She fluffed up two pillows against the headboard and leaned back. She loved this room, with its soothing tones of pale green and beige, the soft cotton sheets and goose-down duvet on the bed, the muted lighting. It was so peaceful here. James still hadn’t emerged from his study. Usually, by this hour, he was under the covers, reading a newspaper or business magazine, waiting for her to join him.
She opened her date book, enjoying, as always, the soft leather and thick cream-colored pages. Her own appointments were in red. Tomorrow started with a planning meeting for the high school’s spring fund-raiser, after which she had to take in her BMW for a lube and oil. She made a note to bring her book club’s choice for this month to read while she was waiting.
After that, food shopping for the small dinner party they were having on Saturday, so she could start preparing a few days in advance. She would pick up James’s dry cleaning and the pearl necklace she was having restrung as a gift for Lizzie, a gift Meg knew would be unwanted now but which she hoped would be appreciated in later years. Then it would be time to drive to piano lessons (a protesting Lizzie—purple ink) and to the shoe store for new sneakers (Sam—blue ink). Swing back around to retrieve Lizzie, then get Will (green ink) from basketball practice at school, and home to make dinner. She scheduled an hour the next night to pay bills and catch up on paperwork.
She turned to her master to-do list, a veritable rainbow of color-coded tasks at the front of the book. Lizzie needed her dental checkup, and Meg jotted that down in purple below the forty-some other tasks on the list. No matter what she did, that list just kept getting longer. It seemed that for every item she completed, another two instantly took its place. Some of the less pressing obligations reappeared month after month, causing Meg guilt pangs over what she viewed as her negligence. Still, there were many days when she wondered what all of this was adding up to. Was there a prize for being the person who accomplished the most errands? Maybe the day you got to the end of your to-do list was the day you died. Just in case, she thought with a smile, it’s a good thing I always leave some stuff undone.
She closed the book and was placing it on her bedside table when James came into the room. Having left him alone all evening, Meg had assumed that by now his bad mood would have dissipated, but she saw that she was mistaken. His mood was, if anything, darker.
“Honey,” she began.
He threw her a hard look. “Not now.” He began unbuttoning his shirt, his anger evident in his sharp movements.
“James, what on earth is the matter?” She refused to go along with this any further.
“I said not now,” he snapped. Their eyes met, and he softened, his shoulders sagging. “I’m sorry, Meg, I shouldn’t … I’m really sorry.”
She leaned forward. “Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on.” James exhaled slowly. “It’s been a rotten day, that’s all. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”
“You didn’t even say hello to the kids tonight. Please tell me what’s bothering you.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and kissed her on the lips. “I’m sorry for being a jerk, but I swear, it’s nothing.” He smiled, shifting gears. “And a very happy Halloween to you, too. Sam better have saved me some of his candy.”
“You know our Sam,” Meg said lightly, her tone matching his change of mood. “He had a candy bar and some M&M’s, then put the rest away to dole out to himself sensibly.”
James shook his head. “I can’t imagine doing that. My friends and I used to eat ourselves sick on Halloween.”
“The simple pleasures of childhood.”
He stood. “I’m going to brush my teeth and all that good stuff. Then we’ll talk. You’ll tell me about your day and the kids’ day, and I promise you’ll have my undivided attention.”
“That’s great.” Meg smiled at him.
Bending over, he kissed the top of her head, then grinned and went into their bathroom. She heard the water running at his sink, her husband singing an old Bob Dylan song in an exaggerated scratchy voice. It would seem that he had put aside whatever unpleasantness was on his mind. She didn’t believe it for a second.
Chapter 2
Meg flipped through a rack of party dresses but made no attempt to pick out anything. She knew that any dress she selected for Lizzie would be met by an immediate veto. Meg understood that she wasn’t exactly on top of what teenagers liked to wear, but she didn’t think she deserved her daughter’s inevitable look of disbelief whenever she held something up for consideration. As far as choosing something for Lizzie to wear to the high school’s big Christmas Dance—Meg wasn’t even going to try.
