A Home for Christmas

Renee Pryor placed the star at the top of the tree just so, then looked down at the smiling face of her daughter.

As always, Brianna was beaming back at her mother with her eyes wide, the brown eyes sparkling with life and intelligence.

Even though she had just turned 4, Renee was considering starting Brianna in kindergarten in the fall, because the girl was already reading and already knew her numbers. Renee felt that holding her daughter back a full year until she was legally old enough would be detrimental to her development.

"You know what the star means don't you, sweetheart?" Renee said.

"Of course, Mommy," Brianna said. "It was the star that led the wise men to baby Jesus."

"That's right, honey," Renee said, trying but failing to hold back the tears. "And they brought baby Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gifts..."

And she couldn't go on. Christmas was exactly one week away, and unless a miracle occurred, there would be no gifts for Renee and Brianna this year.

Renee looked at the scrawny tree, barely three feet tall, which sat on a small table. She really hadn't wanted to get a tree, hadn't wanted to put up any Christmas decorations at all. But Brianna had begged and begged until Renee had finally relented.

She'd found the smallest tree she could, because they really didn't have room for anything bigger, and she'd bought a few ornaments, some things to put up around the tree and a small manger scene. Even though she wasn't in the holiday spirit, Renee had done it for her daughter.

Brianna saw her mother's tears, and for at least the thousandth time in the previous weeks, reached up to give Renee a hug that told her everything was going to be all right, that things would work out and that Santa Claus would come, just as he did every year.

Renee finally sat down on the small sofa with Brianna in her lap, and looked around at the tiny trailer they called home.

She should be thankful she had that much, Renee knew. Many of her friends and neighbors there in Waveland were still living in tents, as she and Brianna had for two months after Hurricane Katrina had blown their lives to pieces.

Renee knew she should be thankful, too, for her and her daughter's lives. Unlike many of her friends – unlike her beloved Uncle Martin – she had heeded the warnings that said this storm would be one for the ages.

She and Brianna had packed up everything her beat-up Volvo could carry and they had fled north at the first light of dawn on Sunday, the day before the storm's landfall. By the time they had found some place that had a vacant room to stay, they were at Batesville, just 65 miles from Memphis.

That awful Monday, she could only imagine how bad it was on the Gulf Coast, because it was bad enough in north Mississippi, some 300 miles inland. The motel where they were staying had lost power amid the 65 mile per hour winds that Katrina still had even that far from open water.

But nothing could have prepared her for what she found when she finally made it home a week after the storm, after she had run out of money and was forced to vacate her motel room.

It was a wonder she'd even made it that far. She used her last 20 dollars getting seven gallons of gas at a station south of Jackson, and she'd had to wait in line three hours to get that.

She got as far as the railroad tracks in Waveland, still 10 blocks from her house, when she couldn't get any further because all the streets and roads were still impassible.

At first, she wasn't sure where she was, because, honestly, the area where she had lived looked like an atomic bomb had been dropped on the area. But when she finally figured out that, yes, that was the spot where her house had been, Renee had just dropped to her knees in disbelief and despair.

Her little house, the one she'd worked so hard to get the down payment on, the one she'd made into a home for herself and her daughter, had been reduced to splinters, her possessions scattered in every direction.

She would eventually find a few of her tattered belongings, a mattress here, a table there, some clothes, but for the most part it was as if her whole life up to that moment had been erased.

Worse was to come. She lost count of the number of school friends and co-workers who were dead or missing, then she got word from her aunt that her uncle had been found dead in his home in Biloxi.

Her Uncle Martin and Aunt Patricia had practically raised her after her father had abandoned her and her mother when Renee was a child. Her mother had worked nights, and when she wasn't working, she was drinking, and that had caught up with her one night when Renee was 18.

Her mom had been out drinking, gotten up on I-10 to come home and had a wreck. She'd lived for three days, but her injuries were too severe and she'd died.

Unlike a lot of families in that part of the country, hers was a small family. Her father's people had been from upstate somewhere, she wasn't sure where, and she'd never had much interest in them anyway, nor had they expressed much desire to have a relationship with her.

