This Christmas (23 page)

As a demon. He was obviously trying to rattle me, though I had no idea why. “I’ve got to go.” Otherwise we would have a wreck.

“Okay. Say ‘hi’ to Mr. Perfect for me.” He signed off with a laugh.

“Pest,” I muttered, gunning through a yellow light.

We drove in silence for a moment.

“Maybe we should have invited him along,” Jason said.

I practically howled. “Over my dead body! Honestly, he acts as if my life is the staging ground for all his moods and antics. And I’ve about had it with his incessant needling.”

After a few moments I flicked my gaze over and noticed Jason staring at me as if I were some kind of monster.

“What?” I asked.

“I was talking about Ted.”

“Oh!” No wonder he was regarding me as if I had just grown a second head. “I thought you meant Isaac. That was Isaac on the phone.”

He nodded. “Maybe it would have done Ted some good to get out of the house and be with people.”

Wasn’t that sweet of him? Always thinking about other people. Even people who locked themselves in their rooms when he came for a visit.

We went to the National Gallery, but we didn’t really look at many paintings. It was early evening, but because of the holidays there was a rushed, closing-time atmosphere in the place. All the employees looked ready to abandon their framed charges and hit the malls to finish their shopping.

Jason and I just wandered around a few rooms, then headed for a coffee shop.

I was still in a bit of a funk. After lingering over two cups, Jason gave me a nudge. “Why is it I get the feeling that you don’t want to go home? Are you trying to hide me from your family?”

“Try the other way around. I can’t believe you would want to go back there!”

“What’s the matter?” He shrugged. “Your brother is having problems, so it’s understandable he’s upset. It’s an awful time of year to go through the kind of trouble he’s having.”

I frowned. “I know…but even my mom and dad…”

“They’re great!” Jason said.

“They weren’t at their best, believe me.”

“But I liked it that they weren’t hovering when we arrived.”

They not only weren’t hovering; they had forgotten we were coming.

“And the house looks great. I like old houses. So the tree is artificial. And smallish. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.” His Kenneth Coles gave me a gentle kick beneath the table. “You’re spoiled, you know that?”

Maybe I was. He seemed so glad to be in the bosom of my messed-up family, it made me a little ashamed. All I could see was that the one year I was really primed for holiday cheer, no one else was cooperating. “Maybe when we get home, things will have improved.”

“That’s the spirit,” Jason said, coaxing me along. “Why don’t we take your folks out to dinner? Your mom will probably be so busy these next few days, it would be great to give her a treat.”

That was Jason all over. Looking at his handsome face, feeling all that optimism radiating from him, I felt humbled, as if someone had poured the soul of all the good men of the world into Brad Pitt’s body and handed the result to undeserving me for Christmas. He was perfect.

Recalling what Isaac had said, I was perturbed. Then defiant. What was wrong with perfect?

We went home, and while Jason went up to the spare room to change for dinner, I found my mom sitting in the living room with her feet propped up on an ottoman. She had Walkman headphones clapped on her ears and hadn’t heard us come in.

“Mom?”

She jumped as if I had jolted her out of a deep sleep. “Oh, hi!”

“What are you doing?” What I really meant was,
Don’t you have some walnut people to attend to?

“I’m listening to
Crime and Punishment
. They had an unabridged copy at the library.”

That would explain the plastic box the size of a small suitcase sitting on the floor next to her. It even came equipped with a handle.

“Mom, what’s going on? It seems really weird to be in the house and not see any of the old decorations. What happened to your snow villages, and all the other stuff?”

“Those villages are such a lot of work to arrange! I just didn’t have the stamina this year.”

“Well, but…” She obviously had some stamina, or she wouldn’t be listening to a reading of Dostoevsky.

“Is this really the time to be sitting around listening to depressing Russian novels?”

