A Christmas Sonata by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen [Paulsen, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80427-3
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

Each time Matthew would salute and pretend to write down what I said on a piece of paper with a pencil, but I saw that he was just making marks. Because of the medicine he had to take, he didn’t know letters any better than I did, except that he made some A’s that looked pretty good.

And finally, after lunch, I came in to get orders and Matthew’s eyes were closed and he was asleep, and Ben said he could not play anymore until the next day because it took him down so. I couldn’t see that he was down, but that’s what Ben said, it took him down so.

The rest of that day I sat in the store and watched people come in and go out and ran around the aisles without knocking anything down and played under the tree until I noticed that there weren’t any packages under it. We had brought some presents for Marilyn and Ben and Matthew and even those weren’t under the tree and I asked Ben about it.

“Santa puts them there.” He was cutting meat with a slicer that he had to turn by hand and he stopped to look at me. “He puts all the presents there on Christmas Eve.”

“Even ours? That we brought?”

He nodded. “All of them.”

“But there isn’t a Santa Claus.”

“Of course there is.”

“But I saw. I saw Mr. Henderson. And he doesn’t live at the North Pole and he doesn’t have a sled or reindeer and hates me, so there isn’t a Santa Claus.”

“We’ll see,” Ben said, smiling, only when grown-ups said that it was the same as saying nothing. Or at least it was when Mother said it. “We’ll see” meant the same as “nothing.”

But Ben stopped cutting meat then and gave me a bottle of 7Up, which I took to the corner by the tree to sit and drink. In the summer I had seen a plane making smoke all over the sky, and I ran in to get Mother, and she said it was a smoke writer writing the name of 7Up to make people buy it.

I watched it until the plane was all done and gone and all the smoke had blown away and saw the 7 and the U and the P and knew what they were, letters across the sky, and the same letters were on the green bottle with the girl diving and the bubbles.

I thought the green was the prettiest green in the world because you could see through it, hold it up and see through it, and I sat in the corner and looked at things through the bottle. Ben and the tree and the stove and the store and people who came to buy things from the store—looked at them all through the green bottle even after the 7Up was gone, until it was time for dinner.

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