“Why not?”
“Who knows?” she said, reaching for another egg. “Maybe they’re afraid that we’ll bump noses under the mistletoe. God forbid that I should kiss you in front of the children. As if anybody ever kisses anybody in front of the children.” She put the egg back into the carton, turned to me and laid a hand on my stomach, now decently covered in a fluffy pleated sweater. “Maybe they’re afraid of the questions this will raise.”
“Wouldn’t they ask the same questions over at Aunt Beatrice’s house?”
“Not in a million years. They’d be too busy trying to sit still and not scuff the furniture.”
I set the knife down and put my hands over hers. “What I hear you saying is that in their natural environment these kids aren’t the ‘be seen and not heard’ type.”
She smiled wryly. “No, indeed they’re not.” She wiggled her fingers under mine. “They’re the, ‘Hey, aren’t you the lady with the cool motorcycle-ain’t you the one who set the barn on fire-how’d you get that scar on your head-why are you pregnant and not married?’ type.”
“Precocious little things, aren’t they?”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Okay,” I said, taking a breath, “so when are they coming?”
“The cooking and cleaning party should arrive at one. The dinner is still on for four.”
“It’s only nine now,” I said, giving her my wiggly eyebrow look.
“What about it?” she asked, squinting her eyes at me.
“You know what we have time for?”
“Sex?” she said hopefully.
“Snow.”
She pulled a face and turned back to the eggs. “Some present that is, you dragging me out into the snow on Christmas morning.”
“You’re the one who didn’t want to do presents, remember? You said birthdays are for presents and Christmas is for family?”
“Did I say that?”
“You most certainly did.”
She sighed and whipped a fork around in the eggs fast enough to raise a froth. “Fine. Snow. But after breakfast, okay?”
“Immediately after. Do we have any carrots?”
“Bottom drawer on the right.” Meri poured the eggs into a pan and sprinkled the onions on top. “See if there are any radishes in there. We can use those for eyes.”
I giggled and headed for the refrigerator.
Snow is much heavier than it looks. It caught me by surprise as we rolled the three circles around in the pasture. It looked so light and fluffy coming down, all lace filigree and intricate patterns. It seemed to me that it should be as light as a spider’s web, but Meri reminded me that, in the end, snow is just frozen water, and water can be awfully heavy, especially when you have to carry buckets and buckets of it all the way across the pasture to fill Sergeant’s trough. I asked her how many snowflakes did she think it took to build a snowman, but Meri couldn’t find a ruler small enough to measure a single snowflake, and besides, they kept falling in all different sizes. I knew there had to be a better way to go about it, but we still had a lot of fun catching snowflakes and drawing zeros in the snow.
We used a carrot for the nose, of course, and radishes for the eyes, apple slices for the mouth just to keep everything horse edible, though Sergeant didn’t care much for apples anymore. Meri put a John Deere cap on the snowman’s head and tucked an ugly plaid scarf under its chin that almost matched the plaid of the coat I was wearing. I wanted to give the snowman two faces. I thought it would be more fun for Sergeant that way, who stood peering at us through the open door of the sheep pen, but Meri thought it would be too creepy to look at, and anyway, it might give him a bellyache to eat too many radishes. His stomach was still pretty sensitive.
I was busy adjusting the stick arms when something splat against the side of my head. Something very cold and very wet. I turned and saw Meri stoop to scoop up another handful of snow.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I yelled and ducked behind the snowman.
A snowball whizzed over my head. I knelt to grab my own handful of snow when something hit me in the stomach. I looked down at myself. A snowball splat against my shoulder, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.
“What is it, Bea?” Meri called out to me.
I didn’t answer. I put both hands on my stomach and it hit me again, harder this time. From the inside.
“Oh, god,” I said softly, sitting in the snow.
Meri skidded to a stop beside me. She knelt and slid her arms around my shoulders. “Bea, what is it? What’s wrong? What hurts?”
