By Lina Marino
Nora can’t escape the holiday: Christmas-themed sitcoms on TV, festive music in the stores, some idiots even decorate their cars with felt antlers, bells jangling on bumpers, the drivers themselves festooned in fuzzy red hats and ridiculous reindeer noses. Her short ride to the mailbox torments her, every house on the cul-de-sac done up with Santa, and Frosty, and Rudolph fashioned from shiny dimpled plastic, twisted wire that mimics spun gold, nylon inflatables that, when collapsed, spread across entire lawns in a plague of parachute fungus.
Across the street, the Portmans’ plexiglass nativity shimmers; the word NOEL blinks in green neon above an icy Madonna. Next door, Bill Frangelo staked his walk with styrofoam candy canes; on his patio a trio of mechanical elves dance on a mound of sprayed-on snow.
Nora glances out the windows, again, to assure herself Carl isn’t lurking behind the nylon snowman swaying on the Starks’ front lawn, that the trees are really trees, the enticing, bauble-laden wreaths dangling from her neighbors’ doors are not inviting Carl in.
For the second Christmas in a row she won’t drag out the holiday dross. Holly-clad garlands, strings of silver bells, fat colored bulbs Carl draped over the porch to keep up appearances, even after the boys left home. When Matt and Paulie joined the Corps, Carl replaced their six-foot live tree with an artificial tabletop model; he mocked Nora for hanging stockings in the family room. “Anyway, Christmas is for kids,” she’d reasoned, weighing the effort versus the gain, forgoing the trinkets she’d collected through the years to avoid the stress of Carl harping on her to “take that shit down” on December 26th, the day most families were enjoying leftover ham or returning unwanted gifts.
A metallic squeak draws her to the upstairs landing window. Jack Stark straddles a ladder higher than his second story. Each rung sinks as he huffs, up and up. Absent his baseball cap, his fat round blonde head gleams like the balding cartoon figure on his handyman truck. Baggy jeans, red flannel shirt flapping, one arm encumbered with a spool of lit pink twinkle bulbs uncoiling with each labored step. An orange extension cord trails down and around the bottom of the ladder like a lethal exotic snake.
“Pink,” she mumbles. “Enough already.” Leave it to Jack. His roofline is a mishmash of purple LEDs, garish yellow pineapples, lopsided plastic icicles, the effect as if Christmas got nauseous and threw up all over his paint-chipped eaves. Nora feels like vomiting herself. What does he hope to accomplish, adding more at this late date? The emerging sun, pitched low and narrow at barely dawn, glints off his lawn in pinpricks reflecting actual frost, not the fake stuff Bill Frangelo splattered on his porch. She can’t remember a California Christmas Eve this cold in thirty years.
Eight steps upstairs, the deep pile carpet bristles beneath her woolen socks; the thermostat sparks a violent shock. “Oww!” she yelps, before she can stifle herself. She isn’t ready to wake Paulie. She needs to rehearse what she wants to say. His snore a sputtering propeller after another late night, another hangover sure to put him in another pissy mood. Good luck with that.
Fifty-nine Fahrenheit, according to the digital display. Carl claimed it wasn’t accurate: you couldn’t go by that because heat rises, the builder was stupid to place the thermostat on the second floor so No, Nora couldn’t turn on the air conditioner when it read ninety because it was ten degrees cooler downstairs. Forty-nine then, downstairs today, by that logic.
She sets the mode to heat, presses the plus sign once, raising the target temperature to a modest sixty, rationing air using Carl’s method. “One degree at a time, Nora,” he said. A click in the crawl space above her rouses the furnace, a swoosh of air pumps through the vents, purring waste waste waste, reminders of her impending electric bill—she hoped to hold out until they read the meter on the 27th, three more days. Half an hour, she tells herself, to take off the chill and thaw her fingers. The orbs of her thumbs bleed, severely chapped, the Band-Aids from last night lost somewhere in her sheets.
She slips into the office to check Jack’s progress.
