Christmas Mourning

by Margaret Maron

  “Yeah?” said his dad. “You gonna sit on his lap? Get your picture taken?”

  “Maybe.” His eyes sparkled with mischief.

  “What’ll you say when he asks what you want him to bring you?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Mary Pat and me, we’re gonna ask him for cell phones.”

  “Good luck with that,” Dwight told him. “He’ll bring you a cell phone about the same time he brings you a Lamborghini.”

  “What’s a Lamborghini?” Cal asked.

  “Something else you’re never gonna get,” Dwight said, tousling his hair.

  He went back to the stove for a second helping of stew and Cal leaned in close to whisper, “So can we? Please?”

  When he’d asked me earlier, I had said that we’d see, thinking it was really too early.

  “Presents are for Christmas morning,” decreed the starchy conformist preacher who lives in the back of my head.

  “But Dwight will enjoy playing with it more before Christmas than after,” argued the rule-breaking pragmatist who shares their housekeeping duties.

  “Pleeeeze?” said Cal.

  “Okay,” I relented. “After supper.”

  By the time Dwight finished eating, Cal had carried his own plate and mine out to the dishwasher.

  Dwight raised an eyebrow at so much unsolicited helpfulness. “What’s happening? We expecting company or something?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said innocently.

  “You finished, Dad?” Cal asked, reaching for his plate.

  “Looks like I am whether I want to be or not,” he said with a puzzled smile.

  There was a metallic clash from the kitchen as tableware hit the dishwasher basket, then Cal darted back past us and into the living room. “Come sit here, Dad,” he said, patting a place on the couch.

  I cleared everything off the coffee table while Cal ran down the hall to retrieve the huge flat box he and I had stashed under his bed last weekend.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Dwight said when the brightly wrapped gift with its big red bow was placed on the low table before him. “Santa Claus come already?”

  “Yeah,” Cal said, nearly bursting with anticipation. “Open it! Open it!”

  Happily for Cal and me, Dwight’s not one of those methodical types who has to untie every ribbon or undo every strip of tape. He found a loose edge and ripped the paper away with both hands. I’m sure that he was prepared to fake pleasure no matter what it was, but his prepared smile turned to genuine delight as the picture on the box registered. It’s not that Dwight had a deprived, poverty-stricken childhood by any means, but his father never made much money, and after his death, during the years that Miss Emily was finishing college and getting her master’s degree, her budget had been too tight to stretch to the train set he had yearned for.

  How long he would have sat there just grinning at the box is something I’ll never know, because Cal was already trying to pull the lid off and show him all the wonders within. “The headlight really works, Dad, and the engine puffs smoke and we got extra tracks so it’ll go all the way around the tree. We could’ve gotten a passenger train, but we thought you’d like a freight train better. She and I went in on it together. Do you like it? Were you surprised?”

  “I like it lots, buddy,” he said and swept the boy up in a huge bear hug.

  Two minutes later, he and Cal were on the floor, fitting the tracks together to encircle the tree.

  Several packages had accumulated beneath the drooping branches, but when I went to move them out of the way, Dwight grabbed a small flat one about the size of a paperback book that hadn’t been there earlier.

  “No shaking till Christmas morning,” he warned me. “Especially not this one.”

  He and Cal shared a conspiratorial grin.

  “Hey, no fair!” I protested. “I let y’all shake mine.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Cal, who last year had rattled every present with his or Dwight’s name on it till I thought he’d wear the bells and holly off the wrapping paper. “That’s ’cause you cheat and put in rocks and marbles and BBs.”

  “All’s fair in love and Christmas presents,” I told him and went out to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and check to see if the laundry was dry yet.

  There was a knock at the door and Haywood stuck his head in before I could answer it.

  Haywood’s one of the “big twins” from Daddy’s first marriage, and even though they’re not identical, he and Herman are both tall and wide. (The younger set, Zach and Adam, are identical and are referred to as the “little twins” even though they’re both a full inch taller.) Haywood’s never been one to stand on ceremony and I’d have to lock the doors to keep him from walking in on us as the mood takes him.