She looked over at her daughter, who was searching through racks across the Nordstrom dress department with great intensity. Her mind flashed on Lizzie’s early years, when Meg had had the pleasure of outfitting her little girl however she wanted. She remembered the bunny-print pajamas, the white bathing suit with navy-blue bows, a yellow sundress. Little white summer sandals, a tiny jean jacket. That all ended around the time Lizzie turned four, when she insisted that her rainbow T-shirt, flower-print stretch pants, and a white tutu were the perfect outfit for preschool. Every day. And, thought Meg with a smile, when she added the red glitter party shoes, it went so easily from day to evening wear.
“Okay.” Lizzie appeared at Meg’s side, her arms filled with dresses. “I’m going to try these on.”
“Want me to come with you?”
“No.” The girl bustled off before her mother could follow.
Meg had spotted a flash of dark purple satin and some black nylon material with big silver sequins among her daughter’s choices. She reassured herself that the odds were against Lizzie actually choosing one of those. This was only their first attempt at finding a dress for the dance. No doubt they would have to endure several shopping trips before Lizzie, growing ever more tense and irritable, made the final decision. This was the reason Meg had allocated six weeks to navigate the minefield. All the hysteria had to unfold in, paradoxically, an orderly fashion. If past experience was any indication, Lizzie would question whether she had made the right decision until the moment she walked out the door to attend the actual event.
Sure enough, when Lizzie returned from the dressing room, she was holding only one dress, pale pink with simple beading details and cap sleeves. “What do you think of this one?”
“Very nice,” Meg said, reaching for the dangling price tag. She froze. “Five hundred dollars? Are you joking?”
“Oh, Mom, come on!” Lizzie snapped. “These kinds of dresses are expensive.”
Meg stared at her. “Did I somehow give you the impression that I would spend five hundred dollars on a dress for a school dance? A dress you’ll probably wear once?”
“What did you think it would cost? This is what a decent dress goes for. And it looked great on me.” Lizzie sounded exasperated. “Excuse me, but what do your dresses cost?”
Meg drew herself up. “What my clothes cost is none of your business!”
“Well, how hypocritical is that?”
Meg was infuriated, but at the same time she felt a stab of guilt, knowing that she did have some obscenely expensive clothes hanging in her own closet. James liked her to dress a certain way when they went out. He even seemed to enjoy shopping with her every so often, encouraging her to buy the best suit, the good Italian shoes. Meg also had to admit that she was frequently inconsistent with her daughter, splurging on a ridiculously expensive sweater or skirt for Lizzie, then feeling she had gone too far and sharply drawing the line at another item.
Still, she didn’t expect her daughter to take those treats for granted. And she deserved some respect from her child.
“Put the dress back.” Her voice was cold. “We’re going home.”
“What are you talking about? We have to get something.”
“No.” Meg’s eyes flashed. “No, we really don’t.”
“I can’t believe this! Al
l the good dresses will be gone by the time we can go shopping again.” Lizzie shook her head. “Come on, Mom. You know you’ll want to get me something nice in the end, so there’s no point to this.”
Meg didn’t respond. She strode toward the exit, knowing her daughter had no choice but to follow if she didn’t want to walk home. When Lizzie caught up in the parking lot, she was empty-handed and silent. She spent the entire drive home texting on her cell phone. Meg’s feelings vacillated between anger at her daughter for her sense of entitlement and annoyance at herself for the way she handled these issues. Sometimes being a parent was so hard, she thought, just so darn hard.
Back at the house, Lizzie slammed the car door and stomped upstairs to her room. Still upset, Meg went to the extra freezer in the garage, peering inside at her choices. She and James were going out that night with two couples, both of the husbands executives in James’s department. She had left him a message that morning reminding him. She wasn’t looking forward to it, but she understood that socializing was important to his success. Before leaving, she would put something together for the kids’ dinner. Lizzie was responsible for watching Sam, something she did periodically and with surprising good nature. Will would be at home as well.