His position on the uppermost rung of the ladder elevates her pulse. The wind lifts his shirt; rolled backfat reminds her of the stuffed pig at one of Bill Frangelo’s barbeques—sloppy, how Jack treats his body, his property, his kids. Mason and Grayson hop from the open garage like neglected sparrows. “Daddy, Daddy,” they chirp. Instead of hammering in new hooks, Jack takes the lazy way, draping a pink twinkle bulb above a yellow pineapple, a tangle of wires overloading the existing fasteners.
He doesn’t protect what he has—a wife, two beautiful children, Allie’s minivan parked in the driveway next to his truck. The boys in pj’s, mismatched sets of cotton bottoms and button tops fluttering on their slender shoulders. “It snowed, Daddy. Look at the snow.” The twins race around Jack’s walkway in circles, barefoot, stooping to test the frost on the lawn with tentative pinky pokes. “Brrrr, cold.” Their broad crimson faces giggle, like how Jack must’ve looked as a child. Nora wonders if Allie’s disappointed she didn’t have the girls she predicted ten years ago.
“Where’s Mommy?” Jack says, without so much as glancing down, his voice as remote as the faraway sky. He leans sideways to loop another twinkle bulb, balanced on one foot.
“Sleeping,” the twins yell up. One of them—Mason? She can’t tell them apart—picks up the extension cord and examines it.
She can’t take this, her watch alone preventing certain disaster. She can’t wait to get out of this neighborhood, not only to put distance between her and Carl, but to forget the Starks, the constant worry, the annoying distraction. She has things to do. Every realtor she contacted since her wasted day in court last week said the house will sell, once she tends a few minor repairs. Touch-up paint throughout, recaulk the kitchen backsplash. Fumigate Carl’s room, if she can manage, the hyperbaric chamber where he sealed himself in getting high and jacking off, she surmises from the plethora of drugs and condom wrappers he left behind, the stench of his cannabis resistant to disinfectant.
And here come the dogs.
The little boy drops the orange cord to chase after them. He and his brother invent a game. They run up to the ocean of lawn, dip a toe in the frost and jump back, dig tiny fingers into the white-blonde scruff of the retrievers’ dragging them along, the two dogs allowing this mistreatment as if it’s common play.
Jack sets the reel of unstrung pink lights on the roof and begins his descent. Careless, like everything he does. He’ll soon be on the ground to reposition the ladder before stringing up the rest. She watches long enough to assure herself Mason and Grayson are safe.
She revisits the Home Sale folder splayed open on the office desk.
“This is a beautiful property.” Steph LeGrass had smiled at the crackle glass pendants centered above the kitchen island. She’d admired the view of Canyon Lake, but unlike the three other realtors Nora interviewed, Steph knew the view would up the property’s value, her take-charge style the best choice to secure Carl’s agreement. “He can still mess things up,” Nora explained. “He can reject any realtor, he can refuse potential offers.”
“I’m neutral.” Steph’s husky voice commanded respect. She laid out her marketing plan, her thirty-plus years’ experience; she gathered up the enormous binder she’d prepared to pitch her services separately to Carl.
The wind rises. A spiral of crumpled leaves disperses from Nora’s front hedge swirling like a miniature tornado. “Look!” Mason and Grayson follow the phenomenon into her driveway. They hop onto her stoop and stick their tongues out at the security camera.
Clang. The ceiling rattles, a disturbance she assigns illogically to the Stark kids before realizing it’s the furnace, another potential repair. She switches off the thermostat and hazards creeping into Paulie’s room—frustrated he doesn’t lock his door, ignoring her fear of Carl’s return. She removes the space heater from his closet.
Paulie spills out of his blanket, exuding the briny smell of cigarettes and beer.
He opens one eye. Rolls onto his stomach.
“You getting up?”
“In a minute.”
