“No questions!” I dropped my voice low. “Just do as I demand!”
I could hear her chuckling as she went into the bedroom, and I put the last of the stuff into a paper sack before rolling the top edge up a bit. I didn’t want Tria to see what was in there before we got to where I wanted to take her.
“Got the blanket?” I yelled into the other room.
“I have one,” she replied.
“Cool!” I said. “Grab the pie and let’s go!”
“Go?” Tria asked. She came around the corner with the blanket from the bed rolled up under her arm. “Where are we going?”
“To have Thanksgiving dinner!” I told her. I gave her a big, goofy smile. “Duh!”
“Am I supposed to follow you blindly,” she asked, “or do I get to know where we are going first?”
“I was thinking I would show you where that tree is,” I said.
“What tree?” she asked.
“You know…you said once that you missed trees and shit,” I replied with a shrug. “I told you there was one in the neighborhood.”
“Trees and shit?” Tria giggled.
“You know—green shit.” I shrugged again.
Tria pressed her lips together, but the edges still curled up.
“So, there really is a tree?” Tria asked with a laugh. “I thought you just made it up!”
“There really is one,” I assured her. “It’s not that far.”
“How far?” She narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously.
“Well…um…close enough to take our Thanksgiving picnic there.”
“Thanksgiving picnic?” Tria looked down to the sack in my hands and then moved her eyes back up to mine before smiling broadly. “I think that sounds pretty nice.”
We gathered everything up and started the walk to the tree along my running path. It took a while to get there, but when we did arrive, I knew it was wo
rth it.
The tree wasn’t very green anymore and had about half of its golden-yellow leaves still on its branches while the other half lay all around the little patch of dirt and weeds surrounding the trunk. I had no idea what kind of tree it was, only that it was thin and usually not something you would consider pretty at all. But with the yellow leaves all around it, the scene didn’t look too bad.
The main thing was, I could see Tria smiling.
“It ain’t much,” I admitted.
“It’s perfect,” she told me. She spread out the blanket, and we both sat down on it. I pulled over the paper sack and held it close to me so she couldn’t see inside. First I took out two heavy paper plates, which I swiped from Feet First, and a couple of napkins. I handed them to Tria, and she laid them out in front of us. Then I started bringing out the actual food.
Buttered toast. Pretzels. Jelly beans. Popcorn.
Tria busted out laughing.
“Oh my God, Liam!” she said through snickers. “Did you make a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Yep,” I replied. I was grinning like a nut and glad my idea had worked. It’s not like I could have really cooked anything, but it still counted as tradition in a warped and cartoonish kind of way, and she didn’t have to worry about going to any trouble.
“The tree is the perfect match for this,” Tria said. “When we first walked up here, I thought it kind of looked like the tree from A Charlie Brown Christmas!”