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Best-ever Christmas Eve starts with a move away
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 25, 2000 It was a Dec. 22, three days before Christmas. Her moving day. On the narrow street that ran by her soon-to-be-former house, she had parked a large Ryder truck, the largest she figured she could handle. When he pulled into the driveway after lunch she was down in the basement rooting through the garden tools. She emerged into the daylight, wiped a strand of hair from her face and gave him a little hug, not perfunctory, but not lingering either. She was a woman with a lot to do. "I'll help," he had insisted on the telephone, when he called to say he would be in town. "I'm a great packer." She accepted with trepidation, thinking: He'd better not expect me to be entertaining. Old friends from college 20 years ago were fine, but not on moving day. Her fears eased a little when she put him to work in the study and he took to it, filling box after box with her books and files and professional journals. She worked in the kitchen. Later they took down her artwork throughout the house, the big canvases, the small frames, and wrapped them all in protective plastic, layer upon layer. Friends dropped by to say goodbye. A neighbor brought a loaf of banana bread. Another couple arrived to help move the furniture. The four of them filled the yellow truck front to back. Exhausted, they all went to dinner, then stopped by a doughnut shop around the corner. The friends left. Then the two of them said good night to each other and he took his place in the guest room, on the mattress on the floor, since the bed and frame were already in the truck. On the morning of the 23rd he stumbled into the living room. She came from the kitchen, where she was making coffee, and they shared a hug. They both thought: This is nice. They loaded the mattresses onto the truck. Goodbye, good luck. He drove off to the west, to be with his own family for Christmas. A few hours later she cranked up the loaded truck, her dog sitting in the seat beside her, and began the long drive westward into the mountains. But an ice storm was sweeping across the eastern seaboard. The interstate eventually came to a near-standstill. The unwieldy truck began to slip and slide. She had no choice but to pull off the highway and check into a roadside motel. And it so happens that the motel was in his hometown. She didn't know his father's name, so she called another listing in the book with the same surname, an uncle. She got the number and called. "Guess where I am?" she asked. "Come spend the evening with us," he said at once. "Will you come and get me so I don't have to drive the truck?" she asked. He said he would. They had supper and sat afterward on the sofa, side by side, and laughed and talked with his family. As the hours passed an odd feeling came over him, as if it was supposed to be this way in the first place, like maybe, in a parallel universe, it had been that way all along. Later he took her back to the motel, and, after a lingering talk, for the second time in a day said: Goodbye, good luck. At 7 a.m. on Christmas Eve his mother knocked on his door and stuck her head inside. "Call that girl," she instructed. "Tell her she can't leave town on an empty stomach and that you'll go get her for breakfast." And she said yes. But when he knocked on her door she was packed for the road. She couldn't risk more delay, given the weather. "I knew it when I said to come get me," she said. "But I couldn't leave town without seeing you again." And his insides turned over. And in the old movies this is where the focus goes blurry and the music rises. A little later he had finished helping her knock the ice off the windshield of the truck and she was sitting behind the wheel, the door still open, the engine running. He stood down on the pavement beside the truck and looked up and took her hand. "This is the best Christmas Eve ever," they said. And it was, too. Except for each one since.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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