Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane

by Mary McDonough

  Emma grimaced. “As long as no one laughs at those awful hairstyles I had!”

  “I haven’t seen any of the family photos or films in years,” Andie said. “To be honest, I kind of forgot about them.”

  “You’ll enjoy seeing them, Andie,” Daniel said. “I know you will.”

  Andie turned to Anna Maria. “Would it be outrageous of me to ask for another piece of Danny’s cake?”

  “No,” she said. “And it wouldn’t be outrageous for you to eat it, either.”

  Daniel watched as Andie dug into her second piece of cake and Emma chatted with Sophia and Marco, still excited from their big night. He was sincerely pleased that his sisters would be attending the country club’s Christmas party. He had been worried they might refuse. He wasn’t exactly sure why it mattered that they be there, but he knew for certain that it did. It mattered a lot.

  CHAPTER 23

  The following day Emma and Maureen met for lunch at the Pink Rose Café. Maureen was wearing a brooch in the shape of Santa’s face. Santa had a very bulbous and lopsided nose. Well, Emma thought, eyeing the piece more closely, it didn’t really merit the status of brooch. It was more like a . . . Well, she didn’t know what it was like. Emma simply couldn’t look away.

  Maureen saw her staring. “I know, I know,” she said with a bit of a grimace. “But I feel I have no choice but to wear it. Our receptionist makes them and she gave one to each of us in the office. Not everyone wears it, but I feel it would be rude not to. Trouble is I forget to take it off when I’m in public!”

  “You’re a nice person, Maureen,” Emma said. “Better than me! I’d hide that thing in the back of a desk drawer.”

  They ordered, a chicken salad sandwich for Maureen, a bowl of pea soup for Emma.

  “Still hearing from Ian?” Maureen asked after she had taken a bite of her sandwich.

  Emma grimaced. “Yeah. But let’s not talk about him.”

  “Deal.”

  “The man who owns the Shelby Gallery,” Emma asked, hoping she sounded nonchalant. “Do you know him?”

  “Like I know most people in Oliver’s Well,” Maureen said. “I know him to see him and we’ve said hello in passing, but that’s about all. I do know from a source I can’t disclose that he’s an honorable guy.”

  Emma was intrigued. “You’re sure you can’t tell me your source?”

  “My lips are sealed,” Maureen said. “My ability to keep a secret goes hand in hand with my being a natural confessor.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why are you asking about Morgan Shelby?” Maureen wondered.

  “It’s just that he’s doing an appraisal for us of Mom’s silver serving platters.” And maybe, Emma thought, he would be at the country club’s holiday party her brother was catering.

  “Well, I’m sure he’ll give you an honest report.” Maureen lifted her water glass and looked meaningfully at Emma over it. “He’s single, you know.”

  “No,” Emma said. “I didn’t know. How’s your mom feeling, by the way? You said she had the flu last month.” If Maureen found the abrupt change of topic odd, she didn’t say.

  “She’s fine, thanks, as fine as a woman almost eighty can be after a nasty bout of flu. The older one gets, the longer it takes to recover from sickness or sadness, and that’s a fact.”

  Emma nodded. She knew all about a long recovery—and about those, like her mother, who never managed to achieve it.

  “I went to see your mother a few times in the six months or so before she died,” Maureen said, as if reading Emma’s mind. “I always called ahead.” Maureen smiled. “Caro Reynolds was not the sort of person you just dropped in on.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” Emma agreed. “That was kind of you, to visit. See? You’re a much nicer person than I am.”

  “I still say that’s debatable. Anyway, I’d never really talked to your mother before those visits—I mean talked to her as a person, another woman. She was always ‘Emma’s mom,’ just as my mother is always probably ‘Maureen’s mom’ to you.”

  “What did you two talk about?” Emma asked.

  Maureen smiled. “Well, first thing, she asked me to call her Caro and not Mrs. Reynolds. That took some getting used to. And mostly we talked about politics. She wanted to know if I voted and I told her that yes, I did. She told me she had been raised to take voting very seriously. Once she asked what I thought about the Syrian refugee crisis, if it was being handled properly and what the U S should be doing to help.”

