A Christmas Sonata Read Free

Mother and hugged me and Marilyn took Mother’s suitcase and was crying and Mother was crying and Ben picked me up and carried me to his car.
    “Thirty below,” he said to Mother. “I wasn’t sure the car would start. I’ll have to drain the radiator when we get to the store.” Then he turned to me and smiled,holding me out. “Do you think Santa will be able to get his reindeer going?”
    “There isn’t a Santa Claus,” I said. “I saw Mr. Henderson drinking red wine.”
    “Ohhhh.” Ben shook his head. “Are we so old then that we have outgrown Santa Claus?”
    But before I could answer, we came to the car and Mother and I climbed into the backseat.
    “I’ve had to keep her running,” Ben said, getting in. “It was hard to do, what with the gas rationing—but I was afraid to let her stop. If the oil stiffened we’d never get her going again.”
    “Why is the car a girl?” I asked Mother, but she didn’t hear me and was too busy talking to Marilyn, leaning over the front seat and laughing, to notice anything else.
    It wasn’t a long drive to the store, but I fell asleep again. Bundled in my snowsuitand coat and scarf, which Mother had left on because it was cool in the backseat when I fell asleep, I didn’t move except to fall forward when we stopped.

    Mother helped me upright and out of the car, and Ben picked me up again and carried me into the store.
    It was in a large wooden building made of white boards. The store was downstairs in the front part, and there was a place for living in the back. The store was built right on the edge of a huge lake—Winnipah Lake—and went out over the water on posts. In the summer, part of the lake was under part of the store, and there was a big dock that went out into the lake still farther.
    I only got one or two whiffs of icy air through my scarf, then Ben had me in the store along with Mother and Marilyn and our suitcase, with the door shut tight to stop the cold.
    There was so much in the store that Icouldn’t see it all. It was a large, long room, open all the way, and the ceiling was very high and made of squares with pictures of flowers and things in them.
    Down the left side of the store there was a long wooden counter with a glass front, full of all sorts of things—candy and caps and knives and small cards with flowers on them. The rest of the store was all shelves, except for the back, where there was a big black stove with a fat face that looked like a smiling monster on the door blowing smoke. And back in the corner away from the stove was a Christmas tree that went all the way to the ceiling, but it was all dark.
    As Ben carried me down the length of the store, I saw all of this the way I saw things out the train window, moving and blurred; and then we were through the store and into the back, where there were rooms for living.
    The back was very small and very bright after the dark of the store out front.
    There was a room with a couch and a kitchen table. It looked a lot like our apartment in Minneapolis, except that there were two other rooms off to the side. These were bedrooms and one was for Marilyn and Ben and the other was for Matthew.
    “Matthew is asleep,” Ben whispered. “You can see him in the morning.”
    Marilyn and Ben pulled the couch out into a bed for Mother and me, and Mother helped me undress and use the bathroom next to Ben and Marilyn’s bedroom, which was smaller than the bathroom on the train. We went to bed, all whispering, so as not to wake Matthew. I felt like we were still moving on the train and stayed awake a little trying to make the couch quit moving.
    It’s easy to miss things in the mornings.
    I often sleep and sleep through things, and Mother has to wake me up, but this first morning at Uncle Ben’s store I was awake almost as soon as the grown-ups.
    Mother got out of bed, and I opened my eyes and it was still dark outside the window over the sink. Ben and Marilyn were up and Marilyn was making oatmeal on