“Well, you weren’t here and Ted’s still in his room….” She shook her head. “And it’s not really depressing at all! I’m surprised. It’s sort of like a suspense story, really. I don’t know why they gave it that dreary name—they should have called it…well, I don’t know….” She tilted her head and thought for a moment. “It’s got that great murder scene. Maybe something with
fear
in the title.
Sudden Fear
. Or how about
Landlady Beware?
”

“You haven’t mentioned Jason,” I said, changing the subject.

She blinked at me. “What should I say about him?”

I plunked myself down on the ottoman. “Well, what do you think? Were you surprised?”

“Yes, I was.” She thought for a moment. “He doesn’t seem your type.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Of course he’s better looking than anyone I’ve gone out with.” To me he seemed better looking than anyone, period.

Mom smiled wistfully. “I always liked Isaac.”

“Isaac?” I bit my lip. I was still miffed with him.

“Did he drive down with you, too?”

“Well, yeah, but…”

“That’s good. Don’t forget to invite him to dinner tomorrow. He’s always such a lot of fun!”

I wanted to tear my hair out. I had brought home Jason—Adonis—and all she could talk about was
Isaac?

“Speaking of dinner,” I said, “Jason wanted to take you and Dad out tonight.”

“Your father and I already had dinner.”

“Already? It’s only—” I looked at my watch. It was 7:00
P.M
. I should have remembered that my parents usually ate at six on the dot.

Mom shrugged. “You were gone, and there was all that food…”

“We can put something together here,” Jason piped up behind me.

I jumped up. How long had he been standing there? I hope not long enough to hear my mother stating her preference for Isaac!

My dad came in. “Do they want to go out again? They just got here!”

“We were thinking of taking you out to dinner,” I said.

“Oh!” My dad brightened. “That sounds great.”

“Laird, you just ate,” Mom reminded him.

“I don’t mind going along for company,” my dad said. “Maybe have some coffee…”

“Terrific,” Jason answered.

Dad gave me a fatherly nudge but directed his next comment to Jason. “Maybe you can help me convince Holly here to look beyond teaching English to seventh graders. She could go to graduate school and at least teach in a college, or go to law school.”

“Dad…” Just because I didn’t want to get a Ph.D., he acted as if I were a beach bum. I could never convince him that I
liked
teaching English to seventh graders. I was even good at it.

“It’s never too late to become what you might have been,’” he lectured.

By the time he brought out that old saw, we were usually reduced to scolding on his part and eye rolling on mine. It had been the same since I was a teenager. I wasn’t trying hard enough. I didn’t apply myself to the subjects that matter, or have the right kind of ambition.
Look at Maddie
, he’d say.

“You all have fun,” my mother chirped. “I think I’ll stay and get a little farther along in my book.”

I could see why.
Crime and Punishment
was looking like a nice alternative to family togetherness to me now, too.

At that point, Jason was practically dragging me along. We passed underneath the archway where the mistletoe usually hung. I turned. “Mom, what happened to the mistletoe?”

“Mistletoe?” She looked confused for a moment. As if she had never even heard of the stuff. “Oh! I couldn’t find any. There’s a shortage this year—a fungus killed it all.”

I groaned as I was tugged away. Wouldn’t you know it? For twenty-seven years there had been mistletoe dangling in that spot, as useless to me in my coupleless state as a screen door on a submarine. But the one year I really needed it?
Mistletoe blight!

During dinner I started to get the jitters. All the time I was sawing through a chicken breast and picking at my mashed potatoes, I kept thinking,
This could be the night
. I could barely keep my mind on the conversation—something about the New York draft riots during the Civil War—for wondering what would happen when Jason and I got back home. Should I find some way to entice him to my room, or should I change into something slinky and tiptoe over to his?

At one point, Jason had reached over to squeeze my knee under the table, causing me to sploop coffee all over my crème brûlée.