  “Hey, shug. Y’all busy?” Without waiting for an answer, he set his porkpie hat on the counter and handed me a well-wrapped package that must have weighed three or four pounds. “Aunt Zell sent y’all a fruitcake. Um, boy, that coffee sure smells fitten to drink!” He unzipped his heavy jacket. “Bet a slice of this cake would go real good with it.”

  I laughed. “So how many slices of Aunt Zell’s cakes have you already had today?”

  He grinned. “Not a crumb today.” The grin grew sheepish. “ ’Course now, I got to say that the two slices I had yesterday were right hefty, and Bel won’t let me have any more till both the children are home, and Jane Ann can’t come till tomorrow.”

  He gave me a hopeful look.

  What the hell? Another serving of fruitcake wasn’t going to affect that fifty-inch waistline any more than cutting two million out of the federal budget was going to affect the national deficit. I took his jacket and sent him on into the living room.

  “Lord have mercy!” I heard him say. “What you boys got there?”

  A gleeful toooot-tooot answered him.

  It was almost nine-thirty before Haywood reluctantly left. By then I had folded and put away two loads of laundry and the train was circling the tree, headlight shining, whistle blowing, smoke puffing. A pile of pine twigs had been tossed on the fire, sacrificed to give better clearance for the locomotive. Cal turned the controls over to Dwight, let Bandit outside for a final time, then went off to brush his teeth and get into bed. Bandit had already settled in beside him when I went to check on them.

  I’m not sure if he was getting less self-conscious about accepting affection, but he had quit shying away from my touch. When I leaned over to kiss his forehead that night after tucking the blanket around him, he actually hugged me back and said, “Dad really likes that we got him that train, doesn’t he?”

  “He really does,” I agreed, remembering how solemnly he’d handed me the twenty dollars he had saved up to help pay for it.

  He reminds me of a young horse that’s not quite saddle-broke. Enough sugar cubes, enough unsudden movements, and one of these days he’s going to trot right over to me without any coaxing.

  Or so I kept telling myself.

  On the other hand, he had almost quit calling me by name, referring to me as “she” or “her” or “you” unless there was absolutely no way to avoid saying “Deborah.” Dwight hadn’t noticed and I wasn’t going to call attention to it, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt a little.

  When I came back to the living room, Dwight had put a CD of soft carols on the player and turned off all the lights except for the tree itself. The last log of the evening burned low on the hearth. I slipped off my shoes to join him on the couch, lying down across his chest with his arms around me and my head on his shoulder.

  Snuggling myself more deeply into his arms, I said, “You don’t have any plans for our anniversary, do you?”

  “Dinner at Las Margaritas, then back here for champagne,” he said promptly. “Mama’s already said Cal can spend the night there.”

  I was touched. Dinner at that Mexican restaurant in Garner had led to his unexpected proposal.

  “Sounds wonderful,” I told him. “And then can
we go dancing Tuesday night with Portland and Avery?”

  He nodded, then murmured, “Thank you for my train.” He tipped my face up for a long sweet kiss and we held each other quietly, savoring the moment. Nowhere to go, nowhere to be, just here and now, together, both aware of where this would lead but without any urgency to rush.

  Eventually, he slipped his hand up under my sweater and chuckled to realize that I’d shucked my bra sometime earlier.

  The log had burned down to embers before we finally pulled ourselves up, unplugged the tree, and got ready for bed.

  While brushing my teeth, I remembered that odd quality in Dwight’s voice when he called me before; and when I joined him under the covers, I asked what had kept him at work.

  “You know how the hospitals always draw a vial of blood when car wreck victims are brought in and how they test for alcohol?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, when they drew Mallory Johnson’s, it registered point-oh-three.”

