turned and walked out, probably grateful that he hadn’t had to say more, and I gave Abby a panicky glance.
“We don’t have anything for them, do we?”
She smiled. “I was going to send them. They’re upstairs in a Target bag next to our bed.”
I kissed her again. “You’re perfect, you know.”
“Don’t start,” Abby told me. “Man can get shot talking like that.”
I went upstairs and found the bag—Abby hadn’t just bought the presents, she’d wrapped them, the little minx. I met the others in the living room. Abby had dusted off—literally—our menorah, and was trying to find candles that would fit, since we always leave such things for the last minute, which was still forty-six hours away.
We managed to discover just enough candles (you only need two the first night of Chanukah, and this wasn’t even that) left over from the previous year, and approximated a Jewish festival celebration. We sang the prayer, or as much of it as we could remember, and Ethan got to light the candles. Ethan has a rather unhealthy fascination with fire, so he wasn’t necessarily paying attention during the whole “singing the prayer” part of the festivities.
When we got down to the serious part of the evening—gifts—my children were as attentive as they ever get, sitting in the living room, near the non-functional fireplace, anticipating the great bounty that was soon to be theirs.
They, of course, had forgotten that this was their Uncle Howard giving the presents. Leah, given the store-wrapped box to open (with the store’s logo on the paper), could barely contain herself, until the ritual shredding of the paper revealed a Barbie doll. Leah gave up Barbie roughly two years ago, and now disdains the brand (and, to be fair, dolls generally), calling it “dumb.” This particular Barbie was dressed as a flight attendant, which suits my daughter about as well as working at Disney World would suit Marilyn Manson.
“Thank you,” she said by rote, and her aunt and uncle bought it as sincere. Leah’s eyes were already glazed over as she estimated what she might be able to exchange the gift for on Thursday. I groaned inwardly, thinking about what toy stores were going to look like the day after Christmas.
Ethan’s gift was a subtler affair. For one thing, those on the autism spectrum tend to be very, very specific about the kinds of gifts they like. We actually ask Ethan to compile a written list of acceptable gifts each year, and he does so with great care, spending considerably more time on that than he does on his homework. Howard and Andrea, because they’d been in our house for a week, had certainly had access to the list, but had chosen, in this case, to ignore it.
They had bought Ethan “Trouble,” a hopelessly juvenile game for a twelve-year-old, and one which, knowing Howard, had been purchased with an eye toward economy rather than true affection.
“It’s ‘Trouble,’” Ethan, ever the diplomat, grumbled. “I think I had this when I was five.”
“Oh, my,” said Andrea. “Dylan assured us it was something you’d adore.” Dylan, seated to the left of his mother, smiled a truly evil smile. I hoped Abby had gotten him a bag of three-day-old calamari.
Alas, my wife is a far nobler person than I am, since she’d bought Dylan a PlayStation 2 game cartridge with characters I didn’t recognize on the cover. Ethan’s eyes practically popped out of his head when he saw it, and Dylan must have realized how serious a prize he’d won when his grandparents had decided to provide him with an aunt, because even he couldn’t mask his enthusiasm thanking Abby for the gift.
Ethan looked like he might actually go off in a huff and chew nails, but he bravely kept it together, and I made a mental note to tell my son how proud I was of him for doing so. There have been times when he would not have held in his surely growing resentment of his cousin.
“It’s funny,” Howard said. “We were going to get one of those for Ethan, but Dylan said he’d like the board game better. Besides, do you know how much those video games cost?”
“Yes,” I said. “We do.”
Gifts among the adults followed, after Dylan, grumbling that he couldn’t play his game on Ethan’s antiquated system, and Ethan, grumbling in general, left to argue elsewhere. Leah, who loves to see people get presents, stayed.
While we were exchanging boxes, Warren ambled in, no doubt after checking the clock. It