“Soon?” They have to talk. A real talk, not some argument or flip sarcastic dodge. Nearly two weeks he’s evaded her, since she overheard Carl barking on Paulie’s cell, demanding Paulie deliver his possessions. She needs for that to stop, and for Paulie to help her get the house in shape for viewing.
“I said, in a minute. Can you go now please?”
“Going. Gone.” But this isn’t over. She leaves the door ajar to prove her point.
The space heater clicks on, though she has to practically sit on top of the thing to feel warmth. The unit is older than the furnace, the frayed cord patched with electrician’s tape. Cautionary stories on the news claim these things get hot enough to start a fire, but after fifteen minutes of tepid currents Nora has her doubts.
Jack steps off the ladder and onto his roof. He works his way around the middle gable above the spare room—Carl’s bedroom at Nora’s house—and scales the ceramic tiles on the peak, unfazed by the bluster at that height, a reel of pink unfurling behind him, a twinkling question mark with an orange tail.
“Come play with us Daddy.” The boys grab hold of the ladder and shake it, the tops of their heads twin shocks of silk blowing across fragile seashell skulls. The retrievers bark, running rings around the boys’ ankles.
If things go as planned she’ll be out of here by spring. No feral kids or pets or dangerous ornaments. She’s tired of being the neurotic passenger whose vigilance keeps the plane afloat.
The Starks’ nylon snowman ripples, the beanbag fabric undulates in mad waves. Jack’s ladder pings, vibrating against the stucco.
“Daddy, come down!”
The top rung of the ladder releases, swaying gracefully just below the roofline, suspends midair, then slams again with an earsplitting thwack that at last gets Jack’s attention.
“Put that back,” he yells. He swings one leg over the side and deftly clamps the ladder against his thigh.
Nora holds her breath.
The dogs pause their barking.
The boys tilt their fair heads skyward.
Even the wind dies. For a moment all is well.
Until Jack’s hands fly up.
He loses his grip. His flabby bottom scuds down the rungs and, midway, he catapults forward taking ladder and lights, a snarl of twisted wire and sparkling multihued bulbs. At the lowermost rung, his feet stop, momentarily. And then he somersaults. He lands—not on pavement—but on a small pale body. A blonde head breaks his fall.
***
Paulie sleeps through the fiasco.
Through Nora’s startled, “Oh!” Her panicked race downstairs.
She cinches her bathrobe, cracked thumbs stinging in the frozen outdoor air. By the time she leaves her porch Jack’s on his knees scooping the hysterical boy from the cement. He’s alive, thank god, kicking at his father’s shins with enough vehemence Nora realizes his injury isn’t all that serious. “You hurt me, Daddy,” he cries.
His brother moans. The dogs whimper in commiseration.
“You shouldn’t move him,” she calls, but as she approaches their walkway Allie vaults from the front door of their house and wards Nora off with a scowl.
The family loads into the minivan: Allie in the driver’s seat, in a bathrobe herself, blue with yellow stars. Jack climbs in back with twins and dogs, leaving his tangle of lights in a heap on their driveway, the ladder sluiced through the deflated snowman on their melting lawn.
***
“Paulie, get up!”
“I told you—”
“Something happened. Is your alarm broken?”
“Go away.”
“Something happened.” She crosses to the window and flips the shutter open, condensation clouding the glass, the top of the aluminum patio cover swampy wet.
He flops his arm over the side of the bed, pink veins spidering his eyes, the lids drooping. “This better be good.”
“There was an accident.”
“A what?”
“Next door at the Starks’.” She picks her way around piles of his dirty clothes, black denim jeans, weighted with a chain hooked on one pocket to hold his keys, the crumpled denim shirt he wore last night. “Jack fell off his ladder.”
“Is he okay?” His voice is thick, maybe still drunk. He kicks the blanket off, his flannel clad legs swing to the matted carpet. Her Paulie in Christmas pajamas and swollen eyeballs.
“He’s fine.” The moron. “But his son got hurt. They took him to the hospital.” She crinkles her nose, the beer and nicotine smells intense closer to the source. “It stinks in here, Paulie.”