“Lamb chops it is.”
Meg reached into the icy air to retrieve the shrink-wrapped package. She dropped the frozen meat into the kitchen sink and set her bag on the counter, hitting the play button on the message machine.
“I tried your cell, but it went right to the message,” came her husband’s voice. “Did you forget to charge it? I got your message about dinner tonight, but I’d forgotten all about it, and I can’t do it anyway. There’s an emergency meeting at work, so we have to cancel. I’ll take care of it. Don’t wait up for me.”
An emergency meeting on a Saturday night? If I didn’t know better, Meg thought, I’d swear he was cheating on me. Fortunately, she knew he really would be at the office, because things there had been going from bad to worse over the past few weeks. That’s where James was right now, spending a sunny Saturday behind his desk. Of course, he was hardly the only one whose company was in dire economic straits these days. He was closemouthed about the specifics of his firm’s troubles, but she could see the stress in his distractedness and growing irritability, not to mention the new dark shadows beneath his eyes.
She had no idea what it all meant, but it frightened her. Was there a chance he might lose his job? He assured her that wouldn’t happen, but she read the newspapers and, like everyone else, saw the layoffs going on across the country. In addition, Meg knew virtually nothing about where their savings were invested; James had always handled that end of their finances. She did—and didn’t—want to know if they had lost anything substantial in the stock market over the past months. James made it clear he didn’t wish to be questioned on these issues, and she knew better than to press him. She had resolved instead to stick her head in the sand because the only other option was to drive herself crazy with pointless speculation. Besides, she thought, it had to be more helpful for everybody if she remained upbeat.
Meg hoped that whatever was going on wouldn’t get bad enough to interrupt their Thanksgiving plans. Every year for the five years they had lived in North Carolina, Meg had invited several families in the neighborhood for a huge feast, one she spent a solid week preparing. They were families who, like them, had no other relatives or lived far away from those they did have. Meg always put in a call to her parents, her only living relatives, but they weren’t up to making the trip from Homer, New York. Not that they would have come anyway, she knew. Nor, to be honest, would she have wanted them if they did.
Meg had always had a strained relationship with her parents, both of whom were so controlled and controlling, so disapproving of everyone, including her, their only child. She could never understand their narrow-mindedness or why they felt entitled to pass judgment on everyone else’s supposed shortcomings. One of the best moments of her life had been finding out she had received a full scholarship to college. The first day of freshman year couldn’t come too soon for her. Her parents couldn’t understand why she would go to a school so inconveniently far away, and she didn’t bother explaining that was exactly why she had chosen it.
Before she was born, her parents had started what grew from a tiny general store to a small department store with a specialty in fishing equipment, selling everything from waders and rods to bait and tackle. They had never forgiven Meg and James for refusing to move back to her hometown and join the family business after they married. Without the couple’s participation, the store, their lives’ work, would disappear once they could no longer run it.
Their irrational demand had come as an unpleasant shock, and it was pretty much the last straw. Both Meg and James found this long-held grudge incomprehensible. It cast a pall over the few phone conversations she and her parents did have. But Meg tried to remain on decent terms with them for the sake of her children.
She often wished that the three of them had cousins, but James, too, had no siblings. His parents had died in a car accident when he was in his twenties. Sadly, there was no one else, other than James’s elderly uncle, who was in a nursing home in California, in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s.
Meg loved Thanksgiving, so, despite the lack of extended family, she went all out. Up went all the construction-paper turkeys and pilgrim hats made by the children over the years in elementary school. She fussed over gourds, cranberries, and Indian corn to create painter-ready still-life arrangements. Berries and bright orange, red, and yellow leaves accented any surfaces that struck her fancy. Meg suspected that, as they had on Halloween, her efforts would go unnoticed at best or, at worst, be ridiculed. Nonetheless, she would do it for herself and for the younger neighborhood children who would be in attendance.
