You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (21 page)

It was that last line that I kept repeating.
“ServePro. Like it never even happened.”

Only after ten or fifteen minutes of this refrain rat-on-a-treadmilling through my brain did I say, “Wait a minute,” and run from the room, into my office.

I was stunned that the Internet still worked. Somehow, I had assumed the flood had taken everything away, even Google.

When I returned, I smiled at Dennis. “The Cavalry is coming,” I told him. “They’ll be here in two hours.”

With the room now stunningly empty and all our furniture stacked and piled in the garage, only the heavy, soaked rugs remained. My brother squatted down and began to roll, and then bunch the first rug up into a transportable mound. “I’ll take all the rugs down to my house and lay them out on the radiant heat flooring in the basement where they can dry.”

And all our rugs traveled by British military Land Rover past one mailbox, then another, and down my brother’s long driveway and straight into one of his four garages.

Dennis appeared to be in shock so I said, “He may be something of a bull in a china shop but when your china shop is being held up at gunpoint by thugs, you’ll be awfully glad you have a thousand-pound bull behind the counter, snorting and furious and ready to stampede.”

Dennis nodded because it was true.

Carleen and Henry slipped out to take care of their two kids. And the man who literally built our house stopped by. I’d called him because I had developed a psychological dependence on him and it seemed to me he could fix everything. But he could do little more than stand in morbid awe and be appalled.

This would be our lump of coal and reindeer-hit-by-car sandwiches Christmas. Just exactly like all the motherfucking rest of them.

ServePro arrived in a large Ghostbusters’ van. They wore uniforms and carried precision instruments with long, sharp probes that could be inserted into wood, to test its moisture content. After entering the house, they signaled one another using hand gestures and then dispersed; a couple went into the rear, two more downstairs to the basement. The sergeant stayed with me and I found his presence comforting. His unchanging facial expression—one of serious concentration but no surprise—made me feel that perhaps our water damage was less severe than I thought. Maybe he would tell us to lay newspapers on the floor over night to soak up any remaining moisture. Maybe he would say,
“Pay no mind to the deformity of floorboards; they’ll spring back into shape in a couple of days.”

Instead, he reached for his walkie-talkie and recalled the rest of the troop.

That’s when they brought out the hatchets.

Whole chunks of ceiling were removed, baseboards pried away from walls. Dennis’s prized carpet was ripped from the floor like a scab and carpet nails shot like sparks around the room.

When they finally left, the house had been filleted, nine industrial dehumidifiers and high-output drying fans had been left behind and the heat had been turned up to ninety.

It was now evening and the day was not destroyed, it was merely over. The house would live.

In bed that night, the walls and windows vibrated, as did the bed itself. This was because the dehumidification equipment, which would need to run twenty-four hours a day for a minimum of two weeks, sounded and felt like a jet engine was loose in the house. Upstairs with the bedroom door closed, we were somewhat isolated from the sound, but there would be no escaping the deep, endless vibrations I could feel in my liver.

Dennis lay flat on his back with his arms straight out from his sides. The dogs stood on his chest and licked his head. He was still wet from the shower, so they were able to get a drink, too.

“You know who you look like right now, especially in your boxers?”

He said, “Who?” then, “Blech, not my teeth, Cow.”

I smirked and said, “Jesus. With your arms straight out like that.”

“Very funny, ha ha,” he said.

Then I asked him, “Do you think I could become a Christian or is it too late for me?”

“Why do you want to become a Christian?”

“Because what Carleen did for us was very Christian.”

“You’re not Carleen.”

I was not Carleen.

After caring for her children, Carleen had returned. She was polished and well dressed and I saw at once how such a person no longer belonged in our house. It was a house for dirty guys in overalls once again.

She handed me a basket filled with fresh sandwiches, potato chips, and cookies.

Things we could eat without heating. Things we could eat with our hands. Our dirty hands. Carefully, beautifully wrapped. So that we would have one square foot of lovely between us.

I stared at the basket. And then at her. “Carleen, this is so incredibly—” I started to say but she put her hands up and waved me to a stop.

“No, but seriously, I can’t believe you did this. Thank you.”

She looked at me and said, “It was nothing. It’s just some sandwiches.”

But it was more than just the sandwiches. And it was the sandwiches, too.

It was how
automatically
she tossed away those precious five or ten early morning moments alone on her porch with her coffee. It was the way she looked over her shoulder as she reached her door, “We’ll be right there.”

And it was because something in her very nature seemed to act as a sort of scaffolding for the environment around her. There were people who had so much strength that you could borrow some, just by being in the same room with them.

Carleen had brought more than towels and a Shop-Vac and sandwiches into our home; she had brought grace itself, carried it in her bare hands and left it there for us.

In that basket, hidden beneath one of the sandwiches and cunningly tucked right between a chocolate chip cookie and a bag of Cape Cod brand potato chips was Christmas itself. Pure, true Christmas. Unavailable at any mall or even Cartier. The hardy, incorruptible, and now exceedingly rare variety of Christmas—more of a
substance
than a holiday. Ingesting even the smallest amount would cause you to stop whatever it was you were doing and listen, listen, listen for the sound of bells high in the sky above you.

It was the night before Christmas, six days since the flood. And we’d learned a few things.

It
was
the German gay faucet.

Cheap plastic valve, aggressive tighten-happy plumber.

And nine humidifiers and industrial fans? You can’t fight the noise. You must give in. You must enter it. It is the only way.

We also learned that if we had discovered the water an hour later, we might have had to rebuild the house. Instead of just the first floor. Which we learned would consume a lot of money and most of a year to repair.

And we learned that it felt kind of nice to walk on warped floorboards in bare feet.

So.

Yeah.

Dennis came into the bedroom where I was propped against the pillows emailing my friend Haven. “Dennis seems really fine,” I wrote her. “I mean, I thought he was going to be a vegetable, I thought he was going to be really sort of damaged by this. But by that evening, he was pretty much okay.”

I looked up from my ThinkPad. “Hey,” I said.

“Come on,” he said.

My first thought was:
Oh no.

But he was smiling.

“Come,” he said, motioning with his hand.

I closed my laptop and I followed him.

We reached the bottom of the stairs and I just stared. But he took me by the hand and brought me over.

The room was dark. It was hot as hell. And loud; that Satanic dehumidifier near the fireplace would pulverize my mind if I had to be near it for long. And just below us in our fully wrecked non-rec room, a whole pack of dehumidifiers and fans were screaming away, as they did at every moment. I just normally didn’t stand directly above them—I avoided this floor all together.

But none of this mattered.

Because there in front of me was the most beautiful Christmas tree I had ever seen.

It was perfect.

And when I saw that one of the branches was broken and in one or two spots only an ornament
hanger
was attached to the branch, then it was even more perfect.