by Donna Ball
Cici pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, but could not prevent a tear from trickling from the corner of her eye. Lindsay wiped it away with her little finger.
“It’s okay,” she said softly. “Really.”
Cici sniffed, and tried to compose her expression. Bridget handed her a tissue. “I hate being such a bummer,” she said. “Especially after everything turned out so well with the sunroom and all.”
“Cici, you should be proud of the relationship you’ve built with those people,” Lindsay said. “All this time, Bridget and I never knew. But you’ve really made quite a reputation for yourself.”
Cici almost managed a smile. “Well,” she said. “That’s something, isn’t it?”
“We should do something nice for them,” Bridget said. “Bake them cakes or something.”
“Well, it is that time of year.”
“ ’Tis the season.”
“If you can believe it.”
They picked up their mugs again and were silent for a moment, letting the gloom and the tension of the past drain away, losing themselves in the taste of chocolate and the popping and crackling of the fire. Then Cici said, unexpectedly, “Can you remember what we were doing this time last year?”
Lindsay stifled a chuckle. “What we were doing this time every year. Making ourselves crazy getting ready for the Christmas party. Decorating, baking, shopping, building, nailing, stapling, measuring, cutting . . .”
“Not to mention,” added Bridget, “packing up thirty years’ worth of living into boxes to get ready for the move.”
“It doesn’t seem like a year,” Lindsay said thoughtfully. “A lot has changed. We’ve changed.”
Bridget looked at her. “Do you really think so?”
Lindsay gave her a tolerant smile. “Do you really think that a year ago, you could have raised a flock of sheep or put up a hundred and thirty-seven jars of preserves all in one summer?”
“And do you really think you could have been Mama to a deer?” Bridget returned with a grin.
Cici said, “I know I’ve changed. I used to think being rich meant having a new Lexus in the garage every year. Now it means having a shed full of firewood in the winter.”
They all smiled agreement at that.
Then Cici said softly, “I miss it, you know. The Christmas parties, the neighbors, the gossip. The way old Mr. Millicker used to get drunk and break down in tears halfway through “Auld Lang Syne” and the way Carol Evans would always take off her panty hose in the middle of the party and hide them at the bottom of the bathroom trash can. Why did she do that, anyway? Did she think we wouldn’t find them?”
“I miss Bridget’s canapes,” Lindsay said wistfully. “Remember that year you made fried green tomatoes with shrimp remoulade? And it was fun, you know, coming up with a different theme every year, planning all the food and the decorations to match . . .”
“Remember the year we did Pacific Rim?” Cici said. “Now that was a challenge.”
Lindsay shuddered. “Those hideous illuminated palm tree yard ornaments.”
“Oh my God.” Bridget sat up slowly, placing her cup carefully on the coffee table, and turned to face them. Her eyes were big with the promise of a dawning idea. “We have to do it,” she said. “That’s exactly what we have to do!”
Lindsay blinked. “What?”
And Cici said, “Pacific Rim? Are you kidding? I didn’t like it the first time.”
“No, no, no, no.” Bridget was practically bouncing up and down with excitement now. “A party! We have to have a Christmas party! It will be our thank-you to the neighbors for helping today, and all the people who’ve worked on the house—it’ll be like a, what do you call it? When your house is finished and you give a party for all the craftsmen who helped build it?”
“But our house isn’t finished,” Cici protested, confused.
“Our house will never be finished,” added Lindsay.
“And—listen to this! We’ll invite all our friends from the old neighborhood for a house party! Isn’t that what we bought a house with all these bedrooms for? Isn’t that what we promised we’d do when we moved here?”
“All these bedrooms don’t have beds,” Lindsay pointed out uncertainly.
“But we have a loft full of furniture! Can you think of a better time to get it down and dust it off ?”
“Bridget, it’s three weeks before Christmas.” Cici’s tone was reluctant, though she was clearly trying not to dampen Bridget’s enthusiasm. “Who’s going to drag all that furniture out of the loft and up the stairs? I have a broken arm. I can’t even make a bed, much less put one together. Besides, by this time most people already have plans . . .”