When we got home, Dad announced he was trundling off to bed right away. In the living room, Ted was sitting cross-legged on the couch with our old crocheted granny-square afghan around his shoulders. He was staring at the Quality Value Channel. I was relieved to see him out of his room, even if he did appear to have tear marks on his cheeks.

“It’s Melinda’s favorite channel.” His voice rasped with an odd blend of nostalgia and bitterness. “She always watches it before bed. She’s probably watching it now.”

I crossed over and sank onto the couch next to him. “Ted, don’t you think you should get some sleep?”

He burrowed deeper inside his afghan. “I’m not tired. Besides, I want to see what kind of
quality
and
value
Melinda gets off this thing.”

“Uh, Ted…”

“She’s always wasting money. She thinks I’m Donald Trump!”

I patted him on the knee and got up, returning to Jason. “I guess he needs to be alone.”

I tried to think of where I could take Jason now. (Besides away from my bipolar brother.) If there had been a sprig of mistletoe around, I would have yanked him under it. But, of course, there wasn’t. “Feel like a glass of wine?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “I guess I could use a glass of water to take up to my room, though.”

“Oh, sure.”

We went to the kitchen, and I told him again how much Dad had seemed to like him.

“He’s a very interesting man,” Jason said.

I nodded. “I guess he’s getting a little older—maybe not feeling as spry as he was. That would explain the lack of outside holiday decor.”

Jason looked thoughtful. “I understand why you were bummed out this afternoon. When we were driving to the restaurant, all the houses with the lights…”

Oh, God
. He
was
let down. He had been trying to hide it all afternoon, just to buoy my spirits, but now the disappointment was spilling out.

Maybe I could scrounge up some lights and string them up tonight. At least around the doorway.

“Not that it’s any big deal,” Jason assured me. “It’s so great to be here with your family for Christmas.”

I poured him a glass of water.

“Of course, it’s not
exactly
how you described it….”

I leapt in quickly. “I’m hoping things will be back to normal tomorrow. And maybe when Maddie gets here…
if
she gets here…”

Maddie had a true holiday steamroller personality.

He nodded. “I know. And tomorrow’s Christmas Eve. We’ll have fun.”

I handed him his water.
Tomorrow? Couldn’t we have fun tonight?

“Well”—he smiled down at me—“good night.”

“Good night,” I said.

He leaned down and gave me a peck on the lips, but it felt like a perfunctory gesture. Or was I just being paranoid?

When he left, I stood for a moment in the kitchen, crushed by my own cowardice…or Jason’s reticence. What had happened to all my seduction plans? We only had three nights. One seemed to have slipped away from me already.

But what did I expect? I had hyped this trip as a sort of family Christmas Disneyland, and the result had turned out to be something entirely different. Dismalland, maybe. If Jason’s ardor was attached to some kind of Christmas barometer, between now and tomorrow I
really
needed to get some work injecting some holiday fun into this house.

I went out to the living room again. Ted was still staring at the television screen, where a doll that looked like it was dressed as Martha Washington was twirling slowly on a plastic stand.

“Ted, where do Mom and Dad keep the Christmas lights?”

He had broken out the whiskey bottle again and took a slug. “Attic,” he said.

I suppressed a groan. The attic was always a wreck—things got flung up there and forgotten, and then when you went looking for them, they always seemed to be covered in plaster dust and desiccated bug carcasses. The place gave me the crawlies.

The people on the television were exclaiming about how lifelike the doll’s eyes were. “She just seems to be looking at you and saying, ‘I want to be your best friend!’”

I didn’t see it, myself, but Ted sniffled. “I should get one for Amanda.”

“I’m sure she’d love it, Ted, but maybe you shouldn’t buy things just now….”

He shook his head. “Why not?
I’m
not the one with the trouble managing money in my family.”

