The Writer opened the door to the room\nand set the leaf bag down. The girls bolted inside and dived on the\ntwo queen-size beds. The woman followed, unpeeled her backpack,\ncranked up the heat, and inspected the room. He’d booked the largest\none, a suite, with a kitchenette, couch, a huge television screen\nmounted on a wall. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI can’t wait to take a shower, a\nlong hot one,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was the first sentence she’d\ninitiated with him. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHow about we go to the store and get\nsome things, and then I’ll be on my way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOkay,\u201d she said. \u201c’Girls, we’re\ngoing to the store.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They girls burst into glee and\nscrambled off the beds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tinny Christmas music emanated from a\nspeaker mounted over the entrance to the store. Inside, a clerk, an\nelderly woman wearing angel wings and a halo stood behind the counter\nbarking out sales transactions and wishes of Merry Christmas<\/em>\nto a line of the finest weird-looking holiday-attired miscreants\nassembled south of the North Pole. The clerk was assisted by a young\nman wearing a Grinch costume. Grinch served up corndogs, nachos and\nUpton Sinclair nuggets and ran the Lotto tickets and overhead\ncigarette bin. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n It occurred to the Writer that not a\nsingle person in the store had driven a vehicle there because no\nvehicles were in the parking lot. How they got there and where they\nmight be going on Christmas Eve in an ice storm dumbfounded him. Who\nwere these people? He’d never seen them before but now they\nsurrounded him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before venturing into the aisles, the\nWriter huddled together with the woman and girls and rattled off the\ngame plan. He was making it up like a schoolboy drawing up a football\nplay on a sandlot field. Invariably those plays called for the bomb,\nthe long pass, the touchdown. They rarely worked. What always worked\nwere short passes to move the ball down the field. Nothing flashy.\nJust consistent attention to detail. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The play the Writer drew up went\nsomething like this: you each get one of the carry baskets and\nhave ten minutes to fill them with anything you want in the store\n(Mom gets final say, of course). Then you head back to the room and\ncelebrate Christmas Eve.<\/em> \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The girls looked at each other, eyes\nlike full blue moons, smiled, screamed, hugged. The woman brought\nover the baskets as the girls celebrated. She hadn’t said a word\nduring the play call. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou can only have as much as you can\ncarry,\u201d she said to the girls, \u201cbecause that’s all you need.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Writer heard the words. They\ndrilled into him. He picked up a basket, too. He couldn’t wait to get\nto it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Writer opened the door to the room and set the leaf bag down. The girls bolted inside and dived on the two queen-size beds. The woman followed, unpeeled her backpack, cranked up the heat, and inspected the room. He’d booked the largest one, a suite, with a kitchenette, couch, a huge television screen mounted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-meditations","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5589"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5592,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5589\/revisions\/5592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}