His face solidifies into a stony blank. On his nightstand his vape collection of lurid jewel-colored bottles sparkle, half-empty glasses smudged with spotty water (she hopes it’s water), a ticket stub from The Comedy Store in L.A. (how did he afford going there?), filthy discarded coins, and a condom in gold foil—sealed, but a condom nonetheless—as shameless as Carl.
“What does this have to do with me?”
“They left their garage door open.”
“So?” He taps his big toe, the hairy knuckle protrudes from his slender foot, topped with a dirty ragged nail.
When was the last time you trimmed those things, she wants to ask.
“When was the last time you cleaned in here?” she says.
“Huh?”
“Go outside and shut it for them, please.”
“Hmmph. Maybe later.” He slings the comforter around his shoulders, wriggling as if to tuck himself back into bed, but just sits there reeking.
A November paystub from the Pancake Palace reminds her he hasn’t worked in two weeks. He catches her squinting at it.
“Get up now, Paulie,” she snaps. “You had your fun, now get up and do something useful. Quit acting like a slug.”
“I’ll get up when I’m ready.” He reaches across the nightstand, fiddles with the vape bottles, lifts a fuchsia cylinder, and tips it sideways checking its fullness.
“No, Paulie. You’re not doing that in here.”
“In here?” he says. “It’s my room.”
“Really. Do you pay the mortgage?” The words tumble out before she can stop herself, a record flipped on automatic. She intended to approach Paulie as she would an adult, but he’s so damn resistant. He hasn’t earned that level of respect. “When was the last time you took out the trash or washed a dish? You don’t appreciate anything, do you? When was the last time you paid for groceries?”
“Jesus Christ. No wonder Dad left you.”
Her heart thumps, heat spreads across her chest—swift as a virus. “Leave?” she shrills. “He was escorted out by two deputies.” She never told him—at first she knew he wouldn’t hear it, then thought it best to spare his innocence. Let him keep his illusions, she figured, the kid loves his father, so long as he didn’t interfere with what she’s trying to accomplish with the divorce.
“So you say.”
“He tried to kill me, Paulie.”
“If he wanted to kill you you’d be dead,” Paulie says, Carl’s sneer curling from his delicate lips, a glimpse of sharp teeth clenched below Paulie’s gums. A sliver of light creeps through his unscreened window, staining his carpet vomit yellow. She kept her mouth shut and Carl rushed in to fill the void, poisoned her own son against her. “It’s freezing in here.” He blows on his hands, a wart she never noticed before blooms on his thumb. He picks at it, makes it bleed.
She buries her own disfigured thumbs inside her bathrobe pockets. “Put on some socks. We’re not wasting the heat. When’s your next shift?”
“I don’t have a fucking shift. I got fired, all right?”
“Dammit, Paulie.” If she hadn’t been so preoccupied interviewing realtors she might’ve asked him sooner. She wants to ask so many things but isn’t sure she’ll like the answers. “When?”
“Couple weeks.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“I don’t have to tell you everything.”
“If I’m paying your bills, you do.”
“Well you’re not,” he snaps. “So don’t worry about it.”
The car payment, his insurance hiked from all those speeding tickets, that’s Carl’s leverage, bailing Paulie out while Nora isn’t able, buying Paulie with his so-called help.
“I know you’ve been taking your father things from the garage.”
She used to be able to tell when he was lying, his cat-ate-the-canary wince, the muscle twitching under his right eye a giveaway, but today he just stares. “The chin-up bar, the boxing gloves?”
“It’s his stuff.”
It kills her that Paulie’s right. She can’t even afford to buy him a Christmas gift. She put off the grocery shopping again, too long, nothing in the pantry but a jar of coconut oil she found on sale, a can of creamed corn, and a bag of dried kidney beans she intends for soup but keeps forgetting to soak the beans overnight.
“What are your plans for Christmas?”
“I’m spending tonight at Dad’s.”
