Page 54 of Life’s Too Short

“I’ll call Sonja today,” I said. “Thank you for this.”

He smiled at me. “You got it.”

Picking out groceries with Adrian was one of the most fun things I’d done all year. He was exactly like me when it came to produce. He inspected everything, picked out all the best ingredients. He went with fresh herbs instead of dried stuff, organic heavy cream and chicken broth for the base, Plugrá butter for the roux.

Then we went crazy and bought like seventeen different cheeses. People were staring at us. We were dangerous together. I couldn’t even imagine us in France. We’d go broke on the wine alone.

Somewhere along the way, dinner for tomorrow came up and suddenly we were shopping for that too: chicken cordon bleu, with horseradish mashed potatoes and glazed carrots. But at my place this time instead.

When it came time to wander out to the tree tent in the parking lot, Adrian paused with the shopping cart at the sliding doors.

“What?” I asked.

He had a weird look on his face, like he wasn’t sure he should say what he was thinking. “What if we went and cut one down?”

My face lit up. “Like at a tree farm or something?” I started bouncing. “Will you wear a flannel? Will you have an ax?”

He snorted. “I do not own a flannel. And if memory serves, they give you a handsaw.”

I bit my lip and squealed excitedly.

He smiled. “My dad used to take us to a tree farm every year. He’d cut one down. It was a tradition.”

Ahhh. Now I understood the hesitation. And the reason he never had a tree.

My face went soft and I peered up at him. “Was the last time you got a Christmas tree back when your dad was around?”

He paused a moment. “Yes.”

“So when your dad left, it was the end of your childhood,” I said.

He drew in a long breath. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it.”

I smiled up at him. “But look! Now you’re the grown-up and you get to cut down a tree for Grace’s first Christmas and give that experience to her like someone gave it to you once.”

His eyes went soft and he looked at Grace in her stroller. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. Though she’s probably too small to remember it.”

I shook my head. “You don’t know what she’s going to remember. There are things that will happen to her while she’s a baby that will form who she is for the rest of her life. She might be a hundred years old and still feel a sense of calm when she smells someone who smells like you.”

He wrinkled his forehead at me. “What?”

“Yeah. You don’t notice it? How she calms down faster when you pick her up? She already associates you with feeling safe because you saved her that night. She’s imprinting, right now. Little synapses are connecting and telling her that you’re good. She might be drawn to bearded men with kind green eyes and marry one one day, just because she knew you once. And she’ll never even know why.”

He blinked at me and something I couldn’t read moved across his face.

“Anyway,” I said, pushing the stroller toward the exit, “I think we’ve made real progress here today. Even if there’s not going to be an ax and flannel.”

He smiled and pushed the cart, following me out into the parking lot.

* * *

Half an hour later, we pulled into the tree lot. A woman in a heavy winter coat and a Santa hat approached the car and gave us a site map and a saw. The saw smelled like pine.

“You smell that?” I smiled. He rolled up the window as we crept down the snowy road toward the different plots.

He smiled back. “I do.”

I looked at the map. “So what kind of tree do you want?”