Her mom just had her one brother, Martin. Renee herself had been an only child, so when her mom died, her aunt and uncle and her two cousins were the only family she had left.

Renee had always turned to them for advice, and they had usually been right, even when she ignored them, as she did when she married Danny Pryor. He was from Pascagoula, he worked in the shipyard there, and they had met at a nightclub.

Danny had swept Renee off her feet, literally. He was good-looking, always seemed to have a lot of cash, had a garrulous personality, and before long they were seeing a lot of each other.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, that she came up pregnant after they'd been dating for six months. Renee had gotten around a good bit in high school, so she'd let Danny fuck her pretty early in their relationship. They were partying a lot, and apparently she had gotten lazy about her birth control pills.

Her aunt and uncle had sized up Danny and they hadn't liked what they saw, and they urged Renee not to marry him. But she wanted her baby and she wanted her baby to have a father, so they had gotten married.

Problem was, they were both 20 years-old, but while Renee was ready to take on the responsibilities of motherhood, Danny was in no way prepared for the responsibilities of marriage, let alone fatherhood.

He still wanted to go out clubbing with his buddies and chase women, still wanted his booze, his pot and his porn. And, not long after Brianna was born, she discovered Danny was into harder drugs. She'd stumbled on his stash of crystal meth, which explained his increasingly wild mood swings.

She'd given him an ultimatum: her or drugs, and she was stunned when he left her for drugs. It turned out to be a blessing.

The divorce had been painful, and Danny had harassed her right up to the time he was sent off to Parchman for his part in a drug deal gone bad, which left a dealer dead in the parking lot of a Gulfport strip joint.

Renee had stubbornly worked to build a life for herself and Brianna. She'd gotten a nice-paying job at the casino in Bay St. Louis as a waitress, made some new friends, gotten involved with a church and had saved the money to buy a little house in a quiet neighborhood six blocks from the beach.

She had been in the house not quite a year when Katrina came through.

Renee had recalled all the times her uncle had been right in his advice, so when he told her, on the Saturday night before the storm, that she needed to leave, she left.

Her uncle had also sent her aunt off to stay with one of their sons in Meridian, but he had stayed behind. He was a ham radio buff, and he'd felt like he had a duty to stay and provide communications.

He'd been at his station, operating on generator power, when the storm surge wrecked his house. A wall had fallen in on him, crushing him.

Renee had been devastated by his death, but she hadn't had much time to dwell on it. There was so much to do. She had to try to piece together what she could of her homeowner's insurance, had to go through all the red tape to get state and federal disaster assistance, and, of course, she had to live day to day.

That wasn't as easy as it sounds. She had no shelter, no food, no money, no job, there was no running water, no electricity, no nothing.

She had thought long and hard about moving into an apartment, perhaps moving away from the Coast. But she quickly discarded that idea. This was her home, the only place she knew, and she was worried that if she abandoned her property and wasn't there to stay on top of the insurance adjusters, she'd never get a worthwhile settlement, wouldn't get near what it was worth.

So she had decided to stay, both for herself, and for the older people in the neighborhood who needed a helping hand.

Her church had donated a tent and a pair of sleeping bags, and she had managed to scrounge around for some clothes. She and Brianna had lived on MREs for several weeks until she could acquire the means to feed herself – a cooler, a camp stove, a small grill and food stamps so she could buy groceries.

Together, they had gotten through the month of September and into October, while she worked on getting an insurance settlement and worked on getting their lives back in some semblance of order.

Her patience had finally been rewarded just after Thanksgiving, when FEMA finally came through with a trailer for temporary shelter. It was little more than a large recreational vehicle, but it gave her a solid roof over her head, gave her some place to shower, an operational toilet and a small kitchen area.

She hooked up the trailer to the power box, which was back in operation, and a hose to the water main, and she was as set up as one could expect in such a situation.

In the meantime, Renee realized that she needed a job, and it didn't look like the casino was going to reopen any time soon, so she'd gotten work at a convenience store.