I looked into her confusion and concern, into her pale blue eyes that today matched the color of the sky behind her, and the enormity of what we had undertaken hit me, like a little foot against my rib cage. Right at that moment, that little foot stopped being a vague concept. It was not teddy bear wallpaper and tiny pairs of socks, not fuzzy pink blankets and pastel jumpers, not the intellectual ponderings of mother-daughter relationships. That little foot was not just a means to an end.
Meri and I were going to have a baby. My heart swelled in a way that I’d never felt before. I leaned into Meri and felt nothing but love.
“Meri, take off your glove and give me your hand.”
She still looked confused, but she gave me her hand and I slid it underneath my coat. Her palm lay flat and cold against my belly. The baby kicked again, and Meri’s eyes went wide. She rubbed her hands over my stomach and her face broke into a grin. “She wants to come out and play, too.”
I laughed and then I cried as I pulled her head down to me. She kissed me hard, and I got lost in the press of her lips, the caress of her hand, the soft tickle of her hair as it slid through my fingers.
“What the hell do you two think you’re doing?” A deep voice boomed from across the pasture.
Meri lifted her head slowly, reluctantly. Taylor climbed over the fence and came stomping through the snow. He stood over us, the hands on his hips balled into tight angry fists.
“Bea, why are you sitting in the snow? Meri, why are you letting her? Christ on a crutch, don’t you know that baby’s naked in there? It’s not wearing a sweater and earmuffs.”
I laughed at him and his scowl deepened. “Taylor, kneel down here and give me your hand.”
“What?” He looked at me like I had gone crazier than one of his betsey bugs.
“Come here and give me your hand,” I repeated slowly.
Meri tensed and frowned, but she didn’t say anything. I kissed her cheek and the frown softened. Taylor knelt and gave me his hand. I pulled off his glove and started to put his hand underneath my coat. He snatched his hand away and shot Meri a wide-eyed frightened look.
Meri gave an exasperated little sigh. “Just do it, Taylor.”
Taylor gave me his hand back and I put it under my coat right next to Meri’s. I smiled at him.
“What am I doing this for?” he asked, confused and a little embarrassed.
“Just wait,” I said.
The baby kicked again. Taylor jerked. “What was that? Was that the baby? Is that normal? Is everything all right? Should I call a doctor?”
Meri snorted. “You haven’t read a single damn book, have you? And you call yourself a father.”
My smile broke into a grin. “It’s a good thing, Taylor. She’s just moving around in there.”
“Really?” Taylor’s face was a mix of wonder and disbelief and then the baby shifted in a long slow roll underneath all of our hands. Taylor pulled his hand away from me, looked at it with glittering eyes and pressed it to his chest. He leaned down suddenly and swept me into a hug, his stubbly face scratching against my neck.
Meri jerked back with her eyes blazing. “Hey . . .” she started to say.
“Oh, shut up,” Taylor said and wrapped his other arm around her. He pulled the three of us tight in together. Meri stayed stiff and rigid against his arm until I reached down and rubbed her butt. She gave me a frustrated growl and slipped her arm around my wais
t.
Horns blared from the driveway. We broke apart, Taylor wiping his nose and looking a little chagrined. A line of cars crunched over the drive beeping and flashing their headlights. They pulled up to the house and about a dozen people spilled out with buckets and mops, brooms and dustpans, bottles and rags. They shouted and hollered at us, waving and laughing. Meri laughed too and shook her head. “I guess that’s the cleaning crew.”
“And the cooking crew, too,” I said, pointing to the line of tinfoil-covered dishes and armloads of grocery bags ducking into the kitchen. Taylor stood and pulled us both to our feet. He looked at Meri and me with a huge lopsided grin spread across his face.
“Merry Christmas to all,” he said still holding our hands, “and especially to me.”
“Taylor, you’re such an ass,” Meri said with the barest hint of a smile.
