Rachel Cohn - The Twelve Days of Dash and Lily

“Clearly we have to do something.”

“Yes, but what? It really feels like it would be a betrayal if I went out and bought a tree.”

I thought about it for a moment, and something came to me.

“But what if there’s a loophole?” I asked.

Langston cocked his head, looked at me. “I’m listening.”

“What if I got her the tree? As a present. Part of my Christmas present to her. She doesn’t know that I know about your family tradition. I could just bluster and bluff my way into it.”

Langston didn’t want to like the idea, because it would mean liking me, at least for a minute. But his eyes kicked in with a gleam that, for a moment, countered his doubt.

“We could tell her it’s for the twelve days of Christmas,” he said. “To celebrate the kickoff.”

“Don’t the twelve days of Christmas come after Christmas?”

Langston brushed this away. “Technicality.”

I wasn’t sure it was that simple, but it was worth a shot.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bring the tree. You act surprised. This conversation never happened. Right?”

“Right.” Our pastries arrived and we dug in. About seventy seconds later, we were done. Langston reached for his wallet – I figured to pay the bill. But then he was trying to slide a few twenties my way.

“I don’t want your filthy lucre!” I exclaimed. Perhaps too loudly for a restaurant of such quotidian pain.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll take care of it,” I translated, sliding his money back to him.

“But you do understand – it has to be a nice tree. The best tree.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, and then employed a sentence that has been the coin and currency of New York since the days of yore: “I know a guy.”

It was nearly impossible for New Yorkers to get to trees, so every December, the trees came to the New Yorkers. Bodegas that were normally fronted by buckets of flowers were suddenly overrun by groves of leaning pines. Empty lots were planted with rootless trees; some establishments stayed open until the wee hours of the morning, just in case two a.m. was the time you were struck with the need to find the Xmas to mark your spot.

Some of these pop-up firriers were manned by guys who looked like they’d taken a break from drug dealing to try another kind of needle exchange. Others were staffed by guys in flannel who looked like it was the first time they’d ever left upstate and, gosh, was it big in the big city! Often they were helped out by students in need of the most temporary of temporary jobs. This year, one of those students was my best friend, Boomer.

There was, to be sure, a learning curve for him once he started this employment. Too many viewings of A Charlie Brown Christmas had led him to believe that it was the most wan and wayward of shrubs that was the most desirable one, because tending to it was much more in the Christmas spirit than bringing home a self-sufficient, virulent pine. He also thought Christmas trees could be replanted once Christmas was over. That was a hard conversation to have.

Luckily, what Boomer lacked in clarity he made up for in sincerity, so the stand he was working at, on Twenty-Second Street, had become word-of-mouth popular, with Boomer as the foremost tree elf. I think this recognition was enough to make him happy he’d forsaken boarding school in his senior year to be in Manhattan. He’d already helped me pick out trees for my mother’s and my father’s apartments. (My mother got the much nicer tree.) I was sure he’d love the assignment of picking out the best tree for Lily. And yet I was hesitant as I got closer. Not because of Boomer . . . but because of Sofia.

Along with Boomer’s jumping off board his boarding school, the new school year had brought a few surprises with it. Somewhat surprising was that my ex-girlfriend Sofia’s family had moved back to New York after swearing they’d never leave Barcelona again. Not at all surprising was the fact that while I was happy to see her, it was not in a my-ex-is-back-and-there’s-gonna-be-trouble way – we’d pretty much sorted that out the last time she’d visited. But it was SUPER SURPRISING when she started hanging out with Boomer . . . and hanging out with Boomer some more . . . and hanging out with him even more, so that before I could even wrap my head around the possibility, they were a thing. This was, in my mind, like taking the most expensive, finest cheese in the world and then melting it on a burger. I loved them both, in different ways, and seeing them together made my head hurt.

The last thing I wanted was to pop by Boomer’s workplace and find that Sofia was stopping by at the same time, so they could radiate their dating vibes throughout the greater metropolitan area. They were in their honeymoon period, and that made it awkward for those of us who’d left the honeymoon behind and had entered the part of the relationship where the moon waxes and wanes.

So it was with some relief that I found Boomer not with Sofia but with a family of seven, or eight, or nine – it was hard to tell, since the kids were running around so fast.

“ This is the tree that was meant just for you,” he was telling the parents, as if he were some amazing tree whisperer and this tree had told him itself that their dining room was where it had always wanted to be.

“It’s so big,” the mom said. Probably imagining the pine-needle fallout all over her floor.

“It’s a big-hearted tree, yes,” Boomer replied. “But that’s why you’re feeling such a connection to it.”

“It’s strange,” the dad said, “because I really am.”

The sale was completed. As he was swiping their credit card, Boomer spotted me and waved me over. I waited until the family was gone, mostly because I was afraid of stepping on one of the children.

“Man, you really got them pining,” I observed once I got to him.

Boomer looked confused. “Is that a Chris Pine reference? He is a handsome man, for sure, but I don’t think any of them looked like him.”

“Pine. Like tree.”

“Oh! Like Chris Pine playing a tree! That would be cool. He’s already so wooden! But not in a bad way!”

To Boomer, this thought process didn’t seem circuitous at all. Which was partly why I wondered how someone as direct as Sofia could be spending so much time with him.

“I need a tree for Lily. A really special tree.”

“You’re getting Lily a tree?”

“Yup. As a present.”

“I love that! Where are you getting it?”

“I was thinking here?”

“Oh yeah! Good idea!”

He started to look around, and as he did, he muttered something that sounded suspiciously like Oscar Oscar Oscar.

“Is Oscar one of your co-workers?” I asked.

“Do trees count as co-workers? I mean, they are with me all day long . . . and we have the most interesting conversations . . .”

“Oscar is one of the trees?”

“He’s the perfect tree.”

“Do all the trees have names?”

“Only the ones that share them with me. I mean, you can’t just ask. That would be invasive.”

He shoved aside at least a dozen trees to get to Oscar. And when he pulled Oscar out, he – it – looked like any other tree to me.

“This is it?” I asked.

“Wait for it, wait for it . . .”

Boomer lugged the tree away from its cohorts, toward the curb. The tree was easily a few feet taller than he was, but he carried it like it was no heavier than a magic wand. With a strange delicacy, he set it into a tree stand, and as soon as it was settled in, something happened – Oscar opened his arms and beckoned me under the streetlamp light.

Boomer was right. This was the tree.