WELL DONE! Essays, Memoirs, and True Stories
to stretch another Christmas to its limits. Sandy guesses the tree farm would find you. Lee asks how that could be, but our mother moves on, “There’s nothing like piling up pine trees after Christmas and jumping in them.” We all look around the table. One of us, maybe all of us ask, “Why would you do that?” “Because it’s fun,” Sandy says. We watch as she smiles. Perhaps returning at that moment to a day after Christmas, old friends wiping tree sap on their sleeves. Each one daring the others to jump first, all of their mothers still alive, unlike that pile of trees. Robyn is getting sicker. But he married a woman who is always the first to jump. “It doesn’t sound like fun at all,” Lee looks to me for agreement, “Sounds painful. It’s masochism is what it is.” Sandy looks at her watch and tells Robyn to grab the stuff in the kitchen. To ask one of us for help if he needs it. Lee keeps going on about our mother’s crazy Wichita Falls stories, the dumpster diving and the dead Christmas trees. “Why would you jump into a pile of pain?” “Honey,” she kisses her son on the cheek, puts on her coat, “That’s life.” Robyn has gathered far too much to carry out on his own. Still, he’s surveying us; his sons and his wife, “It was a good goddamn night!” We laugh. We’re worried. We say
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