“Oh.” She struggles to make her voice casual. What stings most is that he isn’t bothering to lie to spare her feelings, not a flicker of guilt. “Okay.”
“And I’m bringing him his power saw.” He doesn’t ask her, he tells. A flash of disgust colors his cheeks, transforming him into Carl’s disgruntled double. “He’s cutting a shelf for his apartment.”
“A shelf?” More likely planning to cut her. “No, Paulie. You can’t take that to him. You don’t understand—”
“It’s his. You’re being petty.” Again, Carl’s words erupt from Paulie’s mouth.
“I need your help—”
“I know, the garage door, I’ll get it.”
She wants to tell him about the hole she found behind Carl’s dresser, a fist-sized crater, a mass of fissures splintering from its central orb. Plastic feet stuffed in Carl’s bottom drawer, the dismembered parts of a female mannequin? She realized later they were silicone, Carl mail-ordered the pair, bound at the ankles with a black silk strap, a tray of pink press-on toenails and anklet pantyhose stuffed inside an empty box of condom wrappers.
But how do you tell a boy that, about his father?
“You’re being petty,” Paulie repeats. “Now can you please get out?”
She gapes at him. A repugnant taste coats her throat not unlike when she gave Carl blowjobs—him forcing her down on him, her gag reflex too pronounced to satisfy his marathon demands, not kinky enough for Carl’s twisted post-war brain.
“Get out,” Paulie says.
Through the window behind him the palm trees spin a tortured, wind-driven dance. Whipped into a frenzy, the fronds beat against their trunks like useless fraying hands.
“You’d better not bring him that saw, Paulie,” she says. Wading blindly backward through the refuse on his floor, she stumbles on a belt, the edge of a buckle. “And I said no drinking!” she shouts, her parting shot, her foot smarting as if she fired on herself.
***
She should be grateful they’re home, but melancholy descends on Nora when the Stark and Frangelo families invade the cul-de-sac on Christmas morning. They flaunt extravagant gifts: Clarisse, an eleven-year-old, snaps pictures with a high-end camera on a tripod; kindergartener Tabitha tools around in a pink motorized Jeep, her seal-black head barely reaching the steering wheel, blasting Disney tunes from the vehicle’s radio; Mason and Grayson maneuver remote-control race cars with high-tech flashing lights as impressive as the LED display in Nora’s pool.
Excessive. She and Carl did the same when Matt and Paulie were little. Replaying the memories cuts her heart.
Jack, none the worse for wear after yesterday’s calamity, hollers half-hearted encouragement at his boys from his front stoop. “Faster, Mason. Burn those tires, Grayson.” If not for the cast on Grayson’s left arm—a blue G scrawled into the lemon-neon plaster distinguishes him from his brother—and the farse of Jack engaging somewhat with his offspring, she wouldn’t know there’d been an accident. The roof lights repositioned, the damaged snowman repaired with a green patch above one eye where the ladder sliced in. Its nylon head bounces jauntily above the Starks’ raggedy lawn.
On his turf Bill Frangelo erects a portable gazebo, a pink hexagon with a high-peaked roof—Fairy Princess Castle Tent, the discarded box already shoved to the curb for Friday’s trash. Bettina cordons its mesh windows with satin ribbons and lines the floor with plush pink quilted comforters.
The sun at ten a.m. is bright, aiming its beams at Nora, hunched behind her shaded office window. Sun glazes the hoods of Bill’s pickup and Bettina’s van, reflects off cars crammed in every driveway, parked end to end along the curbs all down the street (even the Portmans have company; a silver Cruiser unloaded a couple with a toddler earlier), while Nora’s landing pad sits empty, a forbidden expanse Mason and Grayson test their limits on, steering their race cars as far as her hedges, then as far as her walk, finally working up the nerve to run the droning plastic up to her garage (the spinning tires about as pleasant as a swarm of frenzied bees), circling her property as the sun encircles the neighborhood—and that depresses her more than if there were storm clouds blackening the sky.
