The Blue Moon sign read CloSed 4 sEAson. We worked one last day, cleaning out the snack shack freezer and boxing up the candy and supplies. Marty emptied the cash register and paid us all one last time. We loaded our arms with leftover frozen pizzas that she said wouldn’t last until next summer. Then we locked up and headed across the parking lot back to the house.
It felt great knowing I didn’t have to work the drive-in anymore. I’d be gone before it opened again. I turned to look across the parking lot. The building looked lonely with its windows boarded up and a huge padlock on the door between them—like a big sad face.
I hid my money in my suitcase. It wasn’t a very good hiding place, but at least it was out of sight. I didn’t trust Deja. She wasn’t there very much, but I still didn’t want to take any chances. No one had said anything about an allowance.
Carl went to work on the Christmas tree lot, setting up a fence and surrounding it with twinkle lights. Then he framed up a small building and tacked heavy plastic on three sides. Winnie said that’s where he sprayed the trees with fake snow.
My allergies didn’t go away. One day I woke up with a sore throat, and Marty put her cool hand on my forehead and cheeks and decided I had a fever. She called in my absence to the school and took me to the clinic. I felt lousy, all achy and shivery sitting there in a cold plastic chair in a big gray room that smelled like BO and echoed with babies crying. Little kids stepped on my feet, and old people coughed so hard that I was afraid they would die right there in front of us.
Dr. Barber back in Pine Run had cushy chairs, gossip magazines, and a giant aquarium with a shark. One corner was always set up with toys and puzzles and blocks to keep kids busy so they wouldn’t think about getting shots. He had soft music playing out of the ceiling and nice nurses who smiled and looked sorry that you were sick. He even had a funny little sign that said The Barber Will See You Now. According to Mom, it was a play on words.
Dr. Barber had known me since I was a baby. When you’re sick, you feel better when somebody knows you and can pronounce your name right.
The doctor gave Marty two prescriptions for me. One was a smelly pill for my sinus infection, and the other was allergy medication I had to take every day. I overheard him say to get rid of the cat, or vacuum and wash my stuff every day.
I felt a flicker of hope. I thought, they’ll never get rid of Cyclops, and if I’m too much trouble, maybe she’ll send me back to Grandma. I must have been delirious with fever.
I missed three days of school. Marty asked me again if my class needed chaperones for our field trip to San Francisco, but I said no. I felt a little bad lying to her. Marty wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t handle a mother-daughter thing.
The morning of the field trip, I threw two books into my backpack with my book light, just in case. I could escape any situation, burrowing into a story. The bus ride took two hours. It was dark when we left the school, way before school actually started. Everybody was pretty quiet until the sun came up, but the brighter it got inside the bus, the louder they got. Natalie kept talking to me and wouldn’t take the hint, so I finally put my book away.
I noticed some of the parent volunteers looking back at me from their seats and whispering. I thought grown-ups would have better manners.
Just before we got to San Francisco, huge patches of glistening water opened up out of nowhere. I closed my eyes when we crossed the Bay Bridge because the bus was so high over the water. A blast of crisp ocean air hit my face. Somebody must have put the window down. Then everybody started putting down their windows until we had a wind tunnel inside the bus and the chaperones made us close them again.
Finally we parked and got out on the street. Mrs. Bettencourt marched us inside the Exploratorium and told us when and where to meet back for lunch. Everyone scattered like rats. Natalie and I goofed around in the photo exhibit, throwing our silhouettes against the giant screen in weird poses until one of the parents told us to stop hogging it. For lunch the bus took us to a huge park with a view of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. We ate on the grass with the wind blowing our trash everywhere.
“Have you been over there, to Alcatraz?” Natalie asked me, peeling her banana.
“Yeah.” I swallowed a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I think I was six.”
“We went last year at Easter break. My brother Ryan got sick on the boat ride and threw up in the bushes when we got there.” She ate a bite of banana. “He was sick the whole time we were on the tour. Then he started crying when Mom said it was time to get back on the boat.”