  “Really?” Even though I didn’t know the girl, that surprised me. “Nothing my nieces said indicated she did alcohol.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Malcolm said, too, when he and Sarah came in yesterday to hear our findings on the wreck.” Dwight reached up to switch off the lamp above his head. “When I told them her alcohol level, he went ballistic. Swore that Mallory never drank anything stronger than Coke and that somebody must have slipped it into whatever she drank at a party she went to after the game Tuesday night. Not just a little alcohol, but maybe crack or meth, too. Sarah did say that she was taking Benadryl for her cold and even a little whiskey could have intensified the effects of Benadryl, slowed her reflexes, maybe left her disoriented. That might explain why she’d go off a straight stretch of highway. I’ve got a deputy checking it out, getting a list of who was there and if anyone saw her add a shot of something to her Coke.”

  “The girls are coming over tomorrow morning to make cookies,” I said slowly. “Want me to ask if they’ve heard anything?”

  “Yeah. Won’t hurt, and it might make Malcolm and Sarah feel better to know. Right now, he’s pushing us to run a tox screen on her blood sample even though that would take at least six weeks. I didn’t want to tell him we don’t have the budget for that. Not for a one-car accident.”

  CHAPTER 8

  We are not daily beggars who beg from door to door,

  But we are neighbours’ children whom you have seen before…

  —“Here We Come A-Wassailing” (Traditional English)

  When my nieces were younger and I still lived in Dobbs with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash, the girls would converge on Aunt Zell’s kitchen the Saturday before Christmas the instant they could persuade a parent to drive them into town. More than once I had groggily answered a six a.m. phone call to hear a small voice ask, “Can I come now, Aunt Deb’rah?”

  Annie Sue, Herman’s youngest child, was nine the chilly December morning that Uncle Ash opened the door to get his newspaper and found her huddled on the front step nearly blue with cold. She had ridden her bicycle the few short blocks over from their house at dawn to make sure she wouldn’t miss anything.

  These days, the other girls don’t climb out of bed much before midmorning, and Annie Sue is still the first one here even though she now has the longest drive. Her new white electrician’s truck rolled into the yard as Dwight was pouring himself a third cup of coffee.

  “Actually, I’m going to do some work today,” she said with a grin when Dwight teased her that she just wanted to show off the truck’s redesigned logo. “Reese is coming over later to help me install your new aff-sees.”

  “The what-sees?” I looked at Dwight.

  He shrugged.

  Annie Sue spelled it out for us. “A-F-C-I’s. Short for arc fault circuit interrupters. Circuit breakers.”

  “Why do we need new circuit breakers? This house is only three years old.”

  “Because they weren’t required when Dad wired you up. These babies will trip the breaker if there’s a frayed or exposed wire and maybe keep your house from catching fire. I’m putting them in all the bedrooms here on the farm. The state requires them in new construction even though the Home Builders Association bitched and yelled about the extra cost.”

  “So how much is this going to cost us?” Dwight asked.

  “No more than sixty or eighty dollars.”

  I was surprised. “That’s all? Then why’s the Builders Association fighting it?”

  “Beats me,” Annie Sue said. “They’re a lot cheaper than the granite counters and designer upgrades the builders are always pushing, and those don’t save lives. That’s why come Reese and I are doing it at cost for all the family. I’ll get started here this afternoon but we have to fit it in around the rest of our work and deer season.”

  Dwight raised his eyebrows at that. “What’s deer season got to do with it?”

  She shook her head with a rueful smile. “You know Reese. He said he saw the tracks of a big buck down at Uncle Haywood’s end of the long pond last weekend, so it’s hard to keep him focused.”

  “Tell him we’ll take the tenderloin off his hands,” Dwight said as he picked up his keys and put on his jacket.

  “Anyhow, I’ll need a key so we can finish up on Monday or Tuesday when we’re out this way. A lot of people are getting electrical appliances for Christmas, so we’re real busy.”