  Emma shook her head in amazement. “I never, ever heard my mother talk about world politics, let alone her feelings about civic duty.”

  “She struck me as pretty well informed,” Maureen said. “And sometimes we talked about me. She tried to get me to talk about my love life or lack thereof. She told me she thought I should be married. She said that everyone deserved to be married.”

  “What did you say to that?” Emma asked. She had never asked her mother how she felt about having a single daughter over the age of forty. She hadn’t needed to ask to know that Caro didn’t like it.

  “I can’t remember, exactly,” Maureen said. “But I got her to admit that what she really meant was that everyone deserves to be deeply loved and cared for. For Caro Reynolds I suppose that translated to traditional marriage.”

  “Even though she knew well enough that so many traditional marriages fall short of her ideal.” Emma shook her head. “You know, Maureen, in some ways I feel I’m only really getting to know my mother now, after she’s gone. It feels . . . odd.”

  “I wonder if that’s the way it always is,” Maureen mused, “that once a person is gone people feel it’s okay to talk about what they wouldn’t have talked about while the person was alive. I don’t mean scandal or dark secrets, just daily stuff. Small bits of information that wouldn’t have seemed memorable or important enough to share while the person were still here.”

  “Little gifts of knowledge after the fact,” Emma said, partly to herself.

  “Only a gift if the knowledge isn’t upsetting. Then it would be more of a punishment.”

  Emma smiled. “Sometimes the truth really isn’t meant to be known, at least not by everybody.”

  “Exactly,” Maureen said.

  When they had finished their lunch, Maureen went back to her office and Emma once again headed to the Greenfern Real Estate Agency. Even if she was vaguely floating the idea of buying her parents’ house herself, it wasn’t right to ignore her brother’s request to choose an agent to handle a sale to a buyer out of the family. She had made a promise to her brother and she would keep it.

  Promises. Duty. She had told Maureen she didn’t want to talk about Ian, and she didn’t. She didn’t even want to think about him, but now, as she walked down Main Street, she wondered if she had a duty to help Ian recover from the loss of a person he genuinely loved—and Emma believed that Ian did love her. She wondered if she had a duty to help him separate from the family he had come to consider his own.

  Could she really have a moral responsibility to the man? But how could that be? How could she have a responsibility toward someone she had chosen to eliminate from her life, someone she had, in brutal fact, rejected? It was confusing, and Emma didn’t like confusion. Maybe, she thought, she should talk to Andie about what she did and did not owe to Ian. She felt bad that Ian was upset, but not bad enough to reverse the new course she was setting for her life just to soothe his hurt feelings. Her life was her own to live, and if she didn’t live it honestly, then she would be the only one to blame for her unhappiness.

  Emma reached the Greenfern Real Estate Agency. This time, she pushed open the door without hesitation and went inside.

  CHAPTER 24

  Andie poured herself a glass of orange juice while she waited for Emma to finish a phone call with her second-in-command at Reynolds Money Management. Emma’s work was as mysterious to Andie as her own work had been to her parents. Interestingly, Andie thought, all three siblings had
chosen service careers. While Emma and Daniel helped people with the basic comforts of life—food and financial security—Andie provided, or tried to provide, the less tangible but no less important spiritual comforts. In that way, the Reynolds children were firmly united.

  The real family. It wasn’t the first time Andie had found herself thinking about Daniel’s comment after the children’s pageant. He had wanted to take a picture of the “real family,” sagging necks, crow’s feet and all. But what was the “real” family? There was no fixed, unchangeable entity; everything was always in flux and every person saw and experienced a different reality. But maybe Daniel couldn’t understand that.

  Andie finished her juice, put the glass in the sink, and wandered out to the living room where that ghastly portrait of her parents confronted her. She didn’t know why it bothered her so, but it did. Still, she forced herself to look at the painting now, and as she did she felt a rush of emotion. The real family. Cliff and Caro’s presence would have made the Christmas pageant, that enjoyable family event, entire. But she of all people knew there was never any good in thinking of what might have been.