Natalie told me funny stories all day. She made it sound like having a big family was a blast.
When it was time to leave, Mrs. Bettencourt and some parents had to track down Scott Worley and his band of nerds. It took an hour to find them, so we were late getting back to school. They were banned from any future field trips.
The next night was open house. When I saw in homeroom that our family trees were on display, I tried to fake being sick at dinner that night. Marty wouldn’t buy it. It turned out that I couldn’t eat much because my stomach was doing flips, so it was true.
We spent a long time in Winnie’s classroom, where the walls were filled with turkeys and Pilgrims. Finally we had to go to my homeroom. Natalie was waiting and dragged me over to meet her mom. She already knew Marty. I watched Marty read my Lockhart family tree on the wall. It was full of doodling and decorations, not like the one I did of her family, which was plain and sloppy. She seemed disappointed at first that hers was missing, but she covered it up really well. She reached up with her finger and touched the characters I’d drawn to show each one of us Lockharts, and bit her lower lip when she got to my cousin Tyler.
That week the weather got colder, and Marty dug out some boxes filled with winter clothes from the garage. I didn’t have a warm coat, and when she pulled an old one out of the box, I knew it was Deja’s. There was just no way I was gonna wear it, and I think Marty knew that because she skipped over me and offered it to Winnie. She took us clothes shopping and bought me a new coat at Target, and it was the first time I think I made Deja jealous. It was just an okay coat, but it was new. It wasn’t like Deja needed one, anyway. She lived in her boyfriend’s old jacket. I think she only took it off to sleep.
I got some bad news just before Thanksgiving break. Grandpa got the flu, and Grandma said it was better if I came some other time. I was so disappointed that I cried in the bathroom with my face buried in a towel so no one could hear me. It hurt my feelings, because I could have helped them out. But Grandma said he was contagious, and I’d just gotten over a sinus infection, plus, I didn’t need to expose everyone else. So I spent Thanksgiving in Newberry.
Thanksgiving Day started early there at Marty’s. The turkey was already sitting shiny brown on the platter when I got up at ten. A pumpkin cheesecake and iced brownies cooled on racks on the counter, and Marty was whipping cream in the mixer. I wondered if she’d slept at all the night before.
“Good morning! Have a cinnamon roll,” she said, pausing in her chopping to wipe her hands on her apron and hand me a plate with a gooey iced bun. “But don’t fill up on them. We’re eating early.”
I got the feeling it was best just to take the bun and fake it that I wasn’t hungry.
Winnie sat balled up in the afghan on the couch watching the Macy’s parade.
“You missed the Snoopy balloon,” she said, licking her fingers. Icing clung to the front of her gown.
I sat beside her on the couch and crisscrossed my legs, tucking my nightgown over them one-handed. “Why do we have to eat so early?” I asked. I sank my teeth into the roll, and gooey warm dough and cinnamon melted in my mouth.
“Grandpa’s setting up the tree lot. The trees came last night.”
I had visions of Christmas trees marching down the driveway and settling in for a double feature.
Marty’s super-hearing must have been activated, because she called, “He likes to get a jump on the competition. You’ll be surprised how many people buy trees on Thanksgiving Day.”
Marty went all out, putting a Thanksgiving tablecloth on the table, setting out china and crystal and cloth napkins. She even had Pilgrim salt-and-pepper shakers. Deja woke up right before we ate dinner. She looked like a slug that had slithered in from the garden and pulled out a chair at Marty’s fancy table.
“Deja, go comb your hair and get dressed,” Carl said. He had washed up and changed into a clean T-shirt, and smelled like sap.
Deja left the table for so long that Carl yelled for her, but she didn’t look much better when she came back. I could tell the scent of turkey was driving Carl crazy, because he frowned, but didn’t insist on a do-over.
Marty said, “Andie, before we eat on Thanksgiving, we go around the table and everyone says something they’re thankful for.”
My chest tightened.
“You don’t have to do it, if you don’t want to.”