“Cici Burke, you know perfectly well that no one worth knowing has ever missed one of our parties!” Bridget retorted. “We’ll get Farley to help with the furniture. And so the timetable is a little short. It’s not like we have anything else to do!”
“Actually,” Lindsay said, and a slow, speculative light began to spark in her eyes as she looked around, “can’t you just see that staircase draped in live garland? And those windows?”
“With burgundy velvet ribbon,” Cici suggested.
“Not just ribbon, but fabric. Giant bows! I really am going to have to go to Charlottesville now. I hope there’s enough velvet left in the town for what I have in mind.”
“We could get a fourteen foot tree in that corner,” Cici speculated.
“We could get a twenty foot tree in the corner,” Bridget corrected, “and a fourteen foot one on the landing at the top of the stairs.”
“But a cut tree, not artificial,” Lindsay said, warming to the concept. “Everything has to be authentic to the period—exactly as it would have been in Victorian times.”
“Except for the candles on the tree,” Cici cautioned.
“Right. No burning down the house. Oh my God, can you imagine what we can do with the mantle decorations?”
“Piles of sugared fruit and glass beads.”
“I can make lace angels for the tree,” Bridget said, “and upholster foam balls with leftover drapery fabric.”
“It’s a big job,” Cici said, still trying to remain cautious. “Three weeks, a whole house to furnish and decorate and get ready for overnight guests . . . all that cooking and cleaning . . .”
Lindsay said abruptly, “I want to do it.”
“So do I,” said Bridget.
Cici looked from one to the other of them, and a slow grin spread over her face. “So do I.”
They raised their cups in a toast to seal the deal. “To the best party ever,” declared Bridget.
“The best ever!”
“Hear, hear.”
And yet, like a silent echo that none of them could completely ignore was the knowledge that it might also be their last. Perhaps, deep down, that was exactly why they wanted so badly to do it.
20
The Lights of Home
The pall that had seeped into the house with the first frost of winter began to vanish over the next days, exorcised by the scent of cinnamon and cloves, the sound of excited, purposeful voices, and the nonstop buzz of activity. Farley was engaged to bring the stored furniture down from the loft, and Lindsay, Bridget, and Ida Mae set to work with lemon oil and polishing cloths. Cici started making phone calls, and to her utter amazement, almost everyone she invited from the old neighborhood accepted their invitation. As their friend Paul put it when she reached him at the office, “Well, darling, of course we’ve been holding the date. We simply assumed our invitation had been delayed in the mail.”
“They want to come,” Cici told the other two at lunch, still not quite able to keep the disbelief out of her voice. “Everyone wants to come! Already we have eight confirmed to stay the weekend, if you can believe that, and that’s not counting Katie and Kevin. Where are we going to put all these people?”
“Katie and the girls can share my room,” Bridget said, munchin
g on a grilled cheese sandwich and barely glancing up from the recipes that were scattered across their newly rediscovered kitchen table. It was a gorgeous old chestnut piece, perfect to seat four, that had been rescued from the dairy loft. When Ida Mae positioned it in front of the big walk-in fireplace in the kitchen they knew it had always been there. “We’ll put the kids in sleeping bags on the floor. They’ll love it.”
Lindsay said, “I don’t suppose Lori . . .”
Cici shrugged her good shoulder, and an almost purposefully neutral expression assumed its place on her face. “I told her she could decide. I’m not going to beg.”
“She’s going to be missing a hell of a party, that’s for sure.”
“We’ve got that little room off the living room that no one ever uses,” Bridget pointed out. “We could put someone there.”
“And there’s always the sunroom,” added Lindsay. “Now that it doesn’t have a hole in the roof anymore. And as far as that goes, we could sleep five or six in the art studio if we had to.”
“This thing is going to be huge,” Cici said, sitting back heavily in her chair.
Bridget grinned. “I told you people would come!”
