“I’m sorry, Jill,” Nell said feelingly. “You must be disappointed, especially with this being the first year without Brian.”
“I am disappointed,” Jill admitted, “but I’m not entirely surprised. Stuart’s failed me before. You can say a lot for nurture, but nature has something to do with the way a person turns out. And in too many ways Stuart displays aspects of his father’s faulty character. I can’t tell you how many jobs Stuart has lost due to insubordination or sheer laziness. And as for his romantic relationships . . .” Jill shook her head. “Stuart never met his father, but he’s unmistakably his son.”
“And you love him.”
“Of course,” Jill said. “I might not be particularly proud of how he’s living his life, but that doesn’t mean I won’t go medieval on someone who tries to hurt him.”
Nell laughed. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Still, it’s hard not to blame yourself when your kid doesn’t turn out exactly as you’d hoped he might,” Jill said. “Every time Stuart breaks up with a girlfriend I think, why didn’t I provide him with a solid male role model? And every time he loses a job I think, why didn’t I teach him a better work ethic?”
“But each person is an autonomous individual,” Nell pointed out, carefully sliding the cookies onto a cooling rack. “A parent can’t be blamed for every poor decision an adult child makes.”
Jill sighed. “Of course not. Still, being a parent puts you in a very strange place. Even when you don’t much like your kid, you love him.”
“Though there have to be exceptions to that. Some people must stop loving their children, for reasons they feel are legitimate.”
Jill shuddered. “Probably, but I’d rather not think about that sort of thing. Christmas is supposed to be a time of peace, love, and understanding. I want to fill my head with visions of sugarplums, whatever they are, and not with thoughts of family strife.”
“I agree. You know, I’ve been remembering so much about Christmases past this season. The good memories are simply flooding my consciousness.”
“Share some of the good memories,” Jill requested. “Distract me from my woes.”
“Okay,” Nell said. “For one, I keep thinking about the years when the girls were small. Christmas mornings were Norman Rockwell perfect, the girls in their flannel pajamas, Joel wearing one of his fine wool bathrobes, me in one of the silk robes he liked me to wear. The girls would literally squeal with excitement as they tore the wrapping paper off their presents. It was idyllic.”
Jill raised an eyebrow. “How much are you romanticizing the past?”
“I don’t think that I am,” Nell countered. “And if I am remembering only the good things, I guess I’m grateful for that.”
“Fair enough. Go on.”
“I’d make eggs Benedict for me and Joel and pancakes in the shape of angels for the girls. Later in the day our neighbors would bring over a traditional homemade Christmas pudding. They’d lived in the States for years but were originally from England.”
“What about church?” Jill asked. “I took Stuart to an Episcopal church for a few years, but he never seemed to enjoy anything about the services, not even at Christmas time. I even enrolled him in Sunday school, but he got kicked out.”
“Why?” Nell asked with a laugh. “I’d think you’d have to be pretty naughty to get kicked out of Sunday school. You know, God forgives sinners and all.”
“Well, Reverend Moore didn’t forgive Stuart for throwing spitballs at him whenever his back was turned. So, what about church?”
“When the girls were little,” Nell told her, “I insisted the four of us go to church on Sundays and on Christmas and Easter morning. My parents had been churchgoers, though not in the least bit spiritual, and I’d always enjoyed attending services