Making the Holidays Happy Again

“Okay, what’s up?” I sat on the bench with my back against the bricks at Joe’s Pub. “You’ve been pissed since last week.” My best friend and secret love of my life, Jimmy, glared but didn’t answer. We’d known each other for so long that I waited him out like usual. I crossed my pumped arms and sat back, smelling my sweat-soaked T-shirt in the AC blowing around us. The past summer in Seven Winds, once a gold rush town in California’s northern Sierra Nevada Mountains and now a tourist trap, had been brutal. A record number of days over one hundred degrees had turned a lot of the shop owners into snarling dogs. As the resident blacksmith, I took the heat as business as usual. So I was hot and sweaty? I was always hot and sweaty. The day I ain’t I’m either sick or dead. I figured Jimmy’s problem was more than the heat, though. He’d been acting funny lately. Like he had something caught in his craw but he couldn’t spit it out. Jimmy wasn’t looking at me, but down at his hands. They was long and thin, completely different from mine. I had a collection of burns and scratches, scars from the forge and the tools and all. His hands was pale white with a bunch of freckles that went with the freckles all over the rest of his body. When we was kids, the tiny red hairs on his arms stood out almost more than his carroty hair. The bright red had changed as he got older and was now more muted. Me? I’d stayed hairy brown all over. I tapped his hand with my blunt fingers. “Whatever it is, you know you can just spit it out. I’ll listen.” He stared at me, and I swear his green eyes got darker. He was making me uneasy. What the hell was wrong? “You ever look at your life, Butch, and ask yourself, ‘Is this all there is?’” He sighed. What the f**k? What had gotten into him? “Don’t give me that look. You’ve got to know what I’m talking about.” “Sure. But you know me. Something’s wrong, I make it right.” Takes me time but I figure out what to do eventually. “So, uh, what’s wrong with your life?” I wanted to make it a joke and laugh, but he was too damned serious. And Jimmy’s never this serious. “I mean, look at us. We work all day in our shops. We make good money. We got nothing to spend it on but ourselves. We go out drinking with the guys on the weekends. Or we go into the city to a game. Or we go fishing, camping, riding around.” He shook his head. “But in the end, what have we got?” “Fun. Friendship. I don’t know.” It wasn’t much of an answer. I knew where he was coming from. I figured it was because we was about to turn thirty after Christmas and it was time for us to grow up. I’d been thinking on it a lot lately. “Don’t you want something else, Butch? Something more? Something better?” He sounded desperate, like he was drowning and I wasn’t saving him. “Yeah, sure. I guess. I mean, I want a husband, a house, a dog, you know, stuff like we talked about when we was kids.” I’d had it mostly planned out. For one thing, I’d been saving my money. I was surprised Jimmy hadn’t already figured it out. He was usually two steps ahead of me in everything. “Okay, I gotta ask. What brought all of this on? What happened?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been sitting around thinking lately. And Mom’s been on me.” His mother, Hazel, is a character. She’s an old hippie with graying auburn hair and grass-green eyes. Her face is a road map of lines cuz she spends so much time outdoors. And she worries. She thinks we need her to run our lives. We mostly let her think that even though it’s not true. “She says she wants me to move out of the farmhouse.” Jimmy said it like it was a death sentence. “So? Isn’t that what you always wanted?” He shrugged, then nodded, reluctant-like. “I guess.” When we was little, we was next-door neighbors when Mom, me, Jimmy, and Hazel lived in town. After my mom died when I was a junior in high school, I sold the house, bought my uncle’s business, and moved into the cottage in back of the forge in Old Town. I’d been working part-time for my uncle, the blacksmith, since I was twelve. After I moved into his house, he retired and moved to Washington State. A few years later, Jimmy and Hazel moved from the old neighborhood into a farmhouse one of her relatives left her. Jimmy graduated high school and went to college. “Jimmy, you’ve always talked about living in your own place.” Once I thought me and him would get together, and, you know, live happily ever after. But then he became a doctor of chemistry and natural medicine. I never finished high school. “Yes, I know. You’re right. I’ve wanted to move out for a while now.” Jimmy sighed. “But this feels like her trying to push me out. I don’t like to be pushed.” Well, that was the truth. He was as stubborn and ass-headed as they came. The solution seemed pretty simple to me. He’s usually a straight line from A to B kinda guy. Jimmy’s real smart, and once he focuses, he’s like a bird dog on point. Not me. I get an idea for a design and like to run through all the side letters first before I connect A and B. Hazel calls it my artistic side. I don’t know. All’s I know is Jimmy usually gets from “What needs to be done?” to “Let’s do it this way” without breaking a sweat. “I don’t get the problem. You know what you want already.” He laughed. “I don’t want to be pushed by my mother.” I woulda sighed, but what was the point? He was Jimmy, and I’m Butch. We are what we are. I still didn’t get it, but he’d have to figure it out for himself. “So the Apple Festival is coming up, and I’m making some changes,” I said, moving on to another subject. “Yeah? What’s up? What’re you doing?” I told him I’d already put an ad in the state blacksmith association newsletter for another smith and now was looking to hire somebody to run the shop, set up a better website, and run a kids’ do-it-yourself craft table at the upcoming festivals. “I wanna make the shop more family friendly.” He looked at me weird. “I don’t get it, Butch. This isn’t like you.” He ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “You’re making me nervous. First my mother, now you. Why is everybody so hot to change suddenly?” “It’s like you said.” I hunkered down, putting my elbows on the table and spreading out my hands. “I took a look at my life. I figure if I don’t do something to get settled, it ain’t gonna just fall in my lap. The Big Three Oh is the first step to the rest of my life. If I don’t get my s**t together, nobody’s gonna hand my life to me. I may not know a lot, but I know it’s up to me to do it myself.” I shot him a frown. “And you know it, too.” He nodded and looked like dog meat. I may not have solved his problem of moving out or nothing, but maybe we was finally on the same page. Maybe. I was making my changes. He had to decide on his own life.