Making the Holidays Happy Again

1

“Okay, what’s up?” I sat on the bench with my back against the bricks at Joe’s Pub. “You’ve been pissed since last week.”

My best friend and secret love of my life, Jimmy, glared but didn’t answer. We’d known each other for so long that I waited him out like usual. I crossed my pumped arms and sat back, smelling my sweat-soaked T-shirt in the AC blowing around us.

The past summer in Seven Winds, once a gold rush town in California’s northern Sierra Nevada Mountains and now a tourist trap, had been brutal. A record number of days over one hundred degrees had turned a lot of the shop owners into snarling dogs.

As the resident blacksmith, I took the heat as business as usual. So I was hot and sweaty? I was always hot and sweaty. The day I ain’t I’m either sick or dead.

I figured Jimmy’s problem was more than the heat, though. He’d been acting funny lately. Like he had something caught in his craw but he couldn’t spit it out.

Jimmy wasn’t looking at me, but down at his hands. They was long and thin, completely different from mine. I had a collection of burns and scratches, scars from the forge and the tools and all.

His hands was pale white with a bunch of freckles that went with the freckles all over the rest of his body. When we was kids, the tiny red hairs on his arms stood out almost more than his carroty hair. The bright red had changed as he got older and was now more muted. Me? I’d stayed hairy brown all over.

I tapped his hand with my blunt fingers.

“Whatever it is, you know you can just spit it out. I’ll listen.”

He stared at me, and I swear his green eyes got darker. He was making me uneasy. What the hell was wrong?

“You ever look at your life, Butch, and ask yourself, ‘Is this all there is?’” He sighed. What the fuck? What had gotten into him? “Don’t give me that look. You’ve got to know what I’m talking about.”

“Sure. But you know me. Something’s wrong, I make it right.” Takes me time but I figure out what to do eventually. “So, uh, what’s wrong with your life?”

I wanted to make it a joke and laugh, but he was too damned serious. And Jimmy’s never this serious.

“I mean, look at us. We work all day in our shops. We make good money. We got nothing to spend it on but ourselves. We go out drinking with the guys on the weekends. Or we go into the city to a game. Or we go fishing, camping, riding around.” He shook his head. “But in the end, what have we got?”

“Fun. Friendship. I don’t know.” It wasn’t much of an answer. I knew where he was coming from. I figured it was because we was about to turn thirty after Christmas and it was time for us to grow up. I’d been thinking on it a lot lately.

“Don’t you want something else, Butch? Something more? Something better?” He sounded desperate, like he was drowning and I wasn’t saving him.

“Yeah, sure. I guess. I mean, I want a husband, a house, a dog, you know, stuff like we talked about when we was kids.” I’d had it mostly planned out. For one thing, I’d been saving my money.

I was surprised Jimmy hadn’t already figured it out. He was usually two steps ahead of me in everything. “Okay, I gotta ask. What brought all of this on? What happened?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been sitting around thinking lately. And Mom’s been on me.”

His mother, Hazel, is a character. She’s an old hippie with graying auburn hair and grass-green eyes. Her face is a road map of lines cuz she spends so much time outdoors. And she worries. She thinks we need her to run our lives. We mostly let her think that even though it’s not true.

“She says she wants me to move out of the farmhouse.” Jimmy said it like it was a death sentence.

“So? Isn’t that what you always wanted?”

He shrugged, then nodded, reluctant-like. “I guess.”

When we was little, we was next-door neighbors when Mom, me, Jimmy, and Hazel lived in town. After my mom died when I was a junior in high school, I sold the house, bought my uncle’s business, and moved into the cottage in back of the forge in Old Town. I’d been working part-time for my uncle, the blacksmith, since I was twelve. After I moved into his house, he retired and moved to Washington State. A few years later, Jimmy and Hazel moved from the old neighborhood into a farmhouse one of her relatives left her. Jimmy graduated high school and went to college.