“Stacey Theresa Fortune, shuddup and eat your supper. Look, you’re spilling wine all over hell and creation.”

“No, Effie, I’m gonna —” Peggy starts.

“You aren’t gonna nothin’. Shut up and eat your supper. Both of you.”

“Mama, I deserve —”

“You deserve what? The right to wreck our last . . .” She stands up and grabs the salt shaker from its hiding place, six inches from Mossy’s untouched wine glass.

“She deserves to know the truth, Effie,” Peg says, an acidic undertone ebbing beneath the veneer of sincerity. The wall has not crumbled that much.

“Spit it out, Peggy. Just tell the truth and shame the Devil yourself for once!” I only realize that I’m almost yelling when Daktari starts to fuss.

“The truth, eh?” Peggy says softly, gently jiggling the kid back to sleep. “Maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Little shards of her crumbling wall of colours fly around her head like antagonizing shrapnel. I wince. I don’t have to take this. My voice is sharp, and tinged with rage. “Just tell me what the ever-lovin’ fuck —”

“E-nough.” Mama punctuates the word with a loud thump of her heavy hand on the table. “The next person who makes so much as a snide peep is getting grabbed by the scruff of the neck and biffed in a snowbank. Got that?”

Uncle Mossy looks dumbly up from his plate, puts down his fork, sniffs his shirt sleeve, and grins like a nut.

“Peep,” he whispers.

Mama swats him upside the head as she picks up his plate before he gets a chance to lick it clean like he usually does, and she marches to the sink.

“Who wants pie?” she barks.

Not me. My head is spinning like a top, but it still tips back effortlessly as I pour the last of the wine down my throat. I make a point of setting the glass down with more than a gentle clink. I shove my chair back and sashay to the living room. And by sashay I mean stagger.

I hear Peggy scoff, “Look at the other one. Drunk as a skunk.”

I’m just about to yell at her to go fuck herself when the world turns into a tilt-a-whirl. I close my eyes. The smell of cat-piss spruce tree swallows me, a million needles bury themselves in my skin, and my whole body is gripped by a heavy, claustrophobic panic. There’s a musical clatter of glass, a chorus of voices, and the steady drumming of footsteps down the hall. I open my eyes. All I can see is tree. And the brownish orange fibre of the living-room carpet. Torn wrapping paper on the pile of presents, all of which are for me. Because I was too broke, too sick, too full of excuses to get anyone anything. And then there’s that damn Dough Baby lying on the floor in front of me, its head cracked in two.

Mama resurrects the sideways tree. Uncle Mossy tugs at my arm until I’m sitting more or less upright, and starts picking up the hunks of shattered glass around me. Peggy stands at the living room entrance with Char’s baby on her hip, pretending to stifle her laughter as it quakes through her body. And before it completely subsides, she starts belting out her own favourite John Denver classic, “Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas),” replacing Daddy with Stacey.