The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily(5)

Once Oscar was standing proudly, I reached into my backpack for the pièce de résistance that would, I hoped, not be resisted.

“What are you doing?” Langston asked as I looped things around Oscar’s branches.

“Are those tiny turkeys?” Boomer chimed in. “Is this going to be like the tree they had at Plymouth Rock?”

“They’re partridges,” I explained, holding up a piece of wood carved in the shape of the bird, with a big hole in the center. “Partridge napkin rings, specifically. There weren’t any partridge ornaments at that store whose name I can’t make myself utter.” (The store was called Christmas Memories, which was enough to make me want to drink Pop Rocks with Coke. I had to think of it as Christmas Mammaries in order to go inside.) “If we’re doing twelve days of Christmas, we’ve gotta do twelve days of Christmas. Lily can decorate the rest of the tree. But this is going to be a partridge tree. And on top, we’re going to have…a pear!”

I pulled said fruit out of my bag, expecting admiration. But the reaction went more pear-shaped.

“You can’t put a pear at the top of a tree,” Langston said. “It will look dumb. And it will rot after a day or two.”

“But it’s a pear! In a partridge tree!” I argued.

“I get it,” Langston said. Meanwhile, Boomer guffawed. He hadn’t gotten it.

“Do you have a better idea?” I challenged.

Langston thought for a moment, and then said, “Yes.” He walked over to a small photograph hanging on the wall and took it down. “This.”

He showed me the picture. Even though it had to be over half a century old, I instantly recognized Grandpa.

“Is that your grandmother with him?”

“Yup. Love of his life. They were quite a pair.”

A pair on a partridge tree. Perfect.

It took us a few tries to get it placed—me and Langston trying out various branches, Boomer telling Oscar to stay still. But we got the pair perched near the crown of the tree as birds peeked out below.

Five minutes later, the front door opened and Lily and Grandpa returned. Even though I’d only known him a few months before he had his fall, it was still surprising to me to see how small Lily’s grandfather had become—like instead of going off to hospitals and rehabilitation centers, he’d really been put in the wash for way too long, coming back even more shrunk each time.

Still, there was the handshake. The minute he saw me, he extended his hand and asked, “How’s the life, Dash?” And when he shook, he shook hard.

Lily didn’t ask me what I was doing there, but the question was certainly in her tired eyes.

“How was the doctor?” Langston asked.

“Much better company than the undertaker!” Grandpa replied. Not the first time I’d heard him use this joke, which meant it was probably the two hundredth time Lily had endured it.

“Does the undertaker have bad breath?” Boomer barged into the hallway and asked.

“Boomer!” Lily said. Now she was definitely confused. “What are you doing here?”

It was Langston who cut in. “Much to my surprise, your Romeo here has brought us a rather early Christmas gift.”

“Here,” I said, taking Lily’s hand. “Close your eyes. Let me show you.”

Lily’s grip was not like her grandfather’s. Before, our hands used to pulse electric together. Now it was more like static. Pleasant, but light.

She closed her eyes, though. And when we got into the living room and I told her to open them, she did.

“Meet Oscar,” I said. “He’s your present for the first day of Christmas.”

“It’s a pair in a partridge tree!” Boomer yelled out.

Lily took it in. She looked surprised. Or maybe the stillness of her reaction was further tiredness. Then something kicked in, and she smiled.

“You really didn’t have to…,” she began.

“I wanted to!” I said quickly. “I really, really wanted to!”

“But where’s the pair?” Grandpa asked. Then he saw the photograph. His eyes welled up. “Oh. I see. There we are.”

Lily saw it, too, and if her eyes welled up, they welled inward. I honestly had no idea what was going on in her head. I shot a look at Langston, who was studying her just as hard, without getting any ready answers.

“Happy first day of Christmas,” I said.

She shook her head. “The first day of Christmas is Christmas,” she whispered.

“Not this year,” I said. “Not for us.”

Langston said it was time to retrieve the ornaments. Boomer volunteered at the same time Grandpa made a move to get some of the boxes. This snapped Lily back to attention—she shuffled him over to the couch in the living room, and said he could oversee them this year. I could tell Grandpa didn’t like this, but that he also knew it would hurt Lily’s feelings if he put up too much of a fight. So he sat down. For her.

As soon as the boxes were brought in, I knew it was time for me to leave. This was a family tradition, and if I stayed and pretended I was family, I would feel every ounce of the pretending, in the same way that I could feel the weight of Lily pretending to be happy, pretending to want to do what we were encouraging her to do. She would do this for Langston and her grandpa and her parents whenever they got back. If I stayed, she would even do it for me. But I wanted her to want to do it for herself. I wanted her to feel all that Christmas wonder she felt last year at this time. But that was going to take more than a perfect tree. It might just take a miracle.