Just having a job was a big help to her state of mind, but it had meant she had to find a new day care for Brianna, and those weren't cheap – if you could find one.

So between paying for day care, buying groceries and gasoline, and getting the utilities hooked up in her trailer, Renee didn't have much money. And just the day before, she'd gotten a notice from her mortgage company that she was going to have to resume paying her house note, beginning with the January payment.

Taking all of that into consideration, Renee knew there wasn't going to be any money left over for Christmas gifts.

Her job also came with another set of problems: guys coming into the store and hitting on her. When she'd been a teenager, she'd loved the attention of boys, and it's not surprising that she got the undivided attention of just about all the males at Bay High, students and teachers.

Renee Thomas, her name before she married, was a tall, brown-eyed beauty with a cascading mane of naturally curly honey blonde hair. Motherhood had added just a trace of padding around her hips, but she still had a wondrous body, complete with a succulent pair of 36Cs, a perky butt and long tapered legs that made guys drool.

Now, however, at age 24, she was tired of being looked at like meat on the hoof by all the transients who had flocked to the area looking for construction work, or from the telephone linemen and utility workers from out of state who were there to get the infrastructure rebuilt.

She had been asked out more times in the past six weeks than she had in the previous year, but most of the guys she saw come through the store repelled her. They reminded her too much of Danny.

But there were a couple of exceptions, and one of these was Walt Freeman. Renee was never sure quite what it was about him – and for a long time, she didn't even know his name – but she definitely felt something each time he came in the store, and that was just about every day.

For one thing, he was older, probably in his early 40s, but he was very handsome in a mature way. His brownish hair was streaked with silver, but it just made him look sexier in her eyes. He wasn't real big, probably 5-9, but he looked solid.

But what impressed Renee about Walt was his appearance. He was a working man, a construction worker of some kind, but he always looked and smelled fresh. His clothes were clean and well kept, he was well groomed, and, most importantly, he was about the only regular who didn't hit on her. He was just always very polite, always ready with a smile.

He'd come in every weekday and buy the morning paper, coffee and a cinnamon roll, then sit at one of the booths to read the paper and have his little breakfast.

She wasn't sure where he was from, but from his accent, she guessed he was from some place up north, the Midwest probably. During her time at the casino, Renee had gotten pretty good at guessing where people were from by their accents. The casino drew people from all over the place, and it had gotten to be a game to her.

Renee found herself wondering about him, what it was that had brought him there, and as she sat in her tiny trailer weeping about Christmas, she suddenly found herself thinking about him.

That got Renee to thinking. What was he going to do for Christmas? Would he go back to his home for the holidays? Would he be alone? Maybe...

But, no, she decided he probably had a wife or a girlfriend somewhere, and he'd undoubtedly spend Christmas there. A man like that wouldn't be interested in someone like her.

Still, the next morning, when Walt came in at 7:30 for his daily visit, she gave him a little wider smile than usual, which was saying a lot, because Renee always had a big smile for everyone, even the leeches that kept hitting on her.

Walt couldn't help casting a glance at the girl behind the counter as he ate his roll, sipped his coffee and digested the daily news. Man, was she ever gorgeous, and she seemed to have a great personality. What he could do with that, he thought.

Then he shook his head with a bemused smile. A girl of her age, who was that good-looking, probably had boyfriends all over the Coast, and wouldn't be the least bit interested in an old fart like him.

He went back to his paper, looking over the previous day's NFL scores, and shook his head in disgust. The damned Lions were hopeless, he decided. They'd lost again, they'd already fired their coach and they were headed for yet another dismal season.

Ah well, time to go to work. So he folded his newspaper, finished his coffee and headed out the door, but not before casting a backward glance at Renee. Some kind of fine, that one, he thought. Then he put her out of his mind as he climbed into his pickup and headed for work.

Walt Freeman was a carpenter by trade, a framer, and he was a good one. He'd been between jobs back in his hometown in southern Michigan when Katrina came, and after hearing so much about the destruction on the Gulf Coast, he'd decided to go down and help.