Paulie hasn’t come home after spending Christmas Eve with Carl.
“Hot chocolate!” Allie’s voice floats up from below as if filtered through an echo chamber. She exits her garage balancing a tray of gold-handled ceramic mugs like something out of a Crate and Barrel catalogue. Jack and the retrievers tail her to the street. Mason drops his control panel, his car zigzagging a chaotic trail that ends with flashing wheels whirring under the right rear tire of Tabitha’s Jeep. Move move move, it seems to whine, but Tabitha, free to proceed if she would only step on the gas, isn’t going anywhere.
“Mom-eee!” Her face contorts, paralyzed—too coddled, Nora believes, her parents and big sister rushing in to soothe before she has a chance to test herself.
She was a preemie, Carl said. He collected bits of gossip while he weeded the garden or swept the walk, adding to his cache of rumors the way he hoarded survivalist supplies. Appalling how people broadcast their business, especially when they mistake you for a friend. Bettina lost a baby after Clarisse, and then Tabitha arrived with a heart defect—open heart surgery in the womb and a couple more since, making her parents more than overprotective.
Bill scoops Tabitha into his hairy arms. Nora flashes on her own Christmases as a kid, her own father’s doting. Bill’s a good parent when he’s sober, she decides. He and Bettina rub Tabitha’s rigid back until the tears subside.
“I’m so sorry. Mason is sorry.” Allie’s words reach Nora as if spoken through a tunnel. She lifts her tray. “Do you like hot chocolate? I made enough for everyone.”
Just last year Bill and Jack were feuding, Carl told her, each offloading their gripes behind the other’s back. “Jack wanted Bill to get him an interview at his school,” Carl said, eyes glinting like the mosaics he had inlaid in the border of their walk. “And you know what Bill did? He said Jack wouldn’t be good at that kind of work. Can you believe it? Bill’s a glorified janitor. Asshole.”
“I want one,” Mason mewls, joined by his twin. Both boys grab a ceramic cup, dipping sloppily into their mugs to make whipped cream moustaches before Tabitha has a chance to choose, sparking another crying fit.
“Mason,” Allie says, “Get your car and apologize.”
Mason huddles next to his brother.
The wives stopped talking back then too, “to stand by their husbands,” according to Carl, but all four adults seem to be getting along swimmingly now. They cluster around the obscene toy Jeep sipping chocolate, chatting. Nora inches closer to the cold glass, craning her neck. “Well he’s not living here,” Jack says. He points at Nora’s vacant driveway, at the spot where Carl sometimes parked.
“Can you blame—” Allie swivels and looks up; Bill and Bettina follow her gaze.
Nora jumps back, burrows in the corner behind the bookcase where Carl kept his metal bat—one of several he secreted throughout the house, swinging them over her head whenever the mood struck. The sun bores a hole in her brain, slinking across the wall. She waits a long while, forgetting they can’t see her through the tint, before she feels safe to peek again.
All day she watches. Clarisse snaps endless pictures. She and Tabitha wrangle themselves into the Fairy Princess Castle’s fluffy blankets. Bill switches on his bebopping elves. Jack hauls out a dirt bike. He totters like a circus clown on the kiddie seat, whizzing around the cul-de-sac with broken-armed Grayson on his lap. Mason and the dogs chase them, howling and whining.
At dusk Allie’s mother arrives, tipsy. She parks her Caddy crooked, blocking Nora’s driveway. Children and dogs are called indoors for Christmas dinner. They scatter like mice, abandon Tabitha’s Jeep at Nora’s curb; one race car flashing on her lawn, the other whirring, toppled sideways in her garden—whirring mercilessly.
Lina Marino earned her BA in Creative Writing from Binghamton University, and now lives and writes in California. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in The Comstock Review, Twyckenham Notes, Atlanta Review, and The McNeese Review, with work forthcoming in Ovunque Siamo. She is a recipient of a National League of American PEN Women Writing Award, and a nominee for a 2023 Pushcart Prize for fiction.