And while they reveled in the anticipation of reuniting with all the friends they had left behind, the local people all felt they had to counter the ladies’ invitation with one of their own: There was the Baptist church Christmas Pageant, the Methodist church Fellowship and Christmas Social, the Women’s Club Charity Ball, the Mayor’s Open House, the Downtown Association’s Annual Luminary and Caroling, and of course the Lighting of the Tree on the town square. It did not occur to them to refuse a single invitation or pass up one small-town event. Who knew if they would ever get another chance?
They held true to their promise not to discuss the future until after the first of the year. But each of them understood, in her own private fashion, that this was more than just a Christmas party. It was also a way of saying good-bye.
Ida Mae threw herself into preparation for the event, polishing windows and banisters and stair treads and chandeliers, liberally dispensing advice and opinions on everything from the placement of the furniture to the holiday menu, working with the energy of a woman half her age.
“This is nothing,” she boasted, “compared to the parties Mr. B used to give. He’d have one, two hundred people in here for Christmas. Why, I remember one Election Day we had cars parked all over the sheep meadow and down the highway a mile. Had to send the buckboard to fetch people to the house from their cars. Now there’s a party. Of course,” she allowed, “I was a lot younger then.”
“We have got to get her something really nice for Christmas,” Lindsay whispered to Bridget, feeling guilty.
“How about a trip to Aruba,” Bridget hissed back. “Permanently?”
Five dozen cookies were baked, wrapped, and stored. Bridget shipped off a fruitcake to Paul and Derrick with a card signed with a smiley face. Lindsay ran off two dozen more cards on her computer, each featuring a black-and-white photo of Ladybug Farm on the front, encased in a full-color Christmas wreath complete with pears and calling birds. Inside was a Christmas greeting and directions to the house. It was signed with three red and black ladybugs.
Even with one arm in a sling, Cici had no trouble turning fifty tiny terracotta flowerpots into silver candleholders, spraying several hundred pinecones gold, and hot-gluing sheet moss and potpourri onto foam cones to make natural Christmas trees for the mantle collection. She designed topiaries made of chicken wire and sturdy tree limbs to line the front steps, and Lindsay filled them in with evergreen and holly berries, then decorated them with tiny white birds that she had bought at Family Hardware for a dollar a dozen.
The bedlam of the mall at Christmastime was replaced by the chaos of Cici’s workshop, where miles of cedar, spruce, and fir boughs were being painstakingly woven together with baling wire, sprayed with a mixture of wax and water, and hung to dry. An old sled that Bridget found leaning up against a wall in one of the barn stalls was sanded down, painted bright red with silver runners, and hung beside the front door surrounded by evergreen. Cici glued sleigh bells to a cracked leather mule harness and Lindsay used it as the center of a wreath for the front door. An ash bucket with a hole in the bottom was sprayed silver, stenciled in gold, and used to hold a vase of holly in the bathroom. Though they worked from first light in the morning until well into the night, they never ran out of ideas, or of things to do. It was as though the house itself was telling them how it wanted to look for Christmas.
Bridget found a green checked fabric stamped with red ladybugs, scanned the pattern into her computer, and used it to make labels for the jars of jam that were stored in the pantry. She cut squares of the fabric and tied it around the lids of the jars with bright red yarn. Everyone who came to the Christmas party would leave with a jar of gaily decorated Ladybug Farm jam.
Cici spent all day bouncing around in Farley’s pickup truck, surveying the potential Christmas trees on their property. Finally she decided on a cedar for the downstairs and white pine for the landing, both because of their abundance on the property and because of their rapid rate of replenishment . . . and because she knew, without ever having been told, that those were exactly the choices generations of Blackwells had made before her. Farley cut the trees and hauled them inside, huffing and puffing and grunting as they all helped him maneuver the pine up the stairs, and they paid him ten dollars. The huge cedar spread its boughs across the corner of the main parlor and the giant pine looked down upon them from the front landing, and suddenly the rooms did not seem so sparsely furnished anymore. The house was starting to look like a home.
