall of Georgia on Christmas Eve to shop for the kids. The drive and the shopping were the longest we’d been alone together since she moved out. I felt as if I was acting in some poignant, indie relationship movie of the 1970s -- a black remake of Chilly Scenes of Winter. How odd it is to be so pleasantly formal with the person who used to share your soul. We fought our way through Barnes & Noble and Toys-R-Us and Old Navy, me paying for everything but we’d agreed to write from mommy and daddy on most all of the presents, and from Santa on the rest. Since she is a raw vegan eating out in the South is complicated. We settled on what looked the most upscale, a simulated Yukon fur-trapper’s lodge with a moose over the bar who got animated and lipsynched to classic Motown on the half hour. I got the Eskimo wings. She got two house salads.
I’d been coming to her mother’s house for twelve years. I call her mom. She makes extra chocolate chip cookies just for me. It’s as close to an ancestral home as I’ve got. Ava dictated to me a note for Santa Claus and laid it on a Styrofoam plate by the fireplace with three cookies and a glass of milk. Carmen and I then kissed the kids to bed and then wrapped all the presents in front of the television. She hadn’t had one since she moved out so was wide-eyed at the new reality shows. Finally, we were done.
Good night, Carmen.
Good night, Trey.
And she disappeared up the stairs to her room. I ate most of the cookies, sprinkled the crumbs around the plate. I drank almost all of the milk. I moved the fireplace screen over to the side. I wanted to leave sooty footprints but Carmen’s stepfather had just cleaned out the fireplace.
Up the stairs to my room I had to pass Carmen’s. When we were just dating her mother made us sleep in separate rooms but she would sneak to mine nightly. This time I bowed just my head and my neck into hers as I passed but that was enough. She was asleep and so beautiful that my chest hurt. On her dresser she had arranged a half-dozen photographs of half-naked swamis. All of the men in the photos were skinny, old and brown except Doug, her boyfriend, in his mop of blond dreds, lotusing under a pine.
Finding my way down the hall in the dark I turned on the light in the spare room to make sure that a drowsy mud dauber wasp wasn’t dying on my mattress. For twelve years I’ve shared this room with them at Christmas and they’ve only stung me once.