“I wanna start,” Winnie said. She scrunched up her face like she was having a brain spasm. Then she said, “I’m thankful that I only got one C on my report card.”
Marty went next. She took a deep breath and said in a quiet voice that crumpled at the end, “We made it through another year.” She tried to smile and wiped her eyes. Carl gave her an affectionate wink.
“Deja?”
Deja cocked her head, looking very bored. I avoided eye contact. Would she make up something obnoxious about me, or chicken out in front of Carl?
“Oh, yeah.” She curled her black fingernail around a lock of split ends. “I’m thankful … that … Madonna’s coming out with a new album. And I hope it’s better than her last one because it sucked.”
Marty looked down at the table and exhaled. Carl stared at Deja for a second, sucking his teeth.
Marty turned to me and asked timidly, “Andie, do you want to say anything?”
My mind was like a blank journal where you’re expecting to see words, but there’s just frightening white space.
“Um …” My knees bounced under the table until the candles and the salt-and-pepper shakers wobbled. “I …”
Everyone waited. Deja yawned loudly.
“I’m thankful … that … I … get to go to Grandma’s for Christmas.”
Deja gave a nasty little smile that said she agreed with me.
Carl said a prayer that covered all the bases. Maybe it was his prayer for the year—I don’t know.
It was the weirdest Thanksgiving dinner. Too quiet. I missed all the friends and relatives my parents used to invite to dinner. I missed squeezing people into the dining room, and being in charge of the kids’ table. Marty had knocked herself out, but it was still like any other dinner. Just the four of us ignoring Deja.
Last came the pumpkin cheesecake. We sensed that it would not be smart to say we were too stuffed, so we ate it. I unbuttoned the top button of my jeans and considered ralphing in the toilet, but that would have been hard to hide.
After the last bite, Marty jumped up and started clearing the table. Carl picked his teeth with a toothpick for a while. I think he was too full to move, or the tryptophan was working its magic. Winnie played with the flame of the candle until I told her to stop spilling wax on Marty’s tablecloth.
Finally Carl got up and put on his coat. Winnie and I grabbed ours, and he told Deja to come with us. We all waddled down to the lot behind him like a line of ducks.
The Christmas trees smelled so good. No matter how old I get, I’ll still be a Christmas bloodhound when I get the scent.
Carl explained the setup at the little shed.
“These six-foot trees are all $19.99. They’re Monterey and Scotch pine. All these rows”—he pointed to the left corner—“these are silver tips. They’re $40 for small ones and $50 for the five-foots. Now, the customer will pull the tag off the tree he wants and bring it in here to the counter. Then they pay for it, you stamp it paid, and they’ll bring the tag out to me to load the tree. If they want it flocked it’s an extra $5 a foot, and they can pick it up in a couple hours.
“Deja, find the extension cord and start the hot chocolate. The big coffee pot’s inside.” He dug in his pockets. “Winnie, take my keys and go up to the snack shack for stir sticks. It’s the green key. Make sure you lock it back up. Andie, find the candy canes in the back and put them out in a basket. And look for the box of spoons and the tape recorder. Play this when the power’s hooked up.”
He handed me a Christmas tape by somebody named Chet Atkins with a guitar on the front. It had to be country music. I weighed it in my hand, thinking maybe the boom box would chew it up.
The music wasn’t all that bad after all. Chet was pretty good on the guitar. With him playing “Jingle Bell Rock” and the trees looking like a miniature forest, the excitement stirred inside me, like cream swirling in Grandma’s coffee. It made your mouth water even if you knew it wouldn’t taste like you expected.
I wandered the lot looking at the trees to make sure I could tell the cheap pines from the silver tips so I wouldn’t screw up. It wasn’t hard to know the difference. The silver tips were perfect and small and smelled like Christmas. The pines looked like a little kid had drawn their outlines and scribbled them in.
The first customers showed up at four o’clock, and I felt the same old panic squeezing my insides that I’d felt my first day of working in the snack shack. But soon there were so many people buying trees that I was too busy to think about being nervous.
