Dear Irene

17

I DON’T REMEMBER opening the car door or jumping out of the car. I might have yelled or screamed – I think I must have. But I only remember finding myself standing next to the car, shaking. Another driver got out of his car. For a moment, I wanted to run from him.

“Lady, are you all right?”

He took a step closer, and I stumbled toward the front of the Karmann Ghia. I must have looked about as calm as a horse being led from a burning barn. But as my initial panic subsided, I realized that he was a teenager. I pictured Thanatos being much older. The boy had long, straight brown hair and big brown eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, staying where he was.

I found my voice and said, “Snake. In the car. There’s a snake in my car.”

“Really?” He walked toward me, slowly this time, holding his hands out at each side, as if to show me he meant no harm. I glanced around and realized traffic was backing up. It had all but come to a complete standstill as other people started getting out of their cars and walking toward us. I calmed down a little.

The boy came closer. “I’m Enrique.”

“I’m Irene.”

“You’re not scared of me, are you?”

I took a deep breath. “No, I’m not. I’m not even afraid of snakes. I just wasn’t expecting to find one in my car.”

“Little cold out for snakes,” he said as he came closer. He looked inside the car, then said, “Damn, whatcha know? There is a snake in there!” He started to reach into the car.

“Don’t!” I warned. “It could be poisonous.”

“Him? Naw,” he said, not taking his eyes off the reptile. “He’s a little ol’ gopher snake.”

Before I could stop him, Enrique had moved like lightning to grab the snake behind the head. He pulled it from the car and held it out, away from his body. The “little ol’ gopher snake” was over two feet long and mad, if all that hissing meant what I thought it did.

“Can I keep him?” Enrique asked.

“I wish I could give you a simple ‘yes,’” I said, watching a traffic cop on a motorcycle make his way toward us. “But the snake is probably going to jail for a while.”

“Lousy thing to do on Christmas,” he said. “Even to a snake.”

WE WERE A LITTLE late picking Steven up for dinner, given all the hullabaloo which followed my close encounter of the serpentine kind. Frank asked me if I wanted to just stay home, but by then I had gone from scared to angry, and I was determined not to let Thanatos spoil my Christmas the way he had spoiled the snake’s.

At first, the snake was the talk of the dinner gathering. Steven theorized that the warmth from the car heater might have made the reptile restless.

Jack recalled the story of Cassandra – that she and her brother were left in a temple one night, and when her parents looked in on them the next morning, the children were entwined with snakes, which flicked their tongues into the children’s ears. “That’s what enabled Cassandra and her brother to tell the future.”

“A lot of good it did Cassandra,” I said.

“Disgusting!” Mrs. Pastorini made a face, and then waved a hand as if to ward off a bad odor. “Snakes licking children’s ears! It’s not good to talk of such things on Christmas.”

“You’re right,” Guy said. “No more talk of sadness and danger and worry.” Guy nodded slightly toward Steven, who was looking a little pale. Steven didn’t notice the subtle gesture, but the rest of us caught the hint. Throughout the rest of the evening, a concerted effort was made to distract Steven from his grief.

You wouldn’t think that we could stuff ourselves two nights in a row, but we did. It was after ten o’clock when we finally got home. Frank lit a fire and asked me to stay up with him for a while. We sat on the floor, on the big rug in front of the fireplace. I reached behind the couch and pulled out the package with his sweatpants in them; he opened it and thanked me. He moved over closer to me. He put his arms around me, gently pulling me between his thighs, my back against his chest, then handed me a neatly wrapped, small box. I started crying.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you going to open it?”

“I give you sweatpants, and you give me this?”

“It’s not as big a package, I admit, but…”

“Very funny. You know what I mean.”

“Open it. I don’t believe in gift-giving as a competitive sport.”

I didn’t say or do anything.

“Open it.” He said this gently, kissing my neck. Frank has learned that kissing my neck gives him a big advantage in the persuasion department.

I tried to open the package with shaking fingers, fumbling with the wrapping until I gave up and ripped the damned paper to pieces.

Frank laughed and said, “Well, I guess that won’t get pressed into the family Bible.”

I opened the small velvet case. Two sapphires and a diamond twinkled back at me. I shut the case and started crying again.

He put his hands around mine and opened it again, took the ring out of the box, and put it on my left ring finger.

“Have I asked you lately if you’d marry me?”

“We’ll check our files. What was the name again?”

I got a bite on the earlobe for that one.

“Yes, I will marry you. Will you marry me?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

We fell asleep on the rug in front of the fire, moving to the bed after waking up in a cold room with cricks in our backs and necks, but this is a small price to pay for true romance, which is generally harder to come by than square eggs.