This was our first Christmas without Daddy, and living through all of the days leading up to it felt like marching up a rocky hill in flip-flops. T and I cried our hardest on December 4 while Mama was passed out on edibles. We loved Christmas and thought we would have to say goodbye to all of it because Daddy died and didn’t leave us instructions. He was our Christmas guru, hanger of lights, cooker of hams, dancer to Motown carols sweet and salty like a mall pretzel on the last shopping day of the year. Now we were walking into haunted houses, ghosts everywhere.
Around December 10 we were handling things our own way. Mama got sentimental and invited Auntie Tammy all the way from Alabama to have dinner with us. T became a kitchen bitchhole, obsessing over cookies and dinner planning. She forced me to taste-test raw batter and sauces every evening after school. The salted caramel chocolate chunk cookie batter was the best. I did the lights. I tried to do the lights. The month was half-spent and I had only two bushes, a tree trunk, and a blinking train set working on the front where there used to be an enviable display of American holiday dick swinging. Ms. Holland spotted me struggling to set up a ladder and called to me from across the street.
Ms. Holland is a witch and sells candy to the neighborhood kids all year long, even during Christmas. She will fuck you up if you try to steal from her, though, no matter your age or size or your parents: bam, open palm to the ear. Open palm because Ms. Holland couldn’t make a true fist. She had fingernails eleven inches long on each hand, even the thumb. When she was younger she had them way longer, multiple feet, broke a record. There’s a picture of her in a book somewhere with her two grown sons and daughter standing around her like a queen’s court or something.
When I heard Ms. Holland call, I knew I had to get down from the ladder and go over to her. She wouldn’t tolerate a conversation in muffled shouts across the street even though I still had forty thousand unplugged strings of lights to identify, separate, and curse. I crossed the street and stepped around the huge nearly dead palm tree absorbing her front yard. Ms. Holland didn’t celebrate Christmas, far as I could tell, no fake garland, no paper Santa, no Styrofoam holly that chips so much it looks like cereal, no smell of collard greens or mac ’n’ cheese or buttery dinner rolls or cranberry sauces slick from the can ever came from her house. I was surprised when she gave me a basket of assorted meats and cheeses, then said it was for our family. I chocked it up to late death food. Better than a casserole any day, except the sausages looked better than they tasted. Ms. Holland offered to have one of her sons help me with the lights while she supervised, which I accepted. She also offered to read my cards, as in tarot cards, which I declined. She said tarot is an important science. I thanked her for the basket.
Actual Christmas dinner went as well as expected, meaning a fistfight and broken table. We had Auntie Tammy, Uncle Lou, and their two sons John and Isaiah. John and Isaiah were sixteen-year-old twins with bad attitudes and really good manners. They called Mama ma’am all day long and me and T couldn’t handle it, so we avoided them as much as possible. Auntie Tammy insisted on taking over the kitchen from T and made chitterlings (aka shitlins). I thought something had died, they smelled so bad. Everyone except me and T did not seem to notice that the entire house smelled like literal poop. Auntie Tammy apparently did not make enough chitterlings because after a brief pause in conversation we noticed Uncle Lou staring at Isaiah and Isaiah staring back, then Uncle Lou grabbed Isaiah by the shirt and they went tumbling together across the kitchen. Everyone stood up away from the table when they crashed into it. Everything on the floor, including whatever personal battle they’d probably been fighting since birth the way men and sons do sometimes. Me and T went outside and ate cookies on the porch. She told me the lights looked nice, and we didn’t feel like crying the way we thought we would. The steep hill to Christmas Day wasn’t all that bad, kind of plateaued when T figured out the salted caramel chocolate chunk recipe. We ate our ghosts and settled our nerves, watching the neighborhood blink to life.
When Daddy was alive we would watch that barefoot Bruce Willis movie and eat strawberry ice cream on the floor before going to bed. Needles from the live tree that dried out too soon scattered on the carpet. I don’t know why they call it a live tree when it is so very dead that it’s decomposing before our eyes. Sometimes I would wake up already in bed and not remember being carried in there. It was frightening to lose time and space like that even though later I figured out what had happened.
I don’t know if I’ve seen that picture of Ms. Holland or I imagined it. I’ve seen her kids, grown men but still kind of simple. They’re always bringing her packages and groceries, running her errands while she sits and opens doors and arranges candy. They never seem that happy, though, but kind of locked in their routine like they couldn’t leave it if they wanted to. I had a dream of Ms. Holland running her long-nailed hands along my head. I’d been shaved bald and she spoke of ghosts and sausages and I was running an Olympic marathon.