His motives weren't entirely altruistic. He knew construction companies would pay top dollar in such a situation, especially someone with his ability and his references, and he knew work would be plentiful.

He hadn't been prepared, however, for the scope of the devastation, wasn't prepared for the suffocating heat that enveloped the area in the weeks after the storm. But he'd toughed it out, and now that December was here, he was enjoying the mild weather that is the hallmark of winter in the Deep South.

Still, he was a little melancholy at the moment. Christmas was less than a week away, and he was going to be spending it alone.

Back home, he would usually spend the holiday with his folks, enjoying opening presents with his brothers and sisters and their children, then after Christmas dinner, he'd go visit his ex-wife and his two sons, and exchange presents with them.

The first Christmas he'd visited them after she'd remarried had been awkward, but he liked her husband and they all got along well enough to enjoy the holiday without rancor.

Walt knew, at some level, that he still loved her and maybe she still loved him, but she was happy with her new husband, and she deserved to be happy after the years of hell he'd dragged her through with his drinking.

Six years earlier, after 15 years of marriage, she'd taken the boys and left him when he came home drunk one time too many. It had taken him another year before he decided to get help, and by the time he got out of rehab, she'd moved on with her life.

Walt had dated around some, but nothing had come of any of those relationships. He always moved on to the next job, leaving some broken hearts behind. But he was a little afraid of commitment after his experience with marriage, so he'd poured himself into finding work wherever he could, and that took him all over the Midwest.

At the moment, he and the crew he was working with were rebuilding a large apartment complex in Bay St. Louis, and there wasn't going to be time for him to take off to go home. He'd been getting packages of gifts from home, so he would have some Christmas, but he was down about the thought of opening presents alone in the motel room where he was staying.

Walt was never sure exactly why he decided to have lunch at the convenience store that Thursday, three days before Christmas, instead of Burger King or Wendy's or some other fast food place. Maybe he just wanted to see Renee, who was on his mind a lot lately.

Over the previous few days, he'd sensed that something wasn't quite right, that behind her smile she was in a deep funk. And, the previous day, she'd asked him his name and asked where he was spending Christmas. Odd.

The store wasn't too crowded, and he'd ordered a two-piece dinner box of fried chicken for lunch from the store's deli. As he got to the counter, he noticed that Renee wasn't working, as he knew she usually did. But he shrugged it off, paid for his meal and sat down at a booth.

Just then, the door to the women's restroom opened, and Renee came out, and it looked like she'd been crying. She sat down heavily at the booth next to his and just stared out the window.

"Are you all right?" Walt said hesitantly.

"Um, y-yeah, I'm OK," Renee answered wearily.

"You don't look OK," Walt said. "You want to tell me about it?"

Renee wasn't sure why, but she looked at Walt's sky-blue eyes, saw the sincerity, the genuine concern, and moved to sit across from him.

"I don't know why I'm telling you this," she began. "But... It's my daughter. She's expecting a visit from Santa Claus, and I haven't got the heart to tell her that Santa's not going to come this year. I mean, she's got a couple of wrapped presents from my aunt, and I've managed to get a her a couple of things, but she's got this idea that Santa's going to bring all these wonderful things, and I just can't afford it. What with the storm and everything, I don't have it to spare."

Walt listened as Renee told her about her uncle, about losing her job at the casino thanks to the hurricane, about how she'd lost several of her best friends, and really didn't have anyone to exchange gifts with.

"I mean, all I have is this little FEMA trailer, and that's not home," Renee said, finally. "I want a home again, and that's... not going to... happen."

Renee tried but failed to stem the tears that began to flow again. But she quickly dried her eyes and got ready to go back to work. She really shouldn't have given this stranger her sob story. He's probably heard them all, she decided.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have laid all this on you," Renee said. "I don't want you to think I'm begging. We'll make the best of it, and I'm sure Brianna will understand. She's very smart, and very wise for a 4-year-old. It's just that she's my life, and I want to make her happy. Anyway, thanks for being a sounding board. I do feel better already."