  She turned away from the image of her parents, those estimable people. She was glad—if that wasn’t too insensitive a word—they weren’t going to be guests at the country club’s holiday party. Andie was a pro when it came to public appearances, but this would be different and she would not have wanted her parents to suffer any potential awkwardness. The fact was there would be plenty of people at the party who had known Andie Reynolds since birth and who had witnessed her “scandalous” departure from Oliver’s Well. Of course, they would likely be too well behaved to snub her or to speak ill of her in her presence. And some might be happy to forget about her dubious past—leaving her child behind, a mother’s greatest sin—in order to be able to tell their friends they had chatted with a celebrity. Andie had experienced fawning before. She understood it was something certain people needed to do; she just didn’t feel compelled to like it.

  Emma came jogging down the stairs and rejoined her sister in the living room. “Sorry,” she said. “Bit of a crisis. It took me longer to troubleshoot than I thought it would. Maybe I’m losing my touch.”

  “More like you’re exhausted from a busy year with no break,” Andie noted.

  Emma shrugged. “Maybe. Anyway, what are we supposed to be doing now?”

  “Come with me,” Andie said, leading Emma to the den. “This entire row of oversized art books. I was thinking that whatever volumes we don’t want would make a nice addition to the public library.”

  “In Mom and Dad’s memory?”

  “Or they could be given anonymously. I like the idea of anonymous donations.”

  Emma smiled. “What does it say in the New Testament, something about doing charitable works without advertising the fact?”

  “Whitewashed sepulchers, corrupt on the inside but presenting a pristine facade. That’s sort of the same thing, isn’t it?” Andie paused before going on. “How did Rumi seem at her birthday party?” she asked her sister. It wasn’t as random a question as it might seem.

  “To be honest,” Emma said, “she was very emotional. I think it was Mom not being there. She told me it was the first birthday she could remember without her grandmother.”

  The real family. “Not the first birthday without me,” Andie pointed out. “Her mother.”

  “I’m sorry, Andie,” Emma said. “I didn’t mean anything accusatory, really.”

  Andie smiled. “I know. It’s just that it would have been better if I were there for her. I apologized, of course, several times, but I don’t think she’s forgiven me for being a no-show.”

  “It was only a party, Andie,” Emma pointed out. “I know she misses Mom, but I think she’s making too big a deal of things. Besides, her friends were there. It’s not like she was miserable. She was, after all, the center of attention.”

  “And Rumi does like being the center of attention.” Even if, Andie thought, she teases me about my public presence. “Remember what Rumi was about to say the other day?” Andie asked. “That she and her grandmother were so close they were more like mother and daughter. I suspect she said that to hurt me. I don’t like to think that about my child, that she intended to wound me, but . . .”

  Emma shook her head. “She didn’t actually say it, Andie. She stopped herself.”

  But the intention, Andie thought, had been there. “Danny laid into me the other day, you know,” she said. “Anna Maria tried to stop him, but he went on and accused me of treating Bob shabbily when I asked for a divorce.” Andie sighed. “I was the one who filed because Bob suggested I be the one. He was being absurdly, sweetly old-fashioned about it. We both knew the marriage was over, and there was no animosity at all, but he didn’t want me to appear as the wife who’d been cast off.”

  “You never told me that. Why?” Emma asked.

  “I don’t know,” Andie said. “I suppose it’s because I try not to dwell on that difficult time. And because what Bob and I have is so . . . Well, so special and private. It felt like such a violation when Danny got all judgmental about our relationship.“

  Emma frowned. “Danny should let the past alone. He’s allowing it to obsess him. And he shouldn’t criticize something—or someone—he doesn’t understand.”

  “I agree,” Andie said. “But he seems to be under a lot of strain.”

  “He does at that. He’s like the proverbial tightly wound spring. And the trouble with a tightly wound spring is that you never know when it’s going to spin off and hit you in the face.” Emma slit open a cardboard box she had unearthed from the floor of the closet. “Oh, look!” she cried. “I haven’t seen this in years! Mom used to keep it in the china cabinet, didn’t she? I wonder why she put it away.”