  Annie Sue began taking courses at Colleton Community long before she graduated from high school last spring. When she passed the state test and earned her electrician’s license back in the summer, Herman officially changed the name of his electrical contracting business to Knott and Family. He actually wanted to make it Knott and Daughter as a slap at Reese, who could not be shamed into buckling down and acquiring his own license, but Annie Sue wouldn’t let him. Reese can pull wire as competently as most other electricians, but he’s never had his little sister’s flair for it nor the discipline to jump through the educational hoops, and it doesn’t seem to bother him one bit to work off her license or their dad’s.

  Or to take off and go hunting when he’s supposed to be on the clock.

  Even though she’s now holding down an adult job and drawing adult wages, Annie Sue wasn’t quite ready to give up making Christmas cookies, and she helped me clear away the breakfast things and get out the baking utensils while Dwight and Cal went to pick up Mary Pat and Jake.

  Because Kate lets Cal go there after school on the weekdays, we try to give her a break by taking the two older children on Saturdays.

  They trooped into the kitchen, red-cheeked and ready to measure and mix while Dwight took our weekly accumulation of trash and recyclables to the neighborhood disposal center a few miles away. All three of them wanted to crack an egg and I tried not to wince when flecks of shell went into the bowl or when Jake’s egg slipped out of his hands and splatted on the floor. After they cut out and decorated several gingerbread men, I showed them how to use drinking straws to punch holes in the stiff dough so that they could later add a loop of red yarn after baking and hang their creations on the Christmas tree.

  When the cookies had cooled enough, Annie Sue helped each boy pipe his name in white icing across the fragrant chest of his best effort. Mary Pat insisted on doing hers by herself. Eventually, there would be a personalized gingerbread man for every member of the family, and these would act as place cards for our big Christmas dinner at the homeplace. This was something Mother had done when I was a child, and when I came back to Colleton County I claimed it as my own contribution to the family feasts.

  By the time Seth’s daughter Jess, Andrew’s Ruth, and Zach’s Emma arrived, the kitchen was fragrant with cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. They quickly shed their jackets, washed their hands, and plunged in.

  Once there were no more eggs to crack, Cal and Jake soon grew bored and wandered outside to help Dwight unload the empty trash cans and recycling bins and put them back in the garage, but Mary Pat decided she wanted to hang with the girls,
especially since they had brought along Melissa, my brother Robert’s eleven-year-old granddaughter.

  Ruth was all around the kitchen with her digital camera, documenting our baking session for a “Christmas on the Farm” album she planned to make for Daddy. He refuses to have anything to do with computers and misses out on the uploaded photos the rest of us share back and forth. He wants color prints he can hold in his hands. Emma’s our computer whiz and she and Ruth keep saying that one of these days they’re going to take all the old photo albums that are cornflaking on a shelf at the homeplace and put them on a DVD.

  We had finished with the gingerbread men and moved on to Mexican wedding cakes rolled in powdered sugar and heavily decorated sugar cookies when Haywood’s Jane Ann walked into the kitchen lugging a large navy duffel bag with a navy, gold, and white UNCG logo on the side.

  “I’m not too late for the bourbon balls, am I?” she cried as the others rushed to hug her. “I got here quick as I could.” There were dark circles under her sleepy blue eyes.

  “You’re just now getting home?” I asked, eyeing her duffel bag. “I thought you guys were due in last night.”

  “Yeah, well, Stevie made it, but today was the absolute deadline for one of my term papers,” she confessed. “I pulled an all-nighter and almost missed my ride.”

  “So what else is new?” Jessica asked.

  Annie Sue shook her head, but the rest of us just laughed.

  Jane Ann is the family’s biggest procrastinator. She’s bright. She’s observant. She can and will do whatever’s required. But she never finishes anything until the very last minute, and too often that last minute is five minutes too late because she never allows for any unexpected delays. She spent her whole high school years doing extra work to compensate for overdue assignments, and it would appear that college had not changed her.

  “Where’s your car?” Ruth asked, clicking a picture of her cousin, who looked perfectly beautiful, even in a UNCG hoodie, no makeup, and her hair skinned back from her face.