The Merchant of Menace

crushed by Jane’s ultimatum. Her voice wavered and she was near tears, but she agreed to call and cancel the Lance King visit. It was only ten minutes later that Julie called Jane back, bubbling and cheerful. “It’s all right. He took it really well, Jane. Said he understood that a television crew was a big imposition at the last minute.”
    Jane was stunned. “You actually spoke to him and he said that?“
    “Yes, he was very considerate and understanding. I’m so relieved. I’m really sorry I acted without thinking and got us into this mess, but it’s all worked out now.”
    Jane hung up the phone, more alarmed than ever. This didn’t sound like Lance King at all. And Jane simply couldn’t buy the concept that he was secretly a considerate gentleman. But what could she do? He’d backed off, taken himself out of the picture, ceased to be a problem.
    Yeah, right, she told herself. In a pig’s eye.
    Jane spent the rest of the morning and half the afternoon getting out the Christmas decorations. The bottle-brush plastic tree was the first item. She hated having a plastic tree, but the real ones gave her hives. She dragged its assorted parts out of the big cardboard box in the basement, set it up, and then tackled the lights.
    Strings of Christmas lights were mysterious and frustrating things. Every January when she put them away, she wound each strand separately, put a rubber band around it, and wrapped it in tissue paper. And every year, when she got them back out, they were in a hopeless snarl. During the summer they must have been doing wicked and vaguely obscene things with each other. Either that or Max and Meow, her two cats, entertained themselves playing in the box—which was much more likely but less fun to contemplate.
    The next step was the tree ornaments. This always made her maudlin. Every ornament meant something dear to her. Among her favorites, there were the balls covered with glitter that Mike had decorated when he was a first-grader; the paper chain of rapidly disintegrating snowmen holding hands that Todd had cut out; the tiny china bride and groom her mother had sent the first year Jane was married; the miniature, fragile Swiss clock Shelley had given her; and the bird nest.
    That one really made her weepy. The year Jane’s husband had died, her honorary uncle Jim had declared that the children needed a real tree, Jane’s hives notwithstanding. He promised her he’d put it up and take it down and she’d never have to touch the thing. They bundled up the kids and Jim drove them to a tree farm where they found a tree with an abandoned bird nest. It was carefully woven and held together with mud. Uncle Jim had made an uncharacteristically sappy remark about Jane and her baby birds that reduced her to tears then—and every time she got the bird nest out since then.
    She so dearly loved the older man who had been a lifelong friend of her parents and had served as their substitute when she was widowed. Her father was with the State Department and had been helping to negotiate a treaty in a small African community that was unreachable by phone the week Steve died. But Uncle Jim, retired career army, second career Chicago cop, stiff as a poker and tough as nails, had been there for her.
    She wiped away her tears and finished putting up the ornaments, then moved on to setting up the little manger scene. The kids had loved to play with the scene when they were little. The lambs had lost their little ceramic ears, baby Jesus had a crayon mark on His arm, and one of the wise men’s camels had lost a leg years ago, which Jane had glued back a bit crookedly. The camel now stood in what looked like a drunken slouch with the wise man poised to fall off. The thatch on the roof of the manger had gradually disappeared in packing, unpacking, and being played with. But she’d never replace it with a respectable-looking new version.
    The nutcracker figures were lined up on the mantel—it was supposed to be bad luck to put them away, but Jane always did so anyway. She got out the punch bowl and Christmas cups, the felt tree skirt her mother-in-law Thelma had made when Jane had Mike. Jane had always taken this gesture to mean that Thelma had acknowledged (grudgingly) that, having given birth to the first Jeffry grandchild, Jane was finally part of the family.
    She filled the Santa bowl with candy canes, stuck the artificial wreath made of tiny foil packages on the refrigerator door, and set out the