  Andie peered down into the carefully packed box and pulled aside more of the wrapping. “Mom’s Lenox. The pattern is called Buchanan. Huh. Just like our lawyer.”

  Emma smiled and lifted a bundle that proved to contain a teapot and its lid. “I wonder if the entire set is here,” she mused. “It’s very sophisticated with its cream and tan and touch of cobalt blue.”

  “Mom didn’t buy the entire set. She only bought pieces for tea and dessert.” Andie dug into the box and pulled out the largest bundle. “Look, here’s the two-tiered serving platter. Gosh, I loved this piece when I was little and Mom and I used to have a fancy tea together. It seemed so exotic, pretty little cakes and cookies arranged on the two levels. I remember thinking we were probably the only ones in Oliver’s Well to have something so special. I . . .”

  “What?” Emma asked, rewrapping the teapot in its bundle.

  But Andie couldn’t speak, not yet. With something akin to shock she realized that she wanted the tea service. She needed it. Again came that wave of nostalgia, something Andie didn’t often experience. Yes, she would like to have this tea set in her own home. She would like to serve tea to her friends. She would like to revive the soothing, civilized ritual her mother had introduced her to all those years ago. The real family . . .

  But maybe Emma or Daniel wanted the tea set. If that were the case, then she would keep her desire for it to herself. “The Buddha said that to live a pure and unselfish life,” Andie recited silently, “one must count nothing as one’s own in the midst of abundance.”

  “Earth to Andie? You okay?”

  Andie startled, then laughed. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “Just wool gathering. Here, let me help you stow this box back safely in the closet. And then let’s get started on those tomes.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The Lower Waterville Country Club’s annual Evergreen Ball. Andie looked around the dining room that had been decorated for the event and suppressed a smile. She never thought she would find herself back here, the scene of all those uncomfortable family meals, when all she’d wanted to do was to go running out of the room, tearing off her restricting, irritating panty hose as she fled.

  Still, it wasn�
�t terrible being there now. The dining room was festive enough, even if the tree that had been given pride of place by the DJ was made of some sparkling white, no doubt toxic material and topped with a glittery red star. Mom would shudder, Andie thought, remembering Caro Reynolds’s refined taste in decor.

  “It’s a real family affair,” Emma noted as they watched Rumi pass among the guests. Both Rumi and her father were acting as circulating waiters, and Anna Maria was acting as her husband’s sous chef and supervising the club’s kitchen staff.

  “Waiting is hard work,” Andie noted. “I hope Danny can afford to pay his workers a decent wage.”

  “I’m sure he pays them well,” Emma said. “Danny is nothing if not scrupulously fair.”

  Except when he’s being testy and unfair, Andie thought, but she kept that thought to herself and instead admired her sister’s appearance. Emma had had little problem putting together an outfit suitable for the Lower Waterville Country Club’s big event. She was wearing a cream-colored cashmere sweater over a slim gray pencil skirt and houndstooth fabric pumps. Emma always looked effortlessly and perfectly put together. Obviously, she had gotten that talent from their mother.

  “I stick out like a sore thumb,” Andie said. “Not that I thought there’d be anyone else here wearing a bright red dress with an image of Ganesh around the hem and Sanskrit printing across the bodice.”

  “You’re definitely more comfortable than that woman by the bar in that sequined number,” Emma whispered back. “How does she breathe? And she must be sweating like mad. I guess she’s never heard the term ‘overdressed.’ ”

  A waiter approached the sisters with a tray of blinis topped with sour cream and caviar. Andie politely refused while Emma took one of the appetizers. Daniel hadn’t provided many vegetarian options, Andie thought. Then again, there was a good chance she was the only vegetarian in this crowd. She knew she shouldn’t make assumptions, but this one seemed likely to be correct. The men and women gathered at the party seemed to Andie all versions of her parents, respectable, conservative in their tastes and probably their politics, not the sort to want to be seen as different in any way at all. Well, Andie thought, each to his or her own.