I left him punching the 800 number into his cell phone and went upstairs, then up the little closet staircase to the attic. I braced myself for the worst, but when I pulled the chain on the overhead light, an entirely different attic was revealed to me from the one I had previously known. This one was swept and tidy. I didn’t see a dead bug anywhere, or hear the scurrying of little critter feet. Instead of piles of junk everywhere, there were stacks of white boxes of different shapes piled neatly together, all labeled with a black marker.
Dishes. HALLOWEEN. Tax Documents
. One marked
Goodwill
wasn’t closed up very well, and I went to investigate.

Poking around for a minute or so, I began to understand that “Goodwill” was a euphemism for “Holly’s belongings.” No wonder my room had seemed so clean when I had dropped my bag there this afternoon! My PowerPuff Girl bedspread from high school was in here, and a lot of my old books, and a nearly bald stuffed orange monkey named Mr. Fabulous that I had had since I was five. The monkey came out of the box. When I pulled him out, I let out a muffled scream. Underneath where Mr. Fabulous had been lay Ted’s old ventriloquist dummy, smiling at me with those eerie eyes of his. I slammed the lid shut on the box. God, that thing was creepy.

I scanned the boxes for one marked
Lights
or
Xmas
or
Snow Village
, but I didn’t find anything.

Then, from nowhere, I remembered Isaac saying, “What a waste of a good dummy.”

My gaze strayed back to the Goodwill box.

Then I remembered that I was mad at Isaac.

But I relented. This was too good to pass up. It was perfect for him! I hauled the dummy out, trying to inspect it without looking too closely at that psychotic little face. His suit was a little moth eaten, but otherwise he seemed okay. I took him down to my bathroom and tried to clean him up. I brushed his suit, scrubbed an indeterminate stain off his pant leg, and took a sponge to his rubber head. Then I carried him downstairs to show Ted; the dummy was his, after all. He might not want to part with it any more than I wanted to see Mr. Fabulous go into a Goodwill bin.

In the living room, another doll was rotating slowly on the television screen.

“I thought I’d get this one for Schuyler,” he said. “It’s only forty-nine, ninety-five.”

“Remember this guy?” I asked, holding up the dummy.

Ted barely spared it a glance. “Yeah, it’s that doll that used to scare the shit out of you.”

“It’s not a doll; it’s a dummy. Mom was going to throw it away.”

“Probably a good idea.”

So much for sentimentality. “Well, would you mind if I gave it to Isaac?”

“Be my guest.” He gestured at the TV with his phone. “Or do you think I should pass on this one?”

I frowned at the television. “I think you should go to bed.”

He ignored me, so I returned to the attic and poked around some more. Then I ventured out to the garage and found some Christmas lights, but half the string didn’t work. I went down to the basement and rooted around till I found a closet holding all the snow village stuff. No monks, no walnut people, no crystal angels. Just some snow village pieces, but by no means all of them. Unfortunately, all the pieces were stored in styrofoam inside individual cardboard boxes. Already tired, I started grabbing them at random and took them upstairs in several trips. Tomorrow morning I would get up early and try to convince Mom to do a little decorating.

Yawning, I dragged the last load upstairs, stacked them in the library, and then waved good night to Ted. “What do you think about these plates?” he asked me.

The decorative plates were part of some kind of large cats collection. A set included a lion, a tiger, a leopard, and a jaguar.

“They’re hand painted,” he said.

“You should go to bed.”

“In a minute.” It was as if a fever had overtaken him.

Exhaustion had such a hold on me that I barely managed to stumble into bed in time to fall asleep. By that time, I wasn’t thinking about seduction, or cat plates, or anything else. The only thought registering in my tired brain was,
What had become of the walnut people?

I bounded out of bed the next morning, bowed but not broken. Positive thoughts loped through my head. I still had Jason, Maddie would probably arrive today, and my parents were bound to snap into holiday mode any moment now. They just needed a little nudge from me.

Mom was already up. It did my heart good to see her puttering around the kitchen, just like her old self. Even if she did have her earphones on.

