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Sam blew out a gust of air that sounded like a horse snort. “Great. So I still have about a two-paragraph story with no details on anything.” He looked down at his notes again. “Wonder if anything else that happened at the courthouse today is worth a couple inches. I may have to go back to working on a feature about the courthouse employees’ contributions to Toys for Tots.”

“Not as exciting as murder, but definitely a good cause. I know you’ll do a nice job writing it up.”

“Yeah, well, I better. They don’t pay me the big bucks to sit around.” His wry grin commented more than his words on the “big bucks” Sam got as a reporter. I made a mental note to put together a tin of homemade cookies and bring it down to the newspaper office some time the end of the week. It sounded like the least I could do for a struggling journalist.

There weren’t a lot of cars in the staff lot at school when I cruised by. I didn’t see Linnette’s anywhere, so I didn’t bother stopping to check the bookstore. Once I got back home I realized that unlike most of my Southern California friends who had their cell phones charged, turned on and ready all the time, I’d been walking around all day with mine turned off. When I powered up there were messages waiting for me.

The answering machine message light blinked as well, and I debated which to check first. In the end it didn’t matter much, because the only message that was worth listening to was repeated both places. “If you get to a phone before five-thirty, come join us for mochas at Charlie’s,” Linnette called out over what sounded like a crowd. She was probably standing in Charlie’s when she left the message.

Charlie’s was the independent coffee house closest to church, and the one we tended to visit at when school wasn’t in session and my place of business didn’t afford everybody somewhere to gather. I didn’t even bother changing out of my errand-running jeans, but left a note for Ben and went straight back out to the car.

It was just early enough that rush hour traffic was still light, and I found Linnette and Lexy celebrating at a corner table. “Great, you got my message.” My best friend patted the empty chair beside her. “We even saved you a place.”

I ordered my own drink at the counter and splurged on whipped cream like my friends. “Brian seems to have been a very good choice as an attorney,” I told Lexy as I sat down.

“I thought so. He called me as soon as they got out of court. Fred Chambers, the crew chief for Leopold, took Matt home with him tonight. He said this way he could keep an eye on him for a couple days.”

“That makes sense. You look mighty festive,” I told Lexy, admiring the red dress she wore.

“Office holiday lunch.” She wrinkled her nose. “I could have thought of half a dozen ways I’d rather spend two hours today, but couldn’t get out of it.”

“What was so bad about it?” Linnette asked, always the Christian Friends leader.

Lexy surprised me by blinking away a couple tears. “Two different people that have been out on maternity leave joined us for lunch, both with these precious little babies in red-and-white stretchy suits gurgling in baby carriers.”

Linnette patted her hand. “It’s the roughest right around the holidays, isn’t it? Everybody puts such an emphasis on family we forget how hard it is for those who don’t have the family situation they want.”

Lexy made a face. “And it’s only going to get worse when we go to the family gatherings for the next two weeks and deal with the aunts and cousins who just have to ask the questions about why I’m
still
not pregnant.”

It didn’t seem fair that somebody as sweet and caring as Lexy had to go through that stuff. “Maybe we can make out a rotation chart so that Linnette and I can go with you to these things. There’s nothing like the presence of a stranger to put a damper on the nosy questions.”

Lexy gave a tremulous smile. “Thanks. I know you’d do it, too. I might take you up on it, too. In fact, maybe both of you could come the twenty-third for the buffet at Steve’s mom’s house. It will take more than one stranger to intimidate his aunt Rhonda.”

At least we could laugh about things like that together, I thought. Maybe this could be a way for me to keep from spending the whole week of Christmas alone when Ben left. Once again hope, chocolate and friends saved a bad situation.

S
ince Ben now knew he would be leaving California Thursday to spend the holidays with his father, I didn’t see much of him. Judging from the oddly wrapped packages that appeared under the tree some time during my busy Tuesday, he spent part of the time shopping. A great deal of it was spent with Cai Li, of course. This relationship must have been developing most of the semester, that or they had certainly clicked with each other quickly. They weren’t to the point of finishing each others’ sentences yet, and fortunately there were no inappropriate displays of affection in public, at least around me. But they just had that moony look gazing into each others’ eyes that said “young and in love” to me.

