I know you?” he asked.
“Well, you’ve been sitting here long enough, we could be old friends.” She smiled. “It’s Karen. Karen Delvecchio.”
Which rang no bells in his benumbed mind. “Thanks,” he said, setting the bag on his lap, as if she might change her mind and try to take it back.
She saw him glance again at the print of Antoinette’s. “Maybe you should be looking at that one instead,” she said, indicating the print that hung near the register. He knew which one she meant. There was a birdhouse, in an intense blue, and in the foreground, a large brown bird, holding a glass bottle in his feet, and inside the bottle, what appeared to be a note. There were other bottles, too, floating in a stream at the bottom of the picture. “Heavenly Messages,” it was titled.
“I don’t get that one,” he said, getting up and slipping into the light windbreaker, and donning the thick blue parka over that. The temperature outside had been hovering at about twenty degrees earlier; by now, it was probably more like zero. “I don’t know what it means.”
“Maybe that’s what it means,” she said. “Maybe Heavenly messages aren’t supposed to be writ large, so we can take them in at a casual glance. Maybe we’re supposed to have to work on them.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. I like Antoinette’s better, though. A cozy little restaurant. Warm food, a fire burning. Nothing to puzzle over.” He started toward the front door.
“Wait, here,” she said. She dipped her hand into the tip jar on the counter and pulled out a handful of bills, and thrust them at him.
“What’s this?” he asked, staring stupidly at the money.
She gave him a pale smile. “Maybe it’s one of Heaven’s messages,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”
He knew he ought to say the same back to her, but the words wouldn’t come. Merry Christmas? Nothing merry about it, that he could see.
“Goodnight,” he said instead, and went out. He heard her lock the door after him, eager to go home, to spend the rest of Christmas Eve with her family. He couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault he didn’t have a home to go to, or a family to share it with. The sign said they closed at eight o’clock tonight, and it was after ten now. She had stayed late as it was, to let him nurse that free coffee, and put off the inevitable. He knew that he ought to be grateful, but the gratitude was sour in his mouth.
The inevitable was colder even than he had anticipated. It had begun to snow, and a devilish wind spit the snow in his face and seemed to slice right through the parka. He didn’t have gloves, and it was too cold to carry the paper bag of rolls barehanded. He tucked it inside the parka, and looked at the bills she had handed him. All ones, eleven of them. He shoved them and his hands into his pockets, and thought, I could get something hot to eat, if anything’s open. The Seven Eleven, maybe? Or, better yet, there were the tacky motels on the edge of town. Maybe he could persuade a night clerk to let him have a room for the night on the cheap. Hey, it was Christmas Eve, wasn’t it, as everyone kept reminding him?
He veered off in the direction of Winchester, cutting through the deserted mall. The night was preternaturally still. The steakhouse next door was closed, and the Office Max across the street. Everything was closed; everyone was at home, or hurrying to get there in the lone car that suddenly loomed out of the darkness. On an impulse, he stuck out his thumb, but they whizzed by as if they hadn’t seen him at all, the tires splashing wet snow across the tops of his shoes.
Not quite everyone was home, as it turned out. He saw someone sitting on the curb a few feet away, and slowed his steps. These days you had to be chary of strangers at night, even on Christmas Eve night. The bad guys didn’t take holidays off.
It was an old man, though; he certainly did not look a threat. What he looked, was wracked with despair—and cold—he was in his shirtsleeves, despite the bitter cold.
Victor hesitated, thinking he would slip on by, hopefully unnoticed. But the slump in the old man’s shoulders...and, when he got closer, he could hear that he was crying, great heaves that shook his body and sounded like the muffled wail of a coyote in the silent night.
“Are you okay?” Victor asked, coming closer.
“Okay? Now there’s a laugh,” the old man said without looking at him. “The damn bastards! They took everything. Took my coat, took the few pennies I had in my pocket, took my pint of Jack. Everything. And on Christmas Eve, too.”
“You were mugged?”
“Three of them, their damned britches hanging halfway down their butts. Little punks. If I’d been twenty years younger....”
What could he say? He was no stranger himself to life’s misfortunes. Still.... “What are you going to do?”
“Do? What can I do? Sit here and cuss, is all I can see.”
“You’ll freeze to death. It must be close to zero by now.”
The old man did look at him then. He stared, stared in particular at the blue parka, as if judging its warmth. Victor felt its woolen bulk seem of a sudden to weigh heavily upon him. Automatically, he pulled it closer about himself, asserting his ownership. The old man saw the gesture, and shrugged, and put his head in his hands. There was blood on his cheek, apparently where someone had struck him.
Damn. “Here,” Victor said aloud, unfastening the buttons with numb fingers. He slipped the coat off, and thrust it at the man. “Take this.”
“Just means you’ll freeze to death instead of me,” the old man said, but he took the coat, and hurriedly slipped his arms into the sleeves.
“No, I’ve got this windbreaker, see, it’s warmer than it looks, actually. And some other stuff under it, it’s what they call layering. To be honest, I was thinking about taking the coat off, anyway, it was almost too warm.”
The old man got the coat buttoned. He stood up, brushing snow of the seat of his pants. If he recognized the lies, he chose to ignore them.
“Glad to have it,” he said.
“You could still freeze,” Victor said.
“I know a place,” was all he said. He started to walk, back the way Victor had come. He had gone about twenty feet before he looked back and said, “Merry Christmas.” He disappeared into the darkness and the swirling snow.
Merry Christmas, again. Why did people say that, when there was so clearly nothing merry about it? You’d think they would choke on the words. You’d think that old guy in particular would choke trying to get them out.
He put his head down and began to walk again, in the opposite direction, shivering in the light windbreaker and cursing himself. What a damned fool thing to do. The old man was right, he would probably be the one now to freeze to death, unless he could make it to one of those motels, persuade somebody to make Christmas merry instead of just wishing it.
He plodded through the snow, the bag of food under his arm, hands deep in the pocket of his trousers, half frozen already, trying to think of things to distract himself.
He thought of his mother. What would she say now? He pictured her now, that little woman who had looked so frail, and been so tough. You had to be tough, to raise twelve children
