Jay Asher - What Light

Andrew takes a look around, but there’s no one else I could be talking to. He faces me, putting his hands in his pockets. “It’s nice to see you again,” he says.

It’s great when workers return for subsequent seasons, but I am careful not to give this one the wrong idea again. “I heard some other guys from the team came back, too.”

Andrew looks at the nearest tree and plucks a couple of needles. “Yep,” he says. He petulantly flicks the needles to the dirt and walks away.

Rather than let this get to me, I slide the window open further and close my eyes. The air out there will never smell exactly like home, but it does try. The view is very different, though. Instead of Christmas trees growing on rolling hills, they’re propped up in metal stands on a dirt lot. Instead of hundreds of acres of farmland stretching to the horizon, we have one acre that stops at Oak Boulevard. On the other side of the street, an empty parking lot stretches toward a grocery store. Since it’s Thanksgiving, McGregor’s Market closed early today.

McGregor’s has been in that spot since well before my family began selling trees here. It’s now the only non-chain market in town. Last year, the owner told my parents they might not be in business when we returned. When Dad called home a couple of weeks ago to say he made it, the first thing I asked was whether McGregor’s was still there. As a child I loved when Mom or Dad took a break from selling trees and walked me across the street for groceries. Years later, they would hand me a shopping list and I would go over on my own. The last few years it’s been my responsibility to make that list as well as shop.

I watch a white car drive across the asphalt, probably to make sure the market really is closed for the evening. The driver slows as he passes the storefront, then speeds back across the lot to the street.

From somewhere within our trees, Dad shouts, “Must’ve forgot the cranberry sauce!”

Throughout the lot, I can hear the baseball players laugh.

Every year on this day, Dad jokes about the frustrated drivers speeding away from McGregor’s. “But it won’t be Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie!” Or, “I guess someone forgot the stuffing!” The guys always laugh along.

I watch two of them carry a large tree past the trailer. One has his arms buried in the middle branches while the other follows, holding the trunk. They both stop walking so that the one in the branches can adjust his grip. The other guy, waiting, looks to the trailer and catches my eye. He smiles and then whispers something to the first guy that I can’t hear but that causes his teammate to also look my way.

I desperately want to make sure my hair isn’t a tangled mess even though I have no reason to impress them (no matter how cute they are). So I politely wave and then walk away.

On the other side of the trailer door, someone scrapes the bottoms of their shoes on the metal steps. Although it hasn’t rained since Dad set things up this year, the ground outside always has damp spots. A few times each day, the tree stands get filled with water and the needles are sprayed with misters.

“Knock-knock!”

I barely get the door unlatched before Heather yanks it open and squeals. Her dark curls bounce as she raises her arms and then hugs me. I laugh at her high-pitched excitement and follow her as she kneels at my bed for a closer look at the photos of Rachel and Elizabeth.

“They gave me those before I left,” I tell her.

Heather touches the top frame. “This is Rachel, right? Is she supposed to be hiding from the paparazzi?”

“Oh, she would be so happy to know you figured that out,” I say.

Heather scoots to the window so she can see outside. She taps on the glass with her fingertip and one of the ballplayers looks our way. He’s carrying a cardboard box marked “mistletoe” to the green-and-white tent we call the Bigtop. That’s where we ring up customers, sell other merchandise, and display the trees flocked with artificial snow.

Without looking at me, Heather asks, “Did you notice how hot this year’s team is?”

Of course I noticed, but it would be so much easier if I hadn’t. If Dad even thought I was flirting with one of the workers, he would make the guy thoroughly clean both outhouses in hopes that the stink would keep me away—which it would.

Not that I would want to date someone down here, whether he worked for us or not. Why put my heart into something fate will only tear apart Christmas morning?

After we stuff ourselves with Thanksgiving dinner, and Heather’s dad makes his annual “hibernate through the winter” joke, all of us move to what have become our traditional destinations. The dads clear and wash the dishes, partly so they can continue nibbling at the turkey. The moms head to the garage to start bringing in far too many boxes of Christmas decorations. Heather runs upstairs to grab two flashlights, and I wait for her at the bottom of the stairs.

From the closet near the front door, I take down a forest green hoodie Mom wore on our walk over. Yellow block letters spell LUMBERJACKS, her college mascot, across the chest. I pull the sweatshirt over my head and hear the back door in the kitchen open, which means the moms are returning. I quickly look upstairs to see if Heather’s on her way down. We were trying to leave before they returned and asked for help.

“Sierra?” Mom calls.

I tug my hair up through the collar. “About to leave!” I shout back.

Mom carries in a large transparent plastic tub full of newspaper-wrapped decorations.

“Is it okay if I borrow your sweatshirt?” I ask. “When you and Dad go back, you can wear mine.”

“No, yours is so thin,” she says.

“I know, but you won’t be out nearly as long as us,” I say. “Plus, it’s not even that cold.”

“Plus,” Mom says sarcastically, “you should have thought of that before we came over.”

I begin to take off her sweatshirt, but she motions for me to keep it on.

“Next year, stay and help us with…” Her words trail off.

