Today you asked me where metal comes from. He’d been waiting for the proper time to share them, but it had slipped his mind-wouldn’t you know-until now. He explained he’s kept it since I was very little. When I asked if I could shell a snowman-to see what the twenty-year-old peanut inside looked like-Mom said, sternly, “Don’t you dare.”Ĭhristmas morning, Dad pulled out a small, worn, red notebook. She’d hung our stockings over the fireplace, even Linus’s. Mom had decorated her biggest potted ficus in tinsel and lights, and with the ornaments we’d made as kids-painted macaroni framing our school pictures, ancient peanuts I’d painted into snowmen with apathetic faces. “Merry Christmas,” we’d tell my parents over speakerphone.Įxcept for Linus gone, everything was the same. “Up to you,” Joel would say, but I always chose Charleston. From San Francisco, where I live, it would have been an easy six hours south. It’s been three or four Christmases away.
This year, with nowhere to go-no Joel and no Charleston-I made the drive down. In the bathroom, there would have been a new, grocery-brand toothbrush with a gift label on it, my name in his mother’s handwriting: ruth. His mother would have popped popcorn for garlands and his father would have baked a stollen. Under ordinary circumstances-the circumstances that had become ordinary-I would have gone to Joel’s. I’m home for the holidays, like you’re supposed to be. The downtown trees have their holiday lights in them, and this man who called had, while driving, noticed the clothes, illuminated. Up and down Euclid, his slacks and shirts hang from the branches.
Yesterday, on Mom’s orders, I’d written his name and our number in permanent marker onto the tags of all his clothes.Īpparently what he’s done, in protest, is pitched the numbered clothing into trees. I put the phone down to verify that Dad was home and had pants on. The stranger called and said, “I have some pants? Belonging to a Howard Young?” Tonight a man found Dad’s pants in a tree lit with Christmas lights.
Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, American Short Fiction, The San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Rachel Khong was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. Newly disengaged from her fiancé, 30-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town, & arrives at her parents’ home to find that situation more complicated than she thought. The following is from Rachel Khong’s novel, Goodbye, Vitamin.
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