"Look, mister," CJ drawled, propping up the tree with one hand. "We busted out yer headlight. Hell, the least I can do is give ya the tree."
The woman tilted her head and shot out a hand to touch my arm. She had a horrified look in her wide eyes that I could see even through her dripping mascara. "You ain't already got one do ya, mister?"
I glanced at my watch and tried to weasel out of it. I'd already nixed the idea of a Christmas tree—told my family (meaning my daughter, Jenny) we weren't having one that year, and that was final. They just shed all over the carpets and had to be tossed out at precisely the right moment in January or the city garbage folks wouldn't pick them up. We'd had a tree one year that sat around well into February because we missed the magic pick-up date. I finally chopped it into little bits and threw it out a piece at a time over the next six weeks. I had no use whatever for a Christmas tree.
In the end, I didn't want to argue with them—it was cold, exceedingly wet, and I was already going to be late for the concert. So CJ helped me load the mortally wounded conifer into my trunk. We groped around for the twine, but couldn't find it, so he battened down the lid with his girlfriend's belt. She had high-tailed it back into the Jeep to wait for him out of the rain. He whispered into my ear while he cinched up the belt. "She don't really need her belt," he said. "I'd have it off her in another couple o' miles anyways." He gave me a wink and wished me a Merry Christmas.
By the time I arrived at the hall, the concert had long since begun and it was almost intermission. I detest arriving late for these things, and I had to wait around the lobby until the first part was over. I was thankful I'd not been any later. Jenny would have been sorely disappointed if I'd missed her big debut: about twenty minutes from the time I arrived in the lobby, she was scheduled to begin her first public performance as a featured soloist—playing "Harold in Italy". If you don't know it, it's a fine piece of music, but it's not in the frequently-performed repertoire, because it's sort of a half-fledged concerto for viola. Not the violin or the cello—the viola: underdog of all orchestral instruments.
My daughter Jenny wasn't always a violist. We started her out right on the violin—something I considered a respectable instrument for a young lady. My ex-wife and I had faint hopes that someday she'd be a concert violinist—Jenny was that good from the time she picked up her first quarter-sized fiddle. We spent a fortune on expensive teachers, and as soon as she was ready, we started her on the long track: youth symphony. But just after her fourteenth birthday, something happened to her brain. I don't mean a pre-mature stroke or some kind of lesion. She came home one day with this hideous dreamy look in her eyes, and she puttered around the kitchen nervously helping me cook. She wasn't talking very much.
I didn't want to probe, figuring she'd tell me what was on her mind when she was ready. "I have to go to Milan next month," I said, trying to be cheerful.
She was tearing lettuce leaves into microscopic fragments, and she looked up. "Will you see Grandma?"
Jenny meant my mother—fountainhead of all family quirks. As a bright-eyed Italian girl of seventeen she married her American sweetheart and came to the States. It turned out to be a terrible marriage, and years later, after dutifully raising four kids, she divorced my father, American style, and went home to the Old Country. Jenny had only met her a few times, but when they did meet you couldn't pry them apart.
"Uh-huh. I thought I might take you along, if you can stand it," I teased. I pulled the salad bowl away from her and tossed in the tomato I had been cutting. "We'll leave the day before spring-break."