I walked up to her but she didn’t see me. When I tapped her on the shoulder, she jumped, sending a spoon flying. “Holly!” she said, slipping her earphones off. “You scared me!”

“Are you listening to
Crime and Punishment
at seven
A.M
.?”

She shook her head. “French.”

“French what?”

“French language tapes.”

I frowned. “Are you and Dad taking a trip?”

She chortled as if I had involuntarily told a knee-slapper. “No—I’m starting college again next semester, and I’m trying to get a head start. I have to bone up for my placement test in January.”

I stared at her, surprised. “What do you want to go to college for?”

That probably sounds like an impolitic question, especially coming from a teacher, but her news jarred me. Mom had been around college professors all her life. It seemed odd that after all these years it was just now popping into her head to partake of what they had to offer.

“I want a degree.”

“What for?”

“What do you mean, what for?” she asked, getting down some shredded wheat.

I shuddered at the sight of that box. “We aren’t having cereal for breakfast, are we?”

“Why not?”

“Well…because Jason’s here.” It was nice to have him as an excuse, though the truth was that I didn’t relish kicking off my morning with those little fiber pellets. My parents didn’t even buy the sugar-frosted kind. It was breakfast as punishment.

“What does Jason eat for breakfast?”

I bit my lip. That was the one meal we had never had together, except for one Sunday brunch. And I had never once seen my mom whip up a Greek omelet, which is what Jason had ordered that time. “What about those yummy cinnamon rolls you make?”

“Those are
yeast
rolls, Holly. They take hours.”

“Oh.” The things you learn. “Pancakes? Everybody likes pancakes.”

“Your father has to watch his cholesterol.”

“Fine. We’ll make them low fat.”

“We?”
my mother asked. “I’m trying to make it through indefinite pronouns this morning.”

I sighed.
“I’ll
make breakfast.”

As soon as they tumbled out of my mouth, the words seemed to presage doom. I inspected the banks of cookbooks lining one kitchen wall and picked a huge tome at random. What the heck. It had the word
Joy
in the title. Very Christmasy.

“I don’t want to be the only one in the family without one,” my mother said, as I scanned the index.

“One of what?” I asked.

“A degree.”

“Oh.” I had forgotten what we had been talking about. Now I was more concerned with the difference between Swedish pancakes and standard American ones. A quick glance at the ingredient lists for both showed that neither were what you would describe as heart healthy.

“It’s not so rare for adults to go back now,” she said.

Adults was one thing…but Mom was fifty-three. “Well, I suppose it would be fun to take a class or two,” I said, wondering if it would be okay to just leave out all the butter, “but what do you want a degree for? That’s such a pain. And what would you need it for?”

“Why does anyone need one?”

“To get work,” I said, “or to go on to something else.”

“And you think that I would never be able to get work?”

I looked up from the book, startled. “Huh?”

“I worked hard enough to put your father’s big brain through graduate school, if you’ll recall.”

Uh-oh. She sounded angry. At some point while scanning
The Joy of Cooking
, I had stepped on toes. People really shouldn’t multitask at seven-thirty in the morning.

“I dropped out of college,” she reminded me, “so he could afford to finish his Ph.D.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But that’s why I was saying, what do you want to go through all the rigmarole of college and job hunting now for? You paid your dues. Now you can take it easy.”

“Easy!” She sniffed. “You think taking care of this family—of your father—is
easy?
”

“Well, no, that’s not what I—”

She chortled at me in challenge. “You just go ahead and make breakfast for everybody this morning, Fannie Farmer, and then report back how easy you think I’ve had it.”

She snapped the headphones back on her ears and skulked off.

I guessed this might not be the right time to ask her to put the snow village together.

I had other things on my mind now anyway. The way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, after all, not through a snow village. I decided to add holiday pizzazz to the recipe by making pumpkin spice pancakes. This would disguise the fact that I was leaving out the butter and eggs so as not to kill my father, plus it would move us a little further down the road of getting the house smelling Christmasy.