Chosen

the kind of horrible fascination usually reserved for gawking at car wrecks I watched Mom open the bakery box and reveal a small square one-layer white cake. The generic Happy Birthday was written in red, which matched the red poinsettias blobbed at each corner. Green icing trimmed the whole thing.
    "Doesn't it look good? Nice and Christmassy," Mom said as she tried to pick off the half-price sticker from the lid of the box. Then she froze and looked at me with overly wide eyes. "But you don't celebrate Christmas anymore, do you?"
    I found the fake smile I'd been using earlier and replanted it on my face. "We celebrate Yule, or Winter Solstice, which was two days ago."
    "I'll bet the campus is beautiful right now." Grandma smiled at me and patted my hand.
    "Why would the campus be beautiful?" Mom's brittle tone was back. "If they don't celebrate Christmas, why should they decorate Christmas trees?"
    Grandma beat me to the explanation. "Linda, Yule was celebrated a long time before Christmas. Ancient peoples have been decorating Christmas trees," she said the words with a slightly sarcastic intonation, "for thousands of years. It was Christians who adopted that tradition from Pagans, not the other way around. Actually, the church chose December twenty-fifth as the date of Jesus' birth to coincide with Yule celebrations. If you'll remember, the whole time you were growing up we rolled pinecones in peanut butter, strung apples and popcorn and cranberries together, and decorated an outside tree that I always called our Yule tree, along with our inside Christmas tree." Grandma smiled a kinda sad, kinda confused smile at her daughter before turning back to me. "So did you decorate the trees on campus?"
    I nodded. "Yeah, they look amazing, and the birds and squirrels are going totally nuts, too."
    "Well, why don't you open your presents, then we can have cake and coffee?" My mom said, acting like Grandma and I had never spoken.
    Grandma brightened. "Yes, I've been looking forward to giving you these for a month now." She bent and withdrew two presents from under her side of the table. One was big and tented with brightly colored (and definitely not Christmas) wrapping paper. The other was book-sized and covered in cream-colored tissue paper like you'd get from a chic boutique. "Open this one first." Grandma pushed the tented present to me and I eagerly unwrapped it to find the magic of my childhood underneath.
    "Oh, Grandma! Thank you so much!" I pressed my face into the brightly blooming lavender plant she'd potted in a purple clay pot and inhaled. The aroma of the wonderful herb brought visions of lazy summer days and picnics with Grandma. "It's perfect," I said.
    "I had to rush grow it in the hothouse so that it would be blooming for you. Oh, and you'll need this." Grandma handed me a paper bag. "There's a grow light inside there and a mounting for it so that you can be sure it gets enough light without having to open your bedroom curtains and hurt your eyes."
    I grinned at her. "You think of everything." I glanced at my mom, and saw that she had the blank look on her face that I knew meant she wished she was someplace else. I wanted to ask her why she had bothered to come at all, but pain closed my throat, which surprised me. I had thought that I had grown up beyond her ability to hurt me. Seems the actual truth of being seventeen wasn't as old as I'd imagined.
    "Here, Zoeybird, I got you one other thing," Grandma said, handing me the tissue-paper-wrapped present. I could tell that she'd noticed Mom's stony silence and, as usual, she was trying to make up for her daughter's crappy parenting.
    I swallowed down the clog in my throat and unwrapped the present to reveal a leather-bound book that was obviously old as dirt. Then I noticed the title and I gasped. "Dracula! You got me an old copy of Dracula!"
    "Look at the copyright page, honey," Grandma said, eyes shining with delight.
    I turned to the publisher's page and could not believe what I saw. "Ohmygod! It's a first edition!"
    Grandma was laughing happily. "Turn a couple of pages."
    I did, and found Stoker's signature scrawled across the bottom of the title page and dated January, 1899.
    "It's a signed first edition! It must have cost a zillion dollars!" I threw my arms around Grandma and hugged her.
    "Actually, I found it in a very junky used book store that was going out of business. It was a steal. After all, it's only a first edition of Stoker's American