The two of them spent a bit of time that evening at the apartment. I baked Christmas cookies while they played some goofy video game again. Finally at about nine Ben got on the computer, and a minute later gave a whoop.

“All right! I made the Dean’s list. Pretty good for my first semester, huh?”

“Definitely. Let’s see those grades.” I put down the pan of cookies just out of the oven, and went into the living room where Ben had his class records still up on the screen. “So, maybe Philosophy of Religion wasn’t as hard as you thought.” He’d posted a B-plus in the class, and that was his lowest grade.

“Eh. Maybe it was as hard as I thought and I had some good study help. You want to call up your grades, too, Mom?”

“Sure. If you know my student ID number you can even do it for me, that or take the rest of the snicker-doodles off the baking sheet before they stick.”

“There are warm cookies?” Ben looked at Cai Li. “Race you to the kitchen.” With his long legs he beat her by several lengths and I could hear them laughing over the goodies there while I punched in the information to get the right screen up.

My grades were almost as good as Ben’s. With only having nine hours of grad work, a B in a three-hour class pushed me down to a 3.67, which still wasn’t too shabby. I wondered if anybody out here at any of the arcades or kid-friendly places gave rewards for good grades. The hours Ben spent at Tilt in St. Louis playing games with those hard-won tokens for each A on his report card still conjure up pleasant memories. It made me consider asking the pair in the kitchen if they wanted to go someplace that served pizza and featured skee-ball machines just for old times’ sake.

Still, I suspected that would get me eye rolls from both of them. Surely they felt too mature for such behavior. “Anybody for Showbiz Pizza?” I called out, waiting for the groans.

“Mom, you’re so out of it. They haven’t called it that in years. Maybe never in California,” Ben hollered back. “Besides, they’re closed by now. You know how Rancho Conejo rolls up the sidewalks by eight at night.”

We settled for the local ice-cream parlor instead, with me buying. Since they were celebrating, both kids got the featured “kiddie” sundae. Personally it gave me a feeling of relief that these two weren’t pushing for a more grown-up relationship right away. Any young woman who could eat bubble-gum ice cream with gummy worms and still claim to have a good time on a date was somebody Ben could bring home often.

After dessert the kids dropped me back off at the apartment to finish the rest of the cookie baking while they went to Cai Li’s house to watch a movie. Once the baking and dishes were done I settled down to read my Bible study for the next morning. Since I was off this week, I’d agreed to go with Dot to the Wednesday morning women’s study group. This time I wanted to be more than four verses ahead of the discussion in class.

It didn’t take long to discover the next morning that almost everybody else had chosen this week before Christmas to slack off in preparation. I sat with Dot and she and I seemed to be the only ones who’d read the lesson in depth. Linnette focused on the conversations she’d had with her daughters the night before on the phone, cementing the fact that neither of them would be home for Christmas for more than a day. “And probably not even the same day, at that. This parenting adults stuff is hard. I mean, I want them to be independent people with their own plans and resources….”

“But you’d also like them to be your girls during holidays and such,” Dot finished as Linnette nodded in agreement.

Tracy Collins slid into the empty seat next to Dot, carrying a cup of coffee and looking less wan than she had in weeks. Instead she looked a bit irate. “So how do you keep kids from getting independent too quickly? Frankie pitched a fit this morning when I told him he had to get up and mind his sisters while I came here. You’d think I was torturing him or something.”

Dot sighed. “A lot of teens go through that. They go through those phases where nothing is important except what their friends think.”

“Yeah, and I don’t like his friends. I wish he had different ones, preferably friends who didn’t like head-banger music and T-shirts with rude sayings.” I remembered being in Tracy’s shoes in that regard just a few years ago. At least I’d had Hal to back me up from a distance. That and the assistance my mom gave me helped keep Ben on the right track. I kept my mouth shut right now, because I figured the last thing Tracy wanted was sympathy from me.

