Still, he let me pick the fattest tree. Let me pick out an ornament from the tiny gift shop and help myself to one too many free candy canes while Big Rob’s son wrapped the tree in a big net and strapped it to our car.
When I was thirteen, Big Rob died of a heart attack sometime around Halloween. We still went out to his lot that year to support his family. I bought my usual ornament—a ballerina, because Dad had just taken me to The Nutcracker the weekend before and I was going through a phase.
By the next year, Big Rob’s lot had become a Dairy Queen, so Dad and I got our tree from a lot just up the street where all the proceeds went to charity.
It was nice. The trees weren’t as fat, and there were no ornaments to be purchased. But they still had candy canes, and the branches still held my beloved ballerina ornament.
The point of all this . . .
I didn’t always hate Christmas. Quite the opposite.
But.
Things change.
And sometimes they change slowly, so slowly that you let yourself cling to the hope that you can keep them the same with sheer force of will.
The first small, slow change started when I headed off to undergrad. I went to Harvard on scholarship. But my dad’s two jobs turned into three to be able to pay for my books and board, so I made damn sure that I saved every single penny from my job at the campus library to ensure that I could pay to come home at Thanksgiving and Christmas. A few changes had to be made to the routine, of course. We bought the tree the day after Thanksgiving instead of the second Sunday of December because I was home. We’d do the outdoor lights then too, and that part stayed blissfully the same, a chance for me to trail behind him pointlessly holding a string of twinkle lights while catching him up on my life.
And then . . . law school.
That’s where things started to go awry. Not simply because my schedule was more demanding, my expenses tighter than ever, and I met my first serious boyfriend and experienced loving a man other than my father.
All of that was true, but the real change, the kind that causes your entire world to crumble, had nothing to do with the slow, bittersweet transition from girl to young woman to woman.
It was a single phone call.
Cancer.
Now, my father’s not the first person to get that diagnosis, and I’m not the first daughter to get that phone call.
But let me tell you, in that moment? It feels like the universe is singling you out. Punishing you for something.
In that moment, everything seemed to fade away, and there was only me and Dad up against a brutal disease with a prognosis that felt like a punch in the gut. A punch in the pancreas, I guess you could say.
They gave him six months to a year. Two years, if we were really lucky.
Lucky, they said.
As though we should feel fortunate that a fifty-year-old man who’d never missed a day of work in his life would be dead in a year.
Dad made it three years.
And sure enough, I did feel lucky. That we had a few more months than expected.
Except when I felt horribly, uncontrollably angry.
Angry that he didn’t make it just a few more months to see me graduate from Harvard Law, something he’d wanted for me almost more than I did.
Angry, most especially, that the disease took him on his favorite holiday. Angry that on that particular December 25, he woke up only twice.
Once, to whisper, “Merry Christmas.”
And once more, toward the very end. To whisper that it was okay that he wouldn’t see me graduate, that he wouldn’t see me become a lawyer. It was okay because he’d dreamed it. Seen me in a cap and gown, seen me popping champagne the day I made partner at a fancy law firm in New York City, where I’d always wanted to live.
To this day, I’m not sure if he actually had that dream, or if he was just remembering that it had once been my dream—one of the “when I grow up” fantasies I’d shared while hanging Christmas lights with frozen fingers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, all those years ago.
I suppose it doesn’t matter. He saw what he wanted to see, whether it was a dream or a wish. And those last minutes gave my life purpose: to make that life he saw for me a reality.
So, go ahead. You can call me the Grinch. You can call me Scrooge. Because, no. I don’t love Christmas these days. No matter how firmly I remind myself that I don’t have to let my warm childhood be sullied by the one Christmas when pancreatic cancer won the day, I can’t quite get there.
But I think this might be my year. The year that I have a Christmas to reset all the Christmases.
The year my dad’s dream for me comes true. And maybe when it does, maybe when I make partner, I can finally ease up on being Katherine Tate, Esquire, and simply be . . .
Katherine.
But first, I’ve got to get the call.
Harry and Joe have this obnoxious tradition of naming partners the week of Christmas.
Only, they didn’t take a note from Santa’s book and do it the same precise time every year. Some years it’s December 21. Sometimes it’s Christmas Eve.
Last year, it was December 23.
Which is today’s date, and yes, I am obsessively glued to my phone.
Honestly, I don’t think they thought it through all the way. That not getting the call during what’s already a painful time of the year for some people is . . . excruciating.
I know because I’ve been through it a few years in a row now. Hoping. Waiting.
Crying.
Yes. Even Girl-Grinches can cry.
But this year, I’m not just hoping or waiting for the call. I’m expecting it. I’ve been at Kaplan & Gosset for seven years now. I’m thirty-six. I’m the most senior nonpartner, and I’m the best they’ve got.
There’s a knock at my door, and when it opens before I say, “Come in,” I already know who it is because there’s only one person on this planet who can get away with that sort of thing, and she knows it.
Irene Diaz steps inside and shuts the door again, her dark brown eyes expectant. “So? Did he ask?”
I give my assistant a look. “If he’d popped the question, do you think I’d be calmly sitting here?”
“Honey, honestly? I know you as well as anybody, and I don’t have the faintest clue how you react to these things.”
She’s got a point there. Irene does know me as well as anyone. Technically, she’s my assistant, and she’s a damn good one. But mostly, she’s the closest thing to family that I’ve got. Not that I tell her that. But she knows.
I hope she knows.
I glance at my watch. It’s old and delicate and does one thing and one thing only: tell the time. I refuse to get on board with those stupid step-counting monstrosities that also tell me the weather and my next period and every time one of the paralegals has a question.
This watch is my mother’s—one of the few precious things I have to remind me of a woman I barely remember. My dad said she never took it off, so I don’t either.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on your way to the airport?” I ask.
Irene’s face crumples a little, but she tries to disguise it by reaching up and adjusting her huge, oversize red glasses. “Actually, Manny and I decided to spend Christmas in the city this year!”
Her voice is bright. Way too bright.
“What are you talking about?” I say. “How many years have we been working together? You’ve never not spent Christmas in Boston with Dani and the grandkids.”