Moment of the Deer

"You know, the chocolate disks covered with gold foil."

"We don't have those."

"You know, the ones made up like gold coins; they have them every Christmas."

"It's Christmas Eve. We sold out on those more than a week ago."

"I mean my son decided the family could come tomorrow after all at the last minute, and we have those for the grandchildren every year they visit. Well, might you know where I could—?"

"No, I don't," Nancy cut in, anxious to move the line along. "We sold out of those last week." She had, in fact, seen those a day or two before over at CVS, but there was no reason why she should be sending business over there. There was no reason why she should have to work on Christmas Eve at all. People could jolly well think ahead on their needs.

The man just sort of zoned out of her attention. Her gaze had been arrested by an elderly women with scraggly gray hair and in what looked like an overcoat over a nightgown and scruffy slippers wandering around in aisle two. When Nancy looked back across the cash register, the man looking for the chocolate coins was gone, to be replaced by a weary-looking young woman with a baby in her arms and a fat toddler pulling at her leg. The woman had put a can of infant formula on the conveyer belt and was rummaging around in her purse, saying she thought she had a store coupon for that. Her toddler had his chubby hand in a can of candy canes on the counter and had pulled one out.

"Should he be doing that?" Nancy asked sharply, an edge to her voice. The nerve of some people loading their fat kids up on candy, she thought. She really didn't approve of the store putting out things out there to tempt the brats anyway.

"Oh, sorry," the woman said. "Well, all right, Mikey," she went on to say to the toddler. "But just because it's Christmas."

"Excuse me," a rather dreamy, confused voice drifted into Nancy's hearing as she was finishing ringing the young woman up. "Can you tell me where the Tums are? I can't seem to find them, and my Ralph is—"

"Right over there on aisle three," Nancy said with a bit of exasperation in her voice to the old woman in the overcoat. "Right where they've always been," she muttered sotto voce as the elderly woman drifted away.

The shift from hell, Nancy thought. She was glad when this one would be over. She hadn't really had any plans for Christmas Eve, but no one should have to work an evening shift on this day.

At last the shift was over, but Nancy's irritation increased as she was driving home and found she had to detour around the main street between her work and her apartment because they had a drive-by Christmas lights display along that stretch of the road. She hadn't thought about that being there and had reached a point where she'd have to take a winding, rural road around the town or backtrack to get to the highway going through on the other side of the town.

She turned onto the rural road and sped up a little faster than she should to make up for the lost time the detour would cause.

She rounded a curve and went into shock as the headlights picked up a large deer standing still in the middle of the road. Deer and woman froze, panicked eyes latched onto panicked eyes. And, as the deer leaped in one direction, Nancy's car lurched in the other direction, and she went down into a ditch and up into a tree, the tail of car still on the apron of the road.

She sat there, dazed from having her head bounce off the side window. The hit wasn't hard enough to set off her airbag, but she saw stars and felt the ooze of blood at her temple.

She was bathed in the headlights of another car, and a man and woman, dressed in evening apparel, appeared at the side of the car, almost instantly, giving her very concerned looks as she rolled the window down.

"Are you all right?" the man asked?

"Are you hurt?" the woman chimed in.

"A deer. It was a deer," Nancy said, rather dumbly.

But right at that moment the beam from a strong flashlight appeared at the corner of the passenger side of Nancy's car, revealing that she'd gone off the edge of the road right next to a driveway.

"I heard the crash," a man was calling out. "Anyone hurt? Oh, that doesn't look too good. Here, let me help you up to the house and we'll see about that gash . . . and about your car. It'll have to be moved or there'll be another crash here."

"I'll stay with her car until a wrecker comes," the first man said.

"I'll go call the Mitchells on my cell phone and tell them we'll be late to the party," his wife called out as she started back to their car. "We'd better leave our headlights shining on her car until the wrecker gets here so anyone else coming around the curve can see it in time."

As the man whose driveway Nancy plowed across and who identified himself as Steve Brandon helped her up to his house, he was asking her if she was in pain anywhere else, but she said she didn't think so. "Still, we'd best call Doc Watson—they live a couple of driveways down—and ask him if he can come over and take a look at you. Do you have AAA?"

"Eh, no, no, I'm sorry, I don't," Nancy answered. She was still feeling a little woozy.

"Guess I'll call Joe Timberman then," Steve said. "He's got the Exxon station up on Maple. Maybe he can bring his truck over and take your car over there at least for tonight. When that's taken care of, I'll drive you home."

When they entered the house, Steve's wife was there, looking concerned and putting her arms around Nancy and helping her to a chair between the fireplace, where a fire was flickering, and a lighted Christmas tree. It was clear that Steve had been assembling toys for young children hopefully abed and at least pretending to be asleep in anticipation of Christmas morning.

"Oh, you can't drive me home. You're—" Nancy muttered.

"I was figuring I'd be up half the night getting this together anyway," Steve said with a laugh. "Another hour or two won't matter much."

"Here, dear," Steve's wife said as she returned from the kitchen. "Here is a mug of hot chocolate and a few Christmas cookies. I called Doc Watson. He was at his daughter's house, but he said he'd be over within a half hour. I'll go call Joe Timberman now."

"It looks worse than it is," Doc Watson said as he finished cleaning the gash on Nancy's temple. "A butterfly bandage should do for now. But maybe you should go into the hospital in the morning to get that checked out. I can meet you there and help you through the process, if you like."

Nancy was murmuring her thanks as she heard the sounds of activity out on the road. She stood and went to the window and saw that a wrecker had arrived and two men were hooking up the tail end of her car to a hoist. The couple in the evening apparel were still there, with the headlights of their car beamed on hers.

Movement caught Nancy's attention out of the corner of her eye, and she turned her gaze to where, bathed in moonlight and standing in a majestic stance in a clearing at the edge of the forest—and peering straight into her face—was a deer. Perhaps the same deer she'd already encountered.

They were both frozen there for a long moment, eyes latched onto eyes. Nancy's eyes teared up, though, in sudden recognition that something had touched her deeply inside on this Christmas Eve, and when she had cleared the haze of her vision, the deer had disappeared.