Remembering Christmas by Drew Ferguson Page A

consigned to the backseat so that the reunited lovers, having been separated by an interminable seven days, could hold hands and rekindle the flame.
    James pulled into his mother’s driveway and sat in the heated car, turning up the volume and wallowing in self-pity and the sweet music of Jason’s guitar. The house was dark except for the porch lamp and the brightly lit corner window on the second story, the bedroom that had been his sanctuary throughout his childhood. The room where, one rainy November afternoon, his mother and sister having gone to Charleston for an Ice Capades matinee, he and Roy, both just thirteen, had wrestled on his narrow mattress, their pants twisted around their ankles, grinding and moaning, caught unawares by a strange and remarkable pleasure. The same room where, many years later, on that first Thanksgiving after moving to New York, he had explained to Roy he wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas, that he was going to Germany with his friend Ernst.
    Roy’s words still stung as if they had spoken only an hour ago.
    â€œI’d change if I thought that would make you love me again.”
    Only now it was someone else’s voice he recalled, from a different time and a different world, but laced with the same sad longing.
    I wanted to tell you what I did so you would know from the beginning, just in case you might think you could like me.
    It was after two when he finally poured a nightcap and settled into an easy chair, staring at his cell phone and resisting the temptation to call Pennsylvania under the pretense of thanking the Prevics for their hospitality. Good God, Adele, he chuckled, appalled by the huge, plastic pine tree that seemed to swallow an entire corner of the living room and remembering the seven-foot, fresh-cut blue spruces that had graced the house in his childhood, magnificent in memory, blazing with cheerful, enamel lights, branches bowed with bright glass ornaments and draped with silver tinsel. And the model railroad platform, with its trestle bridges and papier-mâché tunnels . . . Damn! he thought, jumping up from the chair, his knees wobbly, stricken by divine inspiration.
    Adele was a hoarder; it was inconceivable any blessed artifacts would have been tossed in the trash. Downstairs in the basement, in storage boxes, that’s where he would find what he was looking for. He carefully made his way down the steps, conceding he was slightly inebriated. Behind an old headboard and a cardboard wardrobe crammed with mothballed overcoats, he discovered three large boxes marked XMAS in bold black letters. The first box was stuffed with the dried and cracked wires of ancient Christmas lights and a set of old, tissue-wrapped, five-anddime Nativity figures that hadn’t seen the light of day in many years—a shepherd missing an arm, a headless magi, the Baby Jesus without a left hand. The treasure he was seeking was in the second carton: a Lionel locomotive, three Pennsylvania Railroad Vista Dome Passenger Cars with intricate skylights and the silhouettes of the passengers painted on the windows, and the matching baggage car, all in their original boxes.
    The plan was brilliant, completely innocent seeming, nothing more than a kind gesture to thank a pair of model railroaders for a memorable holiday in their lovely home. He would take the train to Federal Express in the morning and ship it to Kay’s Kozy Korner, then wait for Jason to write a short thank-you, maybe even call. He applauded himself for his ingenuity, the subtlety of his maneuver, for encouraging the boy’s interest without making any commitment of reciprocation. His heart fluttered when he opened his laptop to search for the restaurant’s address and found an unexpected message in his mailbox, a short note from Jason, wishing him a Happy New Year and saying he hoped he could call when he arrived in New York next summer. Three photos were attached. One was Jason’s sweet