blue. So when Shayla and I did dishes to the sound of her favorite Christmas CD, we sang our own words at the top of our lungs, trying to drown out Frank Sinatra’s voice.
“I’m dreaming of a blue Christmas,” we’d sing. And Shayla would find it so funny she’d forget to keep drying.
It was on a particularly chilly December evening that we invited Scott to accompany us on a tree-hunting expedition.
“He’s here! He’s here!” Shayla screamed. She’d been kneeling on a chair by the living room window, her nose plastered to the glass, waiting for Scott to appear. She was at the door waiting for him before he’d had time to stamp the excess snow from his boots.
“Ready, Lady Shay?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” She was a little excited.
“How ’bout your mom? Is she ready too?”
I waited to hear Shayla say, “She’s not my mom,” but she’d been saying it less and less these days. I rounded the corner into the entrance hall, pulling on my gloves. “Ready.”
Scott carried Shayla upside-down into the street, then fastened her securely into her car seat.
We spent the next hour trying to figure out how two finicky adults and an overexcited four-year-old could possibly come to an agreement on the shape and dimension of the perfect Christmas tree. Scott liked tall and skinny, I liked short and fat, and Shayla liked anything with a price tag outside my budget. The person running the tree lot finally came to our rescue and virtually ordered us to buy the one he selected for us.
“Schoen! Schoen!” he said, pointing at the straight trunk and the way the branches sloped down close to it. It was an okay tree, if you liked them shaped like marathoners. I liked mine shaped like sumo wrestlers, and Shayla, apparently, liked hers shaped like dollar bills.
Shayla wrinkled her nose at the tree the salesman held up for us to see, I shrugged my shoulders, and Scott said, “We’ll take it.”
As he’d been holding my hand for a few minutes, I didn’t put up a fight. I was busy trying to keep my neurons firing and my Jell-O legs from buckling.
Scott secured the tree on the roof of my car, installed Shayla in her usual spot, and walked me around to my door, pulling me into him just long enough to say, “We done good,” plant a kiss next to my ear, and assist me into my seat.
When he was settled behind the wheel, he looked at me like he had something to say, but the moment was interrupted by Shayla yelling, “Home! Home! Home!” at the top of her lungs.
And off we went to my apartment, where Scott got a little testy trying to get the tree to stand up straight and Shayla did all she could to distract him from the task. She tried on her ballerina skirt and twirled around him like a top. She told him the story of Rudolph and the Seven Dwarfs. She tried to measure his arm with the tape he’d used to determine how much of the trunk to cut off. And then she brought him the hot cider I’d made for him, which gave him a reason to sit down and contemplate his handiwork.
I joined them in the living room and took a seat on the couch.
“What do you think? Is it straight?” Scott asked.
I pursed my lips and squinted an eye. “No, but I’ve always wanted to see the Tower of Pisa, and this’ll save me the trip.”
“What?” He was out of his chair and standing in front of me, trying to see the tree from my angle. “It’s straight!” he protested.
“Well done.” I smiled.
He pointed at a giggling Shayla. “Don’t laugh, young lady. Your mom’s messing with my mind!”
She giggled some more, so he picked her up by her middle, swung her around in a circle, then plopped down on the couch next to me with Shayla sprawled across him.
He turned his head on the backrest—which meant his face was alarmingly close to mine. I stared straight ahead and tried to concentrate on the marathon-runner tree while the ice-skater in my stomach tried some new, original leaps.
“Wanna go to Riedlingen for supper?” he asked.
I turned my head and looked at him, which took way more courage than, say, wearing a bathing suit in public. Up close and personal, he was no less attractive than from a safe distance, and the fact that my daughter was sprawled across him, perfectly content as she played with