My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(80)
“I’ll give you two fifty.”
The man smiles mockingly.
“Now I’ll only give you two hundred,” Elsa informs him.
The man looks at Elsa’s dad. Dad looks at his shoes. Elsa looks at the man and shakes her head seriously.
“My dad is not going to help you. I’ll give you two hundred.”
The man arranges his face into something that’s probably supposed to look like an expression of how you look at children when they’re cute but stupid.
“This is not how it works, my dear.”
Elsa shrugs. “What time do you close today?”
“In five minutes,” sighs the man.
“And do you have a big warehouse space here?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I was just wondering.”
“No. We don’t have any warehouse space at all.”
“And are you open on Christmas Eve?”
He pauses. “No.”
Elsa pouts her lips with pretend surprise.
“So you have a tree here. And no warehouse. And what day is it tomorrow, again?”
Elsa gets the tree for two hundred. She gets a box of balcony lights and an insanely big Christmas elk thrown in for the same price.
“You MUSTN’T go back in and give him any extra money!” Elsa warns Dad while he’s loading it all into Audi. Dad sighs.
“I only did it once, Elsa. On one occasion. And that time you were actually exceptionally unpleasant to the salesman.”
“You have to negotiate!”
Granny taught Elsa to do that. Dad also used to hate going to the shops with her.
Audi stops outside the house. As usual, Dad has turned down the volume of the stereo so Elsa doesn’t have to listen to his music. Alf comes out to help Dad carry up the box, but Dad insists on carrying it himself. Because it’s a tradition that he brings the tree home for his daughter. Before he leaves, Elsa wants to tell him that she’d like to stay with him more after Halfie’s been born. But she doesn’t want to upset him, so in the end she says nothing. She just whispers, “Thanks for the tree, Dad,” and he’s happy and then he goes home to Lisette and her children. And Elsa stands there watching as he leaves.
Because no one gets upset if you don’t say anything. All almost-eight-year-olds know that.
26
PIZZA
In Miamas you celebrate Christmas the evening before, just like in Sweden, but it’s because that’s when the Christmas tales are told. All tales are regarded as treasures in Miamas, but the Christmas tales are something truly special. A normal story can either be funny or sad or exciting or scary or dramatic or sentimental, but a Christmas tale has to be all those things. “A Christmas tale has to be written with every pen you own,” Granny used to say. And they have to have happy endings, which is something that Elsa has decided completely on her own.
Because Elsa’s no fool. She knows if there was a dragon at the beginning of the story, the dragon will turn up again before the story is done. She knows everything has to become darker and more horrible before everything works out just fine at the end. Because that is how all the best stories go.
She knows she’s going to have to fight, even though she’s tired of fighting. So it has to end happily, this fairy tale.
It has to.
She misses the smell of pizza when she goes down the stairs. Granny said there was a law in Miamas about having to eat pizza at Christmas Eve. Granny was full of nonsense, of course, but Elsa went along with it, because she likes pizza and Christmas food kind of sucks if you’re a vegetarian.
The pizza also had the added bonus of making a cooking smell in the stairwell that drove Britt-Marie into a fury. Because Britt-Marie hangs Christmas decorations on her and Ken’s front door, because Kent’s children always come for Christmas and Britt-Marie wants to “make the stairs look nice for everyone!” And then the Christmas decorations smell of pizza all year, which provokes Britt-Marie and makes her condemn Granny as “uncivilized.”
“As if THAT old bat can talk about being uncivilized?! No one is more damned civilized than I am!” Granny would snort every year while she sneaked about, as was the tradition, hanging little pieces of calzone all over Britt-Marie’s Christmas decorations. And when Britt-Marie appeared at Mum and George’s flat on Christmas Eve morning in such a foul mood, in that way of hers, that she said everything twice, Granny defended herself by saying that they were “pizza Christmas decorations” and that Granny actually just wanted to “make things look nice for everyone!” On one occasion she actually dropped the whole calzone through Britt-Marie and Kent’s mail slot, and then Britt-Marie got so angry on Christmas morning that she forgot to put on her floral-print jacket.
No one was ever able to explain how one can drop a whole calzone through someone’s letter box.
Elsa takes a couple of deep, controlled breaths on the stairs, because that’s what Mum has told her to do when she gets angry. Mum really does everything that Granny never did. Such as asking Elsa to invite Britt-Marie and Kent for Christmas dinner with all the other neighbors, for example. Granny would never have done that. “Over my dead body!” Granny would have roared if Mum had suggested it. Which she couldn’t have done now that her body was actually dead, Elsa realizes, but still. It’s about the principle. That’s what Granny would have said if she’d been here.