Three people wanted their trees flocked. Carl blew flocking on them with a blaster that sounded like a 747 taking off. They smelled more like hazardous chemicals than Christmas trees. Maybe the flocking kept the needles from falling off so they’d look good all the way until Christmas Day. We always bought our tree two weeks before the big day. We’d drive to a Christmas tree farm up in the mountains and ride a wagon to find the perfect tree and cut it down ourselves. Then Dad would hold the thick end of the trunk and Mom would grab the middle, and I would reach into the prickly needles to hold the top where the angel would go, and we’d carry it back to the car. Sometimes there were even patches of snow on the ground. Real snow.
We saw Marty back the car out and leave, and I wondered where she was going. Maybe she needed something from the grocery store. But then I remembered that she said the store was only open in the morning because of the holiday. When she stopped by later to see how things were going, there was dirt on the knees of her jeans and her eyes were all puffy. I gave up trying to figure that one out.
When the hot chocolate ran out, Carl told us to tell Deja to make some more, but she was gone. He was mad when he found out she just took off, and said something under his breath that made Winnie laugh. Winnie and I had to make the chocolate ourselves, but it was pretty bad. One thing I can say for Deja—she knew how to mix hot water and powdered drink mix and make it turn out right.
When it got dark, the Blue Moon sign lit up at the entrance with XMAS TREES 4ROM $19.99. Carl rolled out a barrel and made a fire in it. People stood around the fire drinking hot chocolate, but the little kids got too close to it, and that bothered me. Their parents weren’t even watching them. The kids started throwing pine needles and twigs into the fire and jumping back when showers of sparks popped and sizzled in the air. They’d laugh like it was the greatest thing. They had no idea.
Worrying about the fire kept me from paying attention to what I was doing. One customer snapped his fingers in my face, and another told me I’d given him too much change. After that, I stayed in the shed and tried to ignore the fire, but it was hard. When I stood at the counter, I could see the flames out of the corner of my eye.
Finally Carl put the lid on the barrel and snuffed it out. The last people paid for their trees and went home, and he locked the big fence around the tree lot. Then he turned off the Blue Moon sign and put a chain across the entrance. We turned off the music, locked up the shed, and went back to the house.
It smelled like turkey and pumpkin pie when we opened the door, and I remembered it was still Thanksgiving. Marty made us sandwiches with turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce, and set out a plate of three new kinds of cookies and the pie. It seems like she would have been tired of cooking. My mom always said she was too exhausted to eat by the time dinner was ready on Thanksgiving Day.
I glanced over at Marty when she wasn’t looking. She smiled when anyone talked to her, but then her face drooped, like she couldn’t keep it propped up. If she was that tired, she should’ve watched TV. We knew how to make sandwiches.
The next morning we all went down to the tree lot after breakfast, except for Deja, who slept in. What a slacker. No one complained, though. It was better without her.
Winnie was really enjoying herself, turning the little shed into a playhouse. That is, until a man and a little girl walked in like they owned the place. Winnie’s head jerked up when she heard him giving orders, and her face fell when she saw the little princess prancing along behind him. The girl’s ski jacket was glittery pink with white fur around the collar, and her hands were tucked into a fancy muff. Even her boots were trimmed with fur at the top.
“Oh, not Marissa,” Winnie moaned under her breath.
“Who’s she?” I asked.
“She’s in my class. I hate her. She thinks she’s so cool.”
The man was tall, so that the girl had to almost run to keep up.
“Hi, Winnie,” she said when they got to the counter.
“Hello, girls,” said the man, pulling a crisp fifty, twenty, and a five from a money roll. “There you go.” He slapped down the tree tag. “One five-foot silver tip. Flocked.”
I stamped Paid on his tag and thanked him. He took off to find Carl, but Marissa stayed behind.
When her dad was gone, she looked around the hut really snottylike. “You have to work here?”
