Elizabeth was twirling the scissors around her thumb again, but that was only half of what she was doing. I was still trying to figure out the other half. I settled on pondering but then dismissed it for another, clearer word. I had the feeling Elizabeth didn’t really need to ponder, that she knew enough about the world—both the inner and the outer—to not have to pause and turn things over in her mind. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to say when she offered me those long pauses, it was more like she was sorting the words she wanted to tell me. Elizabeth guided the story rather than simply letting me tell it. I’d often heard that counselors had such tricks at their disposal. With all their training and expertise, it didn’t take them long to size up their patients. Telling their patients what exactly was wrong and how to fix it wouldn’t really solve anything; in the end, it was the patients themselves who had to discover that. The counselor’s job was more Sherpa than doctor. Elizabeth was my guide, not my director.
“I know why they put pickles in their trees,” she finally said.
“No way,” I snorted.
“Andy Sommerville, do you honestly think all I know is how to shrink heads?” The feigned affront was playful and mocking, and in that she reminded me of the Old Man and how much I missed him despite what he’d done.
“Prove it,” I said.
“It’s more for the kids, really. Parents put pickles in their Christmas trees for their children to find. It’s sort of a contest. The first child to find the pickle gets an extra gift.”
“Sounds a tad consumerist,” I said. “I thought Americans were supposed to be the only ones who could be pegged as materialists.”
“You’re missing the point,” she said. “It isn’t consumerist at all. You wanted to know why it had to be a pickle. That’s easy—because pickles are green. They blend in with the trees, so you really have to look hard to find them. You couldn’t even find yours. That’s the point.”
“The point is to not find the pickle?”
“No, the point is to look so hard for it that you start to see something else. Like what happened to you when you were looking for Rudolph’s. It isn’t about the pickle, Andy, it’s about the tree. The children learn to see beyond the decorations and the lights to the real beauty.”
“So the real beauty…,” I started. Elizabeth lowered her head into half a nod and urged me to put the rest of the pieces together. “…isn’t the lights and the tinsel, the stuff put there by them…” Her head was lower now, as if to say almost there. “…but the tree itself, which was put there by God.”
Nod completed. “Exactly,” she said.
“Huh. That actually makes sense.”
“It’s the same with life, too. Sometimes there seems to be no reason for happiness. Times like now, with you. You need to remember that God always wants you to see the good in life, the real, because it’s there. No matter how ugly things seem, there’s always beauty underneath. You just have to look for the pickle.”
My insides churned in a battle between believing those words or my own experience. It was always easy to tell someone else to look on the bright side of things. To say there was always a silver lining. But when you’re in the muck and the mire yourself, those words grew sharp enough to cut.
“The Old Man never told you what the pickle meant?” she asked.
“No, he never did. Maybe he knew you’d be here to explain it to me.” The first part of that sentence saddened me, the last made me smile.
“Did Santa answer your letter?”
“Some of it, yes. The friendship and the sharing, not so much. Still had the Old Man, though, at least until now. I’m not alone, you see. I talk to people every day. But just because I do doesn’t mean I’m not lonely. I think the loneliest people in the world are the ones constantly surrounded by others. Proximity has no bearing on isolation.” I thought for a bit and then added, “Someone told me that once. He said, ‘Andy, everyone in this town knows who you are, but most of them don’t know what you are.’ And you know what? He was right.”
“Who said that?” she asked.
“Danny.”
“Another customer?”
I nodded. “Was, anyway. He passed on a few years ago.”
Elizabeth said “I’m sorry” in a way I knew she meant it.
“It was a long good-bye,” I said. “Cancer took him. Some folks it takes all at once, others little by little. Danny went little by little. It was hard on him, but harder on his wife. If it weren’t for David Walker, I don’t think she would’ve made it through.”
“And who is David Walker?”
“One of the farmers around Mattingly. And maybe the wisest man in town. Least he was on that night.” I reached into the box for the stack of Dairy Queen napkins that had been thus far minding its own business in the lower right-hand corner. I held them up to her. “He’s the one who gave me these.”