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YOUR ENEMIES; YOU MADE THEM. We passed the Vanmares’ old farmhouse,cheap runescape gold, where they had decorated
the front yard again in a completely random holiday fashion: silhouettes of penguins,fiesta online gold, palm trees, geese, and
candy canes all lit up as if they were long-lost friends at a gathering. Still, I was not immune to other people’s
responses to Christmas,buy world of warcraft gold, their whatnot compositions, whether it was art or just exuberance. Whimsy and fuss
could still rivet me.
I got out my sushi and began to snack. ‘Want some?’ I asked Robert.
‘No way,’ he said.
We passed the Drift Inn, which had lost itsD and become the Rift Inn. The parking lot at Buck Rub Bowling was
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jammed for some knockerheimer tournament. We drove right down the main street of Dellacrosse,buy star wars credits, which was
lined with single-story storefronts and diagonal parking out front. Squeezed in side by side were Larry’s Resale
Shop, Terry’s Taxidermy (formerly Dick’s Deergutting), and Walt’s Worms, all of which we sailed right past.
Chewing, I concentrated my stare, as if I were in fact the stranger I felt myself to be, studying the metal rickrack
of the bridge across Wahapa Creek. We passed the road to the township dump and at the turnoff the dump-
tender’s cabin, which the tender had outfitted proudly and spectacularly with items gleaned from the dump itself.
A large glittery reindeer with broken-off antlers sat atop his roof.
Putting away my sushi, I said, ‘If you eat a bear’s liver, will you die?’
Robert laughed. ‘I have no idea.’ Then he added, ‘I do know that if you’re a squirrel you should stay away from
hot electrical boxes or you will get so electrocuted that your teeth will fuse together.’ And he pointed this
gruesome thing out to me, on the power line that edged our road, close to our own gravel driveway.
‘How’s Mom?’ I asked before we entered the house. The truck lights in the driveway would have already
signaled our arrival.
‘Mom’s a little emo. In other words, just the same,’ he said, grabbing my bag and bass again for me the way the
college boys rarely did. My parents had raised a nice farm boy, though I wondered if they knew this. It had not
been their conscious, active intent. I went to follow him, but he signaled that I should walk ahead. I climbed the
porch stairs and rapped on the aluminum storm door, then opened it and shouted hello. My mother was never one
for Christmas Eve, and so coming home for the holidays I was often greeted like a neighbor stopping by on
Sunday after church, a neighbor she saw all the time but did not want to be unkind to.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi there.’ This year there was the smell of baking ginger in the air. The house struck me once
more with its warm neglect and elegant poverty’the Hitchcock chairs that were beat up, uncared for, never
treated as special antiques but as serviceable items that had to earn their existence on this planet the hard way: at
our house, a kind of hard-knocks house for furniture.
My mother had sprung for eggnog, and a little brandy, and although my father had already gone to bed she and
Robert and I sat up for twenty minutes or so, with a coffee log burning low in the fireplace and a plate of
gingersnaps on the mantel before we were all too tired to pretend. The coffee log was a favorite of my mother’s,