‘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. Dismal-land, maybe. If Jason’s ardor was attached to some kind of Christmas barometer, between now and tomorrow I really needed to get to 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.
Once I had demolished the kitchen and had something that looked reasonably like batter, I felt better. In fact, I really had the feeling that I could hold this Christmas together out of sheer determination and generous amounts of cinnamon and nutmeg. Why not?
The next person I saw that morning was Jason. He came bounding into the kitchen in sweats and sneakers and kissed my forehead. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, his gaze naturally drawn to the orange glop I was obsessively stirring.
‘Pumpkin pancakes.’
‘Cool – I thought I’d take a run around your neighborhood before breakfast. Do I have time?’
Okay, I’ll admit to a tiny sag of disappointment just then. I had imagined Jason bounding down to the kitchen and helping me. Or at least diving for the breakfast table and getting ready to scarf down two short stacks. I hadn’t expected him to dash out into the freezing cold and get himself all sweaty first.
I didn’t even know he was a jogger.
Not that I really minded. Anyway, I wasn’t going to let him know it. ‘No! Great!’ I practically singsonged.
He awarded me another peck and dashed out the door. I started making coffee and getting things ready. I turned on the griddle, I dug up a red and green tablecloth with little stick snowmen embroidered on it and threw it on the table, and I unearthed the Christmas Spode and set the table in record time. I put out a pitcher of milk for coffee, and the butter, and then started searching through the cabinets for syrup.
But there was no syrup.
Not a drop.
A wave of panic hit me. I had felt pretty cocksure while I was making those pancakes, if only because I knew that some grade A maple syrup covered a multitude of culinary sins. But without it that orange glop looked more threatening. I tried to think what to do. I could plead with my mother to unearth some syrup or run to the store, but she would probably just make another snide Fannie Farmer comment. Jason was jogging – and besides, he was the person I was trying to impress. Ted …
Well, Ted probably wasn’t in any shape to be running errands.
After a few moments of standing frozen in front of a wall of opened cabinets, I finally gathered my wits about me. What was syrup? Sugar and water. Mrs Butterworth didn’t bother with maple trees. Homemade in this case wasn’t ideal … but I could get it done while the pancakes were cooking … and spice it up with a little cinnamon and nutmeg.
Quick like a bunny, I yanked a saucepan off
a shelf and tossed in four cups of sugar and a cup of water. To my surprise, it seemed to work. That is, the sugar began to dissolve.
Someone knocked at the side door, and I dashed over to open it. I was expecting Jason, but instead, Isaac blew in. ‘My God, it’s cold,’ he said, teeth chattering. He stopped, looked around the kitchen, and deposited a paper grocery bag on the kitchen table. ‘Where is everybody?’
‘Jason’s jogging, Mom’s studying indefinite articles, and everyone else is asleep.’
‘Jason’s jogging?’ he asked. ‘Holidays exist so we don’t have to do stuff like that.’
As if he ever jogged.
‘That’s how cardiovascular slackers think. Jason’s different.’
‘Right, a pillar among men.’ Isaac looked around. He took off his hat, muffler, and coat and dropped them on a chair. ‘What are you up to here?’
‘I’m making breakfast.’
Deep lines furrowed his forehead as he inspected my bowl of batter. ‘And it’s going to be … ?’
‘Pancakes,’ I said.
‘I like pancakes,’ he said, then added, ‘usually.’
I was grudgingly about to invite him to stay, when suddenly a hissing noise got my attention. My syrup was bubbling over. I dove to turn the heat down on it. Isaac was right next to me.
‘Oh, are we having glue for breakfast, too?’ he asked.
My confidence, already shaky, wavered some more. It didn’t look right – sort of thick and white. ‘Syrup.’
‘Holly …’
‘Could you hand me the cinnamon, please?’ I said, cutting him off. The last thing I needed right now was nay-saying. I started shoveling spices into what was beginning to look like sugar cement.
‘Maybe you should add something else?’ Isaac ventured.
‘What?’
‘Butter? That usually helps.’
‘I can’t use fat, because of Dad.’
Real alarm spread across Isaac’s face and he nervously eyeballed the orange sludge in the bowl at his elbow. ‘What’s in that batter?’
‘Would you just sit down and relax? I had this all under control before you showed up.’ I glanced at the bag he’d left on the table. ‘What did you bring?’