Day by day the rooms, once cold and filled with nothing but potential, began to transform themselves into a Victorian Christmas card. Mantles were draped with velvet and lined with evergreen and stacked with displays of gold Christmas ornaments in crystal vases or sugared fruit in wooden bowls or small topiaries covered with dried rose-buds and decorated with cinnamon sticks and lace. Living wreaths, suspended by velvet ribbon, hung from every window. Evergreen garland wound up the long bannister, tied with fluffy burgandy velvet bows that were centered with clusters of silver and gold ornaments. Living garlands draped every doorway and sprays of evergreen adorned every surface. The Christmas trees came to life with hundreds of tiny white lights, bouquets of pale pink and blue dried hydrangea that Lindsay had preserved from their own garden, and angel shapes cut from lace and stiffened with starch.
Ida Mae delivered her fruitcakes. Bridget kept the ovens going day and night, baking meringue cups, cheese straws, cranberry bread, and layer cakes. Ida Mae made the sausage stuffing and Bridget made the sweet potato casserole. Bridget made a bourbon glaze for the ham and Ida Mae made bite-size zucchini tarts from scratch. Without even noticing it, the two women worked effortlessly together, creating a menu that was based, not so much on a plan, but on dishes they loved. And in the process, the meal grew more and more extravagant.
Then it was Christmas Eve.
A twenty-pound turkey was roasting in one oven while a ham baked in the other. Casseroles, cookies, breads, and pies that had been prepared and frozen weeks ago now thawed on every available kitchen surface. Lindsay was putting the finishing touches on the dining room table centerpiece while Cici went through the house arranging candles on holders, floating them in crystal bowls, nestling them among the greenery. A delicate snow was drifting down outside the windows and dusting the garden paths with white, while inside the entire house smelled like Christmas dinner. Lindsay had set up her stereo system in the entrance hall, and the strains of holiday CDs were coming through the speakers, which were disguised by miniature Christmas trees.
“Okay.” Lindsay read from her checklist. “The fireplaces are clean and laid with fresh logs. We’ll light the fires first thing in the morning so they’ll be nice and cozy by the time people start arriving. The buffet is set up with plates and silverware and all the glasses are washed. Punch bowl
s ready to be filled with eggnog. Party favors stacked on the foyer table, ready to give out when people leave.”
“Candles ready to be lit,” added Cici, reading from her own list. “Peppermint bath salts in every bathroom. Boy, am I glad we went with two water heaters. Pillows fluffed, candy bowls in every bedroom, towels rolled and decorated with sprigs of holly. We’ll bring in the fresh greenery for the tables and mantles tonight, so it won’t get too dried out before we light the candles tomorrow.”
“Presents are wrapped for the kids,” Bridget chimed in, drying her hands on her apron. “Cookie platters are ready to be set out. Ida Mae is frosting the Christmas cake now. Cheese biscuits are rising, the ham is ready to be carved, turkey is basting. All we have to do in the morning is—”
And then the phone rang.
The plan was for Kate to fly into Washington with the girls today, and drive to Virginia with Kevin in the morning. When she heard her son’s voice, Bridget inquired happily, “Did Kate get there okay?”
He said, “Mom, the Chicago airport’s been snowed in since early this morning. They’ve canceled all flights. There’s no way Kate’s getting out of there.”
“Oh, no.” Bridget sank back against the wall, and the disappointment in her voice caused Cici and Lindsay to interrupt their checklists and turn to her in concern. She put her hand over the receiver and told them, “Kate’s flight was canceled.”
To Kevin she said, “It won’t be the same without them, but at least you’ll be here for Christmas.”
“I hope so,” he replied, and it took her a moment to realize that he was serious. “If this storm keeps on the way they’re saying, the roads are going to be pretty bad. They’re already talking about closing parts of 1-95. Can you believe that? At Christmastime? What a mess.”
Bridget blinked. “What storm? What are you talking about?”
“The same storm that hit Chicago. Don’t you listen to the news?”
“But . . .” She looked out the window to make sure. “It’s barely snowing here!”