I shift my eyes to the stairs. She doesn’t know I’ve heard the conversations between her and Dad, or between both of them and Uncle Bruce, about whether or not we’ll open the lot next year. Apparently it would have made the most sense to pull up stakes two years ago, but everyone’s hoping things will bounce back.

Mom sets the plastic tub on the living room carpet and pops off the top.

“Sure,” I say. “Next year.”

Heather skips down the stairs in the faded red sweatshirt she only wears this one night a year. The cuffs are in tatters and the neckline is stretched. We got it at a thrift shop soon after my grandpa’s funeral, when Heather’s mom took us shopping to cheer me up. Seeing her in it always feels bittersweet. It reminds me of how much I miss my grandparents when I’m down here but also how great a friend Heather has been to me.

She stops at the bottom of the stairs and offers me a choice of two small flashlights, purple or blue. I take the purple one and put it in my pocket.

Mom unrolls a newspaper-wrapped snowman candle. Unless Heather’s mom changed decorating plans for the first time in forever, that candle will go in the front bathroom. The wick is black from the one brief moment Heather’s dad lit it last year. At the first smell of burning wax, her mom pounded on the bathroom door until he blew it out. “It’s a decoration!” she shouted. “You don’t light decorations!”

Mom looks at the kitchen and then to us. “If you want to make it out of here, you’d better go now,” she says. “Your mom’s looking for her entry in this year’s ugly Christmas sweater contest. Apparently she’s got a winner.”

“How bad is it?” I ask.

Heather scrunches her nose. “If she doesn’t win, those judges have no sense of horrendous.”

When we hear the back door open, we scramble out the front door and slam it shut behind us.

Next to the welcome mat is the small tree I carried over from the lot. Earlier, I transferred the tree out of the plastic bucket, so its roots are now bound in a scratchy burlap sack.

“I’ll carry it up the first half,” Heather says. She picks up the basketball-sized bag and settles it in the crook of her arm. “You can carry that little shovel thingie you brought.”

I pick up the gardening trowel and we head out.

Less than halfway up Cardinals Peak, Heather says it’s time to switch. I slide my flashlight into my back pocket and then we shift the tree into my arms.

“You got it?” she asks. When I nod, she takes the trowel from my hand.

I adjust my hold and we continue our hike up the hill, which the locals adorably call a mountain. We keep to the center of the packed-dirt access road, which will loop around three times before we reach our spot. The moon looks like a clipped fingernail tonight, barely lighting this side of the hill. When we circle to the other side, we’ll need our flashlights even more. Now, we mostly use them to scare away anything small that we hear scurrying in the bushes.

“Okay, so the guys you work with are forbidden,” Heather says, as if continuing a discussion that’s already been playing in her head. “So help me brainstorm other people you can… you know… spend time with.”

I laugh and then carefully pull the flashlight from my back pocket and aim it at her face. “Oh. You were serious.”

“Yes!”

“No,” I say. I check her face again. “No! For one, we’re busy all month; there’s no time. For another—and most important—I live in a trailer on a tree lot! No matter what I say or do, my dad is right there.”

“It’s still worth trying,” she says.

I tilt the tree to keep the needles out of my face. “Plus, how would you feel if you knew you had to dump Devon right after Christmas? You’d feel horrible.”

Heather pulls the small trowel from her back pocket and taps it against her leg as we walk. “Since you brought it up, that’s kind of the plan.”

“What?”

She lifts a shoulder. “Look, you’ve got your high standards about how relationships should be, so I’m sure I sound all—”

“Why does everyone think my standards are high? What does that even mean?”

“Don’t get all prickly.” Heather laughs. “Your standards are one of the reasons I love you. You’ve got this solid… I don’t know… moral foundation, and that’s great. But it makes someone planning to dump her boyfriend after the holidays feel kind of bad. You know, in comparison.”

“Who plans a breakup an entire month ahead of time?” I ask.

“Well, it’d be cruel to do it right before Thanksgiving,” she says. “What would he say at dinner with his family, ‘I feel thankful for having my heart broken’?”

We walk several steps in silence as I think about this. “I guess there’s never a good time, but you’re right that there are worse times. So how long have you been thinking about it?”

“Since right before Halloween,” she says. “But we had such great costumes!”

The moonlight fades as we round the hill, so we shine the lights closer to our feet.

“It’s not that he’s a jerk or anything,” Heather says. “Otherwise I wouldn’t care about sticking around for the holidays. He’s smart—even if he doesn’t act like it—and gentle and cute. It’s just that he can be so… boring. Or maybe it’s more like clueless? I don’t know!”

I would never judge anyone else’s reasons for a breakup. Everyone wants or needs different things. The first person I broke up with, Mason, was smart and funny, but also a bit needy. I thought I wanted to feel needed, but that gets exhausting real fast. I learned that it’s much better to feel wanted.

“How is he boring?” I ask.

“Let me put it this way,” she says. “If I were to describe his boringness to you, the words coming out of my mouth would be more exciting.”

“Really?” I say. “Then I cannot wait to meet him.”

“And that’s why you need a boyfriend while you’re here,” she says. “So we can double-date. Then my dates won’t be so dull.”

I consider how awkward it would be to start seeing someone here, knowing there’s an expiration date attached. If I wanted that, I could have said yes to Andrew last year.