“Sure. It’s fun,” Winnie said. She shrugged Deja’s old coat back up onto her shoulders because it kept sliding down. She had to roll the sleeves up so they wouldn’t get in the way.
“Want a candy cane?” I asked her.
Marissa dug into the basket of candy canes and shoved a bunch into her pocket.
“Hey,” I said. “You only get one. Put the others back.”
Marissa wrinkled up her nose. Did she smell something? “You’re … her … um …”
“She’s Andie. She’s my sister,” Winnie said. “You get one.”
Marissa rolled her eyes and kind of pitched the candy toward the basket. “Santa’s Treeland has better candy canes anyway. They’re big and they come in root beer and grape too. That’s where we’re going for our wreath. Dad says they stay green longer than yours. He got one here last year, and it died before Christmas.”
She stuck her hands in her muff and almost waved it in our faces.
“Is that real?” I asked.
“It’s rabbit,” she said. “My mom ordered it online.”
I said, “Some poor white rabbit gave its life so you could pretend to look cool.”
Marissa didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth, closed it again, twisted her face into a tight knot, and took off. So what if I got into trouble? I didn’t care.
Winnie stuck out her tongue as soon as Marissa’s back was turned.
After they left, Carl called from the Scotch pines. “Andie, run up to the house for me and get my other work gloves.”
“Okay.” Any excuse to go back inside. “Where are they?”
“In my room. Could be on the dresser. Look around.”
I trudged back past the silent speaker poles in the parking lot and into the house. It was quiet, so I figured Deja was still asleep.
Carl’s room was at the other end of the house, just past Marty’s. I pushed the door open and peeked inside. In some ways, it didn’t look like a guy’s bedroom. Except for the socks on the floor and the dresser covered with small tools and loose change. But on the walls were beautiful paintings and drawings.
I stepped closer to a shimmery pastel desert, where flowers dotted the sand like sea anemones on the ocean floor. Beside it was a picture of a beautiful black-haired woman in buckskin cradling a baby. Charcoals of Indian children in a wagon, horses running in a meadow, a horse bucking a cowboy—they were perfect.
Carl had never struck me as an art lover. I read the intertwined CMcA in the corner. It took me a second to realize they were his initials. Carl McAlister. I looked up at the woman again. My breath seemed to move her feathery hair.
One picture had a blue ribbon that said Elko County Fair tacked to the frame. Then I knew it was his work, for sure. It was a pencil drawing of Marty and Tipper, standing by a fence.
I had a blue ribbon too. I’d won it in a contest at the recreation park when I was nine. It was a colored pencil drawing of a carousel horse, with streamers and flowers, like a fairytale unicorn. But it was no way as good as these.
Cyclops rubbed against my leg, screeching his weird other-world meow, and I remembered what I’d come for. I sneezed and pushed him away with my foot, and went to the dresser where Carl said the gloves would be. I opened the top drawer, thinking that maybe he’d dropped them inside.
“Get out!” Deja suddenly roared behind me. She blocked the doorway, a demented dragon in plaid boxers and fuzzy claw slippers. “What are you doing in here?”
My lungs were a vacuum.
“I—I—”
She smelled fear, and kicked it up a notch.
“Get out!” she shouted again, eyes bulging in her white face, morning-hair splayed out from her head like retractable armor. “Who said you could go into Grandpa’s room?”
Was that smoke shooting from her nostrils?
Cyclops bolted under the bed.
“I’m—”
“You don’t belong in here!” she screamed. “When I tell Grandpa—”
I slammed the drawer hard, rattling everything on the dresser. “I came for his gloves!” I shouted back. “He sent me for his gloves.”
“His gloves.” She folded her arms across her chest and arched one eyebrow to the ceiling. “So, where are they?”
“He said they were on the dresser, but they aren’t, so—”
“So you went through his private stuff?”
I searched the room visually, hoping they were in plain sight. Then I saw them on the bed, half hidden by his bath towel.
“Here they are.” I scooped them up and pushed past her. “I told you so.”
