Later(18)

He gave Mom a locket that he said had belonged to his wife. Mom protested and said he should save it for his daughter. Mr. Burkett said that Siobhan had gotten all the good pieces of Mona’s jewelry, and besides, “If you snooze, you lose.” Meaning, I guess, that if his daughter (from the sound of it, I thought her name was Shivonn) couldn’t bother to come east, she could go whistle. I sort of agreed with that, because who knew how many more Christmases she might have her father around? He was older than God. Besides, I had a soft spot for fathers, not having one myself. I know they say you can’t miss what you’ve never had, and there’s some truth to that, but I knew I was missing something.

My present from Mr. Burkett was also a book. It was called Twenty Unexpurgated Fairy Tales.

“Do you know what unexpurgated means, Jamie?” Once a professor, always a professor, I guess.

I shook my head.

“What do you reckon?” He was leaning forward with his big gnarly hands between his skinny thighs, smiling. “Can you guess from the context of the title?”

“Uncensored? Like R-rated?”

“Nailed it,” he said. “Well done.”

“I hope there’s not a lot of sex in them,” Mom said. “He reads at high school level, but he’s only nine.”

“No sex, just good old violence,” Mr. Burkett said (I never called him professor in those days, because it seemed stuck-up somehow). “For instance, in the original tale of Cinderella, which you’ll find here, the wicked stepsisters—”

Mom turned to me and stage-whispered, “Spoiler alert.”

Mr. Burkett was not to be deterred. He was in full teaching mode. I didn’t mind, it was interesting.

“In the original, the wicked stepsisters cut off their toes in their efforts to make the glass slipper fit.”

“Eww!” I said this in a way that meant gross, tell me more.

“And the glass slipper wasn’t glass at all, Jamie. That seems to have been a translation error which has been immortalized by Walt Disney, that homogenizer of fairy tales. The slipper was actually made of squirrel fur.”

“Wow,” I said. Not as interesting as the stepsisters cutting off their toes, but I wanted to keep him rolling.

“In the original story of the Frog King, the princess doesn’t kiss the frog. Instead, she—”

“No more,” Mom said. “Let him read the stories and find out for himself.”

“Always best,” Mr. Burkett agreed. “And perhaps we’ll discuss them, Jamie.”

You mean you’ll discuss them while I listen, I thought, but that would be okay.

“Should we have hot chocolate?” Mom asked. “It’s also from Zabar’s, and they make the best. I can reheat it in a jiff.”

“Lay on, Macduff,” Mr. Burkett said, “and damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ ” Which meant yes, and we had it with whipped cream.

In my memory that’s the best Christmas I had as a kid, from the Santa pancakes Liz made in the morning to the hot chocolate in Mr. Burkett’s apartment, just down the hall from where Mom and I used to live. New Year’s Eve was also fine, although I fell asleep on the couch between Mom and Liz before the ball dropped. All good. But in 2010, the arguments started.

Before that, Liz and my mother used to have what Mom called “spirited discussions,” mostly about books. They liked many of the same writers (they bonded over Regis Thomas, remember) and the same movies, but Liz thought my mother was too focused on things like sales and advances and various writers’ track records instead of the stories. And she actually laughed at the works of a couple of Mom’s clients, calling them “subliterate.” To which my mother responded that those subliterate writers paid the rent and kept the lights on. (Kept them lit.) Not to mention paying for the care home where Uncle Harry was marinating in his own pee.

Then the arguments began to move away from the more or less safe ground of books and films and get more heated. Some were about politics. Liz loved this Congress guy, John Boehner. My mother called him John Boner, which is what some kids of my acquaintance called a stiffy. Or maybe she meant to pull a boner, but I don’t really think so. Mom thought Nancy Pelosi (another politician, which you probably know as she’s still around) was a brave woman working in “a boys’ club.” Liz thought she was your basic liberal dingle-berry.

The biggest fight they ever had about politics was when Liz said she didn’t completely believe Obama had been born in America. Mom called her stupid and racist. They were in the bedroom with the door shut—that was where most of their arguments happened—but their voices were raised and I could hear every word from the living room. A few minutes later, Liz left, slamming the door on her way out, and didn’t come back for almost a week. When she did, they made up. In the bedroom. With the door closed. I heard that, too, because the making-up part was pretty noisy. Groans and laughter and squeaky bedsprings.

They argued about police tactics, too, and this was still a few years before Black Lives Matter. That was a sore point with Liz, as you might guess. Mom decried what she called “racial profiling,” and Liz said you can only draw a profile if the features are clear. (Didn’t get that then, don’t get it now.) Mom said when black people and white people were sentenced for the same type of crime, it was the black people who got hit with the heaviest sentences, and sometimes the white people didn’t do time at all. Liz countered by saying, “You show me a Martin Luther King Boulevard in any city, and I’ll show you a high crime area.”