With an unexpected free evening, she could get a head start on her menu plan and to-do list. She went to get some paper, mentally reviewing what needed doing. Just for starters, polish the silver, wash and iron the linens, check the candle supply, bring up the largest serving platters from the basement closet. The list would be a long one. If she was lucky, she might get the kids to help with the platters, but that was about the only work she could expect to wrench out of them.
As she grabbed a pad from the kitchen desk drawer, she glanced up at the bulletin board that held the family’s notes and schedules. She saw there was an addition to the Holiday Posting. About a year ago, Will began tacking up a selection of each month’s strangest yet real holidays, and it had become a regular feature on the board. Lizzie and Sam also weighed in—all this information culled, Meg supposed, from the Internet, apparently the source for everything in the universe. Or at least their universe. November, it turned out, was Peanut Butter Lovers’ Month. Sam had written that it was also Diabetic Eye Disease Awareness Month. Today Meg saw two new contributions in Lizzie’s handwriting: Start Your Own Country Day, following right on the heels of Absurdity Day.
Meg laughed. Now, those were holidays.
The front door slammed. That would be Will getting dropped off by Michael Connolly’s parents. The two boys often went skateboarding in the park, with Meg and Emma Connolly sharing carpool duty.
Meg heard her son go upstairs. “Hi, honey!”
No response.
She walked out to the bottom of the stairs, spotting Will just before he disappeared from view on the second floor. “Hey, Will, how are you?”
He stopped and took a step back, holding on to his wildly colorful skateboard. “Oh, hi, Mom.” He gave her a small smile.
Meg regarded him. Something didn’t seem right. For two years, a full set of braces had slightly altered the appearance of his lower face, but in September they had been replaced by a smaller retainer. The facial change was minor, but it was visible to Meg. “Honey, why aren’t you wearing your retainer?”
“You’re fast, I gotta give you that.” He shifted the skateboard in his arms. “Yeah, I was going to
tell you.”
Uh-oh. This was why he’d tried to bypass her downstairs: so she wouldn’t get a good look at him.
“Will?”
“It broke. I left it on a bench, I swear, for, like, two seconds, and somebody must’ve sat on it or something.”
“But the case should have protected it.”
Will fiddled with a skateboard wheel.
“Oh. It wasn’t in the case.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “You took your retainer straight from your mouth and put it on a public bench?”
He shrugged. “It was bothering me, so I took it out, and when I came back, it was, like, all bent and busted up.”
“Let me take a look. Maybe Dr. Russell can salvage it.”
“Trust me, no way.”
“Can I at least take a look at it?”
“I threw it out in the park. If you want, we could go get another one in an hour or so. I have some stuff I have to do first.”
“Get another one?” Meg’s voice rose. “Do you realize that makes three this fall? Three!”
“Mom, it’s not my fault! I know I lost the first one, but that could happen to anybody. I can’t help it that some jerk broke this one. Besides, that’s only two.”
“You need a new one. That would make three. At four hundred dollars apiece.”
“Oh yeah, I guess you’re right. Bummer.” He scratched his head distractedly. “So, do you want to go later or what?”
“You can’t just drop by the orthodontist’s office. Besides, it’s Saturday.”
“Oh.” He moved toward his room. “Okay. Whatever.”
Meg gripped the banister in anger. “We invested so much time and money in braces, and now that they’re off, you can’t be bothered to hang on to a retainer for more than a month. But hey, it doesn’t matter, right? We’ll just keep replacing them. Lizzie has to have a five-hundred-dollar dress! You both deserve all these things, naturally. Nobody needs to be grateful or take any responsibility in any way, nobody needs to stop and consider that we are not—I know it’s hard to believe—made of money.”
An Amish Christmas: A Novel Page 2
