The Beginning of After

celebrated in her family, and she just loved it. Christmas music, all the TV specials, even eggnog. Toby and I got eight utilitarian gifts for Hanukkah—socks, sweaters, new parkas—and the good stuff on December 25. My dad was okay with that, and if Nana wasn’t, she never let on.
    When it came to the tree, Mom couldn’t stand the thought of one being grown just so it could be cut down and die slowly with pretty gifts beneath it, then put out on trash day. We planted our trees on New Year’s Day, and although I always thought it was ridiculous trying to dig a hole in the frozen ground every January 1, now I was so grateful we had.
    “That’s very sweet, thank you,” said Nana, but I couldn’t tell if she meant it. Mr. Mita put the tree down in the living room and after he left, with a plate of Nana’s cookies in his hands, Meg and I went into the garage to look for our Christmas decorations.
    “Do you have a tree at your house yet?” I asked.
    “Mom put up the fake one weeks ago. Which is a good thing, because now nobody even cares.”
    “What did she say when she called this morning?”
    “The usual. She wants me to come home. She swears my Dad’s leaving tonight, so we’ll see.”
    I scanned the shelves of the garage until I saw the two big red plastic bins labeled XMAS and pointed. Meg grabbed the stepladder and moved toward them.
    “Is she mad at you for not being there for . . . you know . . . her ?” I asked.
    Meg paused, then said simply, “Yes.” In a series of quick motions, she hopped up on the ladder, grabbed each XMAS box, and handed them down to me.
    Ironically, the first thing we saw when we opened the first bin was our electric menorah. When Toby was little he broke the nice ceramic one my parents had received as a wedding gift, and Mom went out and found the plug-in kind at half price during a post-holiday sale. During Hanukkah she kept it on the kitchen counter between the spice rack and the paper towels, and she and Nana had a fight about it every single year.
    I showed the menorah to Nana, who actually smiled a bit when she lifted it up, then placed it on a table by the Christmas tree.
    While Nana and Meg unpacked the rest of the bins, I took a break to check my email, which was something I did compulsively a little too often since David and I had started writing again.
    My in-box contained one new item: a picture message sent from a cell phone. I knew you weren’t supposed to open stuff like that if you didn’t know the source, but I couldn’t resist.
    First, the words i thought this might remind you of something.
    Then, a photo of a van parked alongside a road somewhere. It was an older model, with a small round bubble window near the back, painted with a purple and pink desert scene complete with howling coyote and cactus.
    I laughed out loud, and remembered.
    One painfully hot summer day years ago, Toby and I were sitting in a small patch of shade in our front yard, trying to come up with something to do. None of the other neighborhood kids were around because of the heat, but we’d spent the morning squabbling in the house and Mom had ordered us outside for a while. We were bored and grumpy and pretty much ready to kill each other when David suddenly appeared in our driveway.
    “Oh cool, you’re here,” he’d said. “My uncle is visiting and he’s going to put on a magic show, but I can’t find anyone. You guys wanna come down and watch?”
    Minutes later the three of us were sitting on the back steps of the Kaufmans’ house, the concrete blissfully cool against our legs, watching David’s uncle James do card tricks. He was David’s father’s brother, and everyone knew he was kind of a wandering soul. He’d dropped out of a PhD program and was taking magic lessons. But the thing we knew best was that he had this awesome vintage van with a bubble window, a mural of planets and stars airbrushed on the sides, which was then parked in the Kaufmans’ driveway. It served as a perfect backdrop for his act.
    Eventually Uncle James went back to school, got married, and moved to Virginia, but I always thought of him with that van and space scene behind him. Maybe David did too.
    The memory of Uncle James’s voice cutting through the humidity and the emptiness of our neighborhood that day, of giggling at his jokes and gaping at his “magic,” of the perfectly sweet lemonade Mrs. Kaufman served to us afterward, came back to me so sharply I had to put my hand