The One & Only(123)
Thirty-eight
Two nights later, I was at Lucy’s house, doing everything I could to avoid eye contact with Coach while he did the same with me. We had not seen each other since the night in his office but had talked every few hours. I’d even fallen asleep the night before while talking to him on the phone.
“Oh, I love this one! It’s Blitzen!” Lucy said now, holding up a frosted glass reindeer as we all assembled in her family room to decorate her tree.
“Dude,” Lawton said, as Lucy passed it off to him with a directive to hang it somewhere near the front. “How the hell do you know that it’s Blitzen? I’m getting a Prancer vibe.”
“It’s not Rudolph,” Caroline sagely pointed out. “See? No red nose.”
“Right,” Lawton said, addressing Caroline, while Coach kept his nose to the grindstone, supergluing a broken Bronco ornament. “But it could be any one of them but Rudolph. How does she know that it’s Blitzen?”
I had been wondering the same thing, figuring there was something I had missed in reindeer lore, as Lucy smiled faintly and said, “Mom told me it was Blitzen. A long time ago.”
“Well, how did she know?” Lawton said.
“She knew her reindeer, Lawton,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes. “Now get him up there … And take this one, too.” She handed him a wooden oar with LAKE LBJ painted on the side and told him it could go toward the back.
One at a time, Lucy unwrapped ornaments from the cardboard compartments nestled in large green plastic bins, then passed them off to Caroline, Lawton, Coach, and me, while Neil, who had strung the tiny white lights earlier in the day, focused on careful placement of the generic gold and red balls. Lucy made it seem as if her ornament allocation was random, but I knew better, and quickly caught on that she gave the sturdiest and most garish ones to Caroline, so that they couldn’t be broken and would be too low to see. She gave all those with a boyish theme (planes, trains, and automobiles; soldiers, elves, and masculine-looking snowmen and reindeer) to Lawton. And she gave anything Walker or football-related—which felt like every other ornament—to Coach and me. Additionally, Coach was in charge of all Santa Clauses, whether whimsical or dignified.
We took our assignments seriously, hoping that our branch selection would meet with her approval. For the most part, we didn’t let her down, though she’d occasionally look up, frown, and point out an unpleasing concentration of one color or theme. “Disperse those elves, would you, Lawton? They look too … busy all clumped together right there,” she’d say before returning her gaze to the bins, half of which came from her basement, the other half from her parents’ attic, having given her father permission to forgo his own tree this year.
“It’s looking good, y’all!” Lucy said at one point, and we all agreed that the tree was beautiful. That you couldn’t even tell it was artificial, necessitated by Neil’s evergreen allergy, unless you stopped to consider that no real trees were this full and symmetrical.
“Do you remember this one?” she said to Lawton, holding up a delicate painted ornament of a little girl pushing a cart full of toys. It looked Germanic and old, or at least old-fashioned, perhaps because the girl resembled Shirley Temple with her big eyes, ruby mouth, and fat sausage ringlets.
“Yep,” Lawton said. “I always liked her … But I could never figure out why an angel would be bringing toys.”
“She’s not an angel,” Lucy scoffed with faux indignation, as if Lawton had dubbed her a hooker. “She’s just a girl. And that’s her shopping cart.”
“The hell,” Lawton said, pointing and peering through his long bangs in dire need of a cut. “See that. It’s called a halo.”
“You think hell and halo belong together?” I quipped, trying as hard as I could to be natural, light, festive, lest I give myself away. I had still not so much as glanced at Coach but was aware of his every move, and felt an electric current whenever he came near me.
Lawton laughed and said, “Hell, yeah, they do.”
Lucy stared down at the girl-angel in disbelief. “Well, son of a gun. You’re right!” she said with a little laugh. “But are you sure it’s not a tiara?”
“It’s a halo, dammit,” Lawton said.
Caroline giddily covered her mouth, thrilled with all the swearwords, as Lucy squinted further. “Well. Now I love her even more. She’s an angelic little shopper!”
“Just like you, Luce,” Coach Carr said, putting a hook on a snowman ornament. “I bet there’s some Channel and Vespucci buried somewhere in that cart.”