“You are so busted if you’re lying, you little—”
I left the house and stomped back to the tree lot.
“Here.” I thrust them at Carl, and his eyebrows shot up. I guess I was having trouble getting my controls on.
“What’s wrong?”
“Deja’s awake.”
He said something under his breath I wasn’t supposed to hear. Then he added, “Don’t let her bother you.”
I had to walk it off. I kicked pebbles, imagining her face on them until I’d powered down. Getting back to work helped me shrug it off some, listening to Chet play “Silent Night” on the guitar. And hearing Carl grumble about how much he hated fake trees.
“What’s the world coming to? The whole point of having a tree at Christmas is that it’s symbolic. Why get a tree at all, if you’re gonna get an ugly one that you take out of a box and put together like bottle brushes?”
Marty caught my eye when she heard him start to rant. She smiled and shook her head behind his back.
We worked the tree lot every day after school, until I started falling behind in my homework. It got kind of embarrassing to see kids we knew from school. Constantly on alert, I hid out when I saw someone I recognized.
One Saturday night Marty sent us back early to get ready for bed because we were going to church the next morning. Winnie was happy, but Deja had rolled her eyes and said, “Knock yourselves out. Just don’t wake me up when you leave.”
Carl geared up to do battle with her, but Marty gestured for him to let it go. I figured church couldn’t be as bad as spending Sunday morning with Deja.
When I got out of the shower that night, I looked in my suitcase for my nightgown. No luck. So I checked the laundry. The dryer was full of socks and underwear, but none of my stuff was out in the piles of dirty clothes. Marty usually folded my clean clothes and set them on top of my dresser. Then I would put everything back in my suitcase.
Only one other place to look. I yanked open a dresser drawer, and there they were. Neatly folded tees, underwear, socks, and jeans. Maybe she was just being helpful, putting them away for me. Or maybe she was trying to force me to give up, to fit in. It didn’t matter which. I scooped up armfuls of clothes and threw them into my suitcase.
Winnie said we didn’t have to dress up for church, so I didn’t. When we got there the next morning, people were standing by their folding chairs, clapping with the band that was playing at the other end of the room. The pastor was wearing jeans and a blue aloha shirt. It wasn’t like any church service I had ever been to. At least they didn’t make me stand up and be introduced to everyone.
After the service, people stood around drinking coffee and punch. Winnie was stocking up on cookies when a lady with a clipboard got us in her sights.
“Hello, girls. I’m Mrs. Keifer. We’re putting on a Christmas play in a few weeks, and you two would make perfect angels. Would you like to be in it?”
I shook my head, but I could tell Winnie was already writing her acceptance speech.
The woman said, confidentially, “You know, blondes make the prettiest angels.”
“Okay,” Winnie said, looking bashful.
I rolled my eyes. So much for being politically correct.
“Where’s your mother? We need to talk costumes.”
Winnie dragged Mrs. Keifer over to Marty.
Natalie made her way over to me through the crowd of hugging, noisy people. “Mrs. Keifer talk you into doing the play?” she asked.
“No, but she got Winnie. Are you in it?”
She nodded and shrugged.
“You’re an angel too?” I asked.
“With my hair?” She tugged on a dark curl. “I get to be Mary. I was Mary last year, and the year before, and the year before that. The little kids think that’s my real name.” She hugged her Bible to her chest. “We’re going Christmas shopping at the mall. You wanna come? We eat lunch at the food court.”
A slow, creeping panic cinched my stomach. Part of me wanted to go. I knew it would be fun. I hadn’t been to the mall yet. But I felt weird—like if I went, I would cross some line, some invisible point of no return. I guess I wasn’t very good at hiding my feelings.
“Forget it. It’s okay,” Natalie said. “We might be too busy to go anyway.”
“No, it sounds like fun. But I think we’re doing something.”
“Sure. Don’t worry about it.” She looked around for her mom. “Well, I gotta go. See you tomorrow.”
I felt like a creep. But in a way I felt relieved, like I had narrowly missed capture.