“Did he give you any particular reason for not wanting to watch the girls?” Dot asked. “Not that there’s any good one, but maybe you could be prepared next time.”

“He said he’d promised somebody he’d stay close to the phone and the computer. I threatened to take away his privileges on both if he didn’t shape up, and that’s when he totally lost it. He acted like whatever he was doing was a matter of life and death.”

“So many things are when you’re thirteen,” Linnette said. “My girls were only a little older than that when their dad died, but it seemed like every crisis for about two years after that was blown way out of proportion. Maybe it was their way of using up the grief they hadn’t spent when Tom died.”

Tracy looked skeptical. “Maybe that’s it. I don’t know, though. Boys are so different. And since I was a little kid when most of my brothers went through being thirteen, I don’t know if this is mostly normal stuff he’s doing or way over the top.”

“If my experience is any help, almost anything is possible from a boy that age, especially if you’re raising him alone. Ben’s dad was three states away and not real helpful when Ben was thirteen. I was basically on my own, and he was a handful.”

Tracy’s face softened. “Maybe I’m just expecting too much too soon. But I never know whether he’s going to act way too mature for his age or younger than his four-year-old sister these days. I guess I didn’t expect to get the preschooler behavior over just waking up early and watching the girls. It’s like having Frank and his opinions all over again.”

Ouch. I decided to let that slide without comment because I didn’t have anything to say. It felt best to stick to teenagers. “It’s a time to choose your battles. If you don’t want to fight over everything you have to decide what the important things are and stick to those and ignore the rest. There were times when I felt like it would have needed a backhoe to clean Ben’s room, but I could shut the door on it. I saved my breath for insisting he do his homework and be civil to his grandmother.”

“The homework is a constant battle. It’s a split decision on grandmas. He puts my mom down, but he makes nice with Grandma Collins because she slips him money and goodies that the girls don’t get.” Tracy’s expression told me what she thought of her mother-in-law’s behavior.

We’d gotten so far afield from the Bible study that it actually startled me when Helen Marshall, our study leader and the church secretary, got down to business, shushed us all and got into the lesson. Tracy and I didn’t have any more time to talk, but her problems with Frank, Jr. were on my mind all morning.

When the study was over and I looked for her so we could talk more, she was gone. “Where’d Tracy go anyway?” I asked Dot. She usually kept track of everybody.

“I don’t know. Her cell phone rang about twenty minutes into the study and she left the room and never came back. That’s a shame because I was thinking about asking her if she wanted to go out to lunch with us.”

“Us? Does that mean I’m included?”

“Certainly. And I’ll ask Linnette since she’s here, too. I was thinking about picking up Candace and Lucy for lunch someplace as a pre-holiday treat. Does that sound good?”

“Sure.” Ben wouldn’t be home for lunch on his last day here, I knew. He’d already told me he would have lunch with Cai Li and dinner with me and we’d have our Christmas gift exchange afterward. So I had nothing to hurry home for.

Linnette liked the idea of going, too, so we decided to leave her car in the lot and take Dot’s and mine to Camarillo since I knew the way to the girls’ place.

“Candace almost always has Wednesdays off, but I’m not sure about Lucy. With all the kids being off from school by now, she may be working extra hours at the theater,” Dot said as we got into our cars and caravanned over to Rose House.

Lucy wasn’t there when we arrived, but it wasn’t because she had to work. Kirsten looked sad when Dot told her our plans. “I’m afraid Lucy’s gone. She complained of not feeling well yesterday afternoon, and when I called to tell Estella that, she came right over and hustled her sister out of here. She said all the excitement of everything going on was bad for Lucy and that she’d be better off at Estella’s for a while. I don’t know if that’s true, as much time as she spends at the hospital. I hope she takes her to a doctor. Lucy looked like she was really hurting by the time they left here.”

Dot sighed. “I guess that’s Estella’s decision to make. Too bad that Lucy won’t be around for a while. I’d hoped we could take her to Christmas Eve services with us at the chapel. I imagine there’s always next year, but she seems to have gotten comfortable at our church and I wanted to encourage that.”

