Unwrap My Heart

Capítulo 7

WILLY

The Sunday after the Christmas parade was always decorating day in the Arriaga household, so I woke up the next morning already knowing what I’d be doing all day.

And who I’d be doing it with.

During the walk home after the fireworks, which had been a lot less leisurely than the walk to town, my mother had invited Ruelle and Andrés over to help decorate the house for Christmas.

What I didn’t anticipate was my mother sending Rue out to help me with the outside decor while keeping Drés inside with her. But it made more sense due to ladders being involved. However, I’d mentally prepared myself for spending the day with a five-year-old shadow who never stopped talking, not for Ruelle Espinosa.

I already thought about her too often. I’d even caught myself driving a little too fast on the way home from work, wondering if I’d get to see her for a few minutes. All I could do was keep telling myself it was the novelty of having a new friendship after a few years of avoiding them by keeping on the move.

It couldn’t be anything more than that.

“Doesn’t this kind of take the fun out of it?” she asked, looking at the organized reels of Christmas lights I pulled out of the box. “I mean in the movies they’re always in a tangled knot.”

“My Dad hated doing the lights and the more carefully he put them away, the faster it was to put them up the next year.”

“I wish I’d gotten to meet him,” she said quietly. “Rosario loves to tell me stories about him.”

“I wish you had, too. He would have gotten a kick out of having Andrés around.”

And he would have liked Ruelle, too, as much as he’d liked Delores. My dad had been a laid-back kind of guy, who liked to joke around and have a good time. Going through Del’s loss with me had aged him a little, but he’d been strong and in good health. Losing him in June had been a totally unexpected blow.

“I’ve never done Christmas lights,” Ruelle said, drawing me back to the present. “I was going to hang some on our porch because the Blooms told me there were Christmas decorations in the basement, but I don’t know how.”

“You’ve never hung Christmas lights?”

“No. The Monday after Thanksgiving, I’d go do whatever I was doing that day and, when I got back, the house would be decorated.”

“Well, after today you’ll know how because you might have noticed, we have a lot of lights.”

It took longer than it should have because we spent almost as much time laughing at each other as we did hanging lights. Ruelle learned she had a slight fear of ladders, which she discovered by freezing at the top of the extension ladder. Her legs shaking made the ladder rattle, which made her laugh. I was laughing, too, which didn’t help, so it took forever to get her back down.

Then, because I was distracted, I didn’t check a long string of lights before hanging it along the roofline so it didn’t light up when I was done and plugged it in. When I cursed, she laughed even harder at me than I had at her.

The sun was going down by the time we finally got the lights strung and the wreath hung on the front door. Candy cane garland twisted up the mailbox post and the two main porch posts.

“I think we’re done for now,” I said, standing at the edge of the street to examine our handiwork.

“For now?”

“Oh, Ma always finds a few things to add.”

“How come you don’t just leave the lights up and not plug them in eleven months of the year?”