Christmas with Tucker Read Online Free PDF Page A

granite. You’ve always been. Nothing ever has and nothing ever will knock us down from the top of McCray’s Hill.”
    He pulled her closer. “I won’t let it.” He plucked four or five pins from her hair, loosening it from its knot and letting it fall down her shoulders, the way she wore it at night. He ran his fingers through it in a comforting gesture.
    “What am I going to do? I can’t go on like this anymore.”
    “It’s November. You’ll do what we do every year.”
    “What’s that?” she asked.
    “After you make the best Thanksgiving dinner in Cherokee County, you’ll waste weeks of time putting up all of your Christmas decorations, just like you always do.”
    “How can I do that, alone, without John and Sarah helping me? You know how much they loved Christmas. The girls were always the first ones to drag the decorations out of the basement and string the lights. Now they are all gone.”
    “I’ll help you. George is still here. We’ll do it, somehow.”
    “I’m sorry, but right now Christmas seems frivolous.”
    He held her cheeks in his hands. “You’ve got more substance than any person I know. There is nothing frivolous about keeping our traditions alive. It may be just what we need to stay propped up. I need you to do it.”
    I crept upstairs, not wanting to disturb them and feeling vaguely guilty for listening in and watching them. It was only November, but it was cold getting ready for bed. Tucker followedme up the steps and sniffed about my room. I pulled a blanket down from the top closet shelf and put it on the floor. He stared at it and then leapt up onto my bed, apparently not that interested in cold oak floor planks. After shutting off the light and situating Tucker at the foot of the bed, I pulled the covers over my head and tried to get warm. The “Minnesota” debate continued to rage in my head. It was easy to picture my mother near a cozy fire, resettled in the beloved hometown she’d always missed, laughing with family and old friends and enjoying the evening in front of a television, something no one around here seemed to think we needed. I loved my McCray grandparents deeply, but I had fond memories of the Peterson side of my family, too.
    My mother’s parents lived in a grand house near Minneapolis that was not only equipped with a television but also filled with cousins and an endless parade of friends and neighbors. It was a wonderful place where we had spent several joy-filled summers. Now my mom deserved and needed that love and support. I just didn’t know about myself.
    When she met my father after the war, moving to a farm had been a compromise for a city girl who’d fallen in love with a country boy. Though she went willingly, the farm no longer made sense, not for her. The McCray farm was now merely a painful collection of reminders. She agreed I could manage for a few months without her, safe in my grandparents’ care, while she resettled our family in Minnesota. After Christmas, which she and my sisters would spend on the farm, I would go back with her to start fresh, too.
    For me, though, moving away from the farm seemed like a betrayal of my father. I thought perhaps I’d get over that feeling, but as the weeks and months passed, I could not let it go. There was part of me that hung on to a hope: if I just hadenough patience, my dad might still walk right through that back kitchen door. For after all, he had been doing it every day of my entire life. He would be laughing with Grandpa Bo. On his face would hang the outdoors, punctuated with little bits of grease, grass, and dust cemented to his face by sweat and sun. He would be tired, but it was farm-tired: sore muscles, sun-bleached hair, and the ever-present assortment of scrapes and bruises that marked one day of simple toil.
    Through it all, over the years, no one ever looked more alive to me than my father when he came home at the end of the day. If it happened, if this was all just really one long,