“I know. And Matt called here several times yesterday trying to reach her. Apparently Estella has changed her phone number and didn’t give him the new one. I felt bad not being able to give it to him, but Ms. Perez told me it was an unlisted number and she didn’t want it given out to
anyone,
especially not Matt.” Kirsten didn’t look like she agreed with that decision, but I knew she had to abide by it. “He and Lucy haven’t gotten to see each other since he was arrested.”

“That’s a shame, but there’s not much we can do about it. Let’s get Candace and go to lunch,” Dot said. She went down the hall and knocked on her daughter’s bedroom door.

“Just a minute,” Candace called. “Who is it?”

“It’s your mother, come to take you to lunch.”

“All right! But you’ll have to open the door because my nails are wet.” When Dot opened the door Candace sat at the desk in the room, manicure supplies out in front of her. “Green glitter polish for Christmas. Isn’t it cool?” She waggled ten shiny nails.

Dot smiled. “Lovely, dear. Do you need to wait for them to dry before we go to lunch?”

“Not for long. I can put fast-drying stuff on them and we can go in five minutes. I hope it isn’t real cold out there because I don’t want to put a jacket on yet.” Candace looked at me behind her mother and waved. “Hi, Gracie Lee. Hi, Linnette. Do you want to borrow my nail polish?”

The thought of wearing green glitter polish made me giggle and I could hear Linnette reacting the same way.

“Not this time, Candace. My son, Ben, would think I was acting like a teenager if I came home with that on my nails. Do you have any silver? Maybe I can borrow that for New Year’s Eve.” Ben wouldn’t be home next week and I could get a little crazy. Besides, since I had no plans to ring in the New Year with anybody, doing a manicure with the girls might be the most exciting thing I did next week.

“Lucy has silver. I bet she’d let you borrow it,” Candace said. “I miss Lucy already. It’s not much fun without her here.”

“Well, she should be back soon. Maybe after Christmas she’ll feel better and Estella will bring her back.”

“I hope so. It’s too quiet alone. And I’m tired of Tina’s Barry Manilow Christmas album already.” Since I would have gotten tired of that after the first listen, I could sympathize with her. We went out to the cars, discussing the merits of various local restaurants for lunch. I had to defer to the others, because I didn’t know much about Camarillo.

In the end we all piled into Dot’s car and had a good time at a Chinese place not far away. They all laughed at me because I got so excited when I saw the appetizer section of the menu.

“They have crab rangoon. This is the first place I’ve seen out here that has it.”

Linnette gave me an odd look. “Is it something special?”

“Yeah. They’re delicious. Think of fried wontons with cream cheese and crab in them instead of meat. In St. Louis it’s as easy to get as toasted ravioli.”

Linnette started to say something but Dot laughingly waved her off. “Don’t get her started on that. She described it to me once and it sounds revolting.”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself. Maybe it’s an acquired taste. There’s nothing to compare it to in California so I don’t try.”

Now I felt really excited about lunch. I decided to get the appetizer instead of a lunch special. That meant I’d miss the cool sectioned rectangular dish lunch came in out here, almost as large as a cafeteria tray. The food on them is different, too; the first time I ordered egg foo yung in California it seemed to have been prepared inside out. By now I’ve gotten used to all the differences except the lack of crab rangoon.

Everybody ordered and we chatted and drank hot tea while we waited for the food to come. Dot asked Linnette if she knew where Tracy went. “Not a clue. She got a call and vanished. I wonder if she ever got in touch with either of the accountants Pastor George recommended.”

“There’s a girl with a lot of problems,” Dot said. “I hope she doesn’t lose the house.”

“Why would that happen?” Linnette asked. “All she has to do is straighten out the business books and wait for Frank’s insurance to pay out.”

“That will cover the house payment, but what will she and those three kids do for living expenses now that Frank’s gone? Her limited skills aren’t going to do enough.” Dot looked troubled, and I could see that the discussion was bothering Candace as well. She had her mom’s soft heart for people.