Turkey and dressing, cranberry sauce and green been casserole, sweet potato pie, crisply chilled apple wine, bright lights and laughter. I’d never had a Christmas dinner like this. It was a madhouse. It was mayhem. It was a marvel. I was deeply in love with everyone there.
Meri was radiant with her wine-blushed cheeks and the fuzzy reindeer horns someone brought her as a gift. Taylor seemed larger than life when he stood to carve the ham in his red Santa hat, his eyes bright and shining. Aunt Bea sat at the head of the table as if it were her proper place in the world. My mother sat at her right hand, looking small in her chair but wide-eyed with wonder. The children ran and shouted, their mothers scolding half-heartedly, as plates were passed and glasses filled and filled again.
“Oh no, we’re out of rolls,” said the cousin on my left, a red haired and freckled girl sitting in an awkward stage of too old to be a child but still too young to be an adult. She rose a little in her chair. “Heya, Andy, you guys got some rolls in there?” she yelled into the den.
“Incoming!” was the answer.
A roll flew through the air in a graceful arc and landed with a splat in a bowl of mashed potatoes.
“Andrew Duncan, you stop throwing food around in there, ya hear?” shouted a voice from the end of the table. Another voice, loud and proud, started to tell a story about a legendary food fight in the high school cafeteria as other voices chimed in with the details of hamburger Frisbees and flying french fries. I was laughing so hard that I almost missed hearing the doorbell ring. At the end of the table, I saw Meri lean over toward Aunt Beatrice. Auntie shrugged. Meri wiped her lips and got up from the table.
“Excuse me, honey, could you pass the green beans?” asked a cousin sitting across the table from me. She was a large woman with a razor sharp wit, sitting next to her small skinny husband who had spent the afternoon saying the craziest things in a deadpan monotone. I had come to like them both very much. I watched her serve a tiny portion of green beans to him and pile a huge mound onto her own plate while she dissected, in weighty philosophical tones, the fallacies of the Jack Sprat story. I was tittering to myself, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up into Meri’s pale face.
“What is it?” I asked, reaching for her hand.
“The door,” she said. “It’s for you.” I saw her eyes dart over to my mother, who was watching us out of the corner of her eye.
I folded my napkin and Meri helped me out of the chair.
“Who is it?” I asked, but I already knew.
“Your father’s on the porch.”
On my porch where he had no right to be. And on Christmas Day. I felt a slow burning anger kindle in the place where my fear used to lie. I tossed my napkin onto my chair. “Is he with an army of lawyers or just a gaggle of butt kissers?”
Meri shook her head. “He’s alone.”
My anger flittered and snuffed out. “What do you mean alone?”
“Alone as in nobody is with him. He’s by himself.”
“Not even Weasel?”
She shook her head again. “Do you want me to tell him to go away?”
I expected to see the cold deadness take over her eyes, but it never came. Only pity and unease drifted across her face.
“No,” I said, gripping her hand. “Thank you, Meri. I’ll go tell him myself.”
She squeezed my hand back and let it go. I went to the door.
I found my father sitting on the porch swing, still and waiting. He looked terrible, thin and haggard and old. Really old. Older than Methuselah, Meri would say. His coat hung limp across the hunch of his shoulders, his slacks were uncreased, his steel-gray hair was wild and natty. A week’s worth of beard stuck like wet ashes against his chin. It shocked me a little. I had always thought of my father as eternal and unchanging. Here was one more thing I would have to unlearn.
He had two small wrapped packages in his hands. Silver foiled paper, red and green ribbons. I stepped onto the front porch and stood looking down at him for the first time that I could ever remember. He looked up at me with an expression that was strange and haunted. His eyes roamed over my scar and then dropped to my stomach. He frowned suddenly and looked at his feet. He’d never done that before in his life. I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
“It’s Christmas,” he said. His blood and thunder voice sounded cracked and broken.
I took a deep breath. “Yes, it is.”
He nodded his head toward the front door. “Sounds like quite a bash.”
I shrugged. “It’s Christmas.”
“Yes, it is,” he said softy. He didn’t say anything else, and it didn’t seem like he was going to.
I glanced over my shoulder at the front door and wished that I were on the other side. “The party,” I said, for the sake of saying something, “it’s a tradition around here. The whole extended family gets together on Christmas. Saves bouncing around from house to house. It’s because of the snow, I think, and the mountains. Traveling around too much can be dangerous this time of year, so . . .” I shut my mouth when I realized that I was rambling.
“Seems like a good idea,” he said, looking at the mountains where the white snow capped the dark, sleepy trees.
“Yes, I guess it does.”
He gestured with one of the gifts that he held in his hands. “I brought you something. For you and . . .” He waved it at the door.
“Meri. Her name is Meri.”
“I brought something for you and Meri,” he said very precisely as if saying her name made his lips uncomfortable. Maybe it did.
“Because it’s Christmas?” I asked with a light touch of sarcasm.
“Because you’re my daughter.” A spark of anger flared in his eyes and then died leaving behind only an empty kind of sadness. “You’re my daughter,” he repeated. “Somewhere along the way, I think I forgot that.”
I don’t think he ever knew it in the first place, but if he was starting to get it now, then I was willing to let it go.
He raised the second box. “I brought something for your mother, too. I heard she was here or that you probably knew where to find her.”
There was no body language to contradict his words, no hidden agenda written in the curl of his lip, only the tired bend of his back, the sad squint of his eyes. “She’s here, but I don’t think she wants to see you.”
He nodded and held both gifts out to me. “Would you give it to her? It’s not much, just a little something.”
“Sure,” I said and took the boxes from him. “Thank you.”
He set his empty hands on his knees. “That’s all I came for.” He stood. “I’ll let you get back to your party.” He brushed past me, stepped carefully down the porch stairs and started down the path toward the driveway and the long line of cars parked there. The last car in the line was a deep blue Cadillac with thirty-day tags. Quite a modest car for him, considering, and I didn’t even know my father knew how to drive. There were probably a lot of things that I didn’t know about my father. I wondered if any of them were good things.
“Dad?”
He turned around with a strange mix of emotions on his f
ace.
I jerked my chin toward the front door. “Why don’t you come in? We’ll put you at a different table than mom.”
He smiled, sad and radiant all at the same time. “Thank you, Collier,” he said, but he shook his head. “I appreciate it, but I don’t think it would be a good idea. Your mother . . .” His eyes cut to the trees, pinched and squinting. “I haven’t treated her very well.”
“No, you haven’t.”
Anger flashed again and then died. He looked back at me. “Or you either.”
“Or me either.”
“I’m going to try to change that.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was almost an apology, but it wasn’t quite. “It’ll take some time,” I finally said to him a little doubtfully.
He put his hands in his pockets. It made his shoulders slump even more. “Just so you know, in case people come asking, I resigned my seat yesterday. It’s probably not in the papers yet with the holidays here.”
I was speechless. His seat in the senate was the one thing he coveted more than anything else. It was the one thing he prized more than money, more than fame, more than family. It had allowed him to be the power behind the president for more years than I could remember. It had brought the presidency nearly within his grasp. I couldn’t imagine him giving that up. Not even the hope of it. I wondered how bad things had really gotten for him. Aunt Beatrice and three fourths of the senate body would be beside themselves with joy, but right then and there, it only made me sad.
“So, now you’ll have time.”
“I’m going to try to spend it a little more wisely.”
I smiled at him as best I could. “That sounds like a good plan.”
He nodded his head at me and turned. He walked past the line of cars, got into his Cadillac and backed it down the drive. It turned onto the road. There was a brief flash from his taillights, and then he was gone.
The front door opened behind me and my mother stepped onto the porch.
“Did you hear any of that?” I asked.
She nodded. “I heard most of it. The door wasn’t shut all the way.”
“He brought you something.” I held out the gift with the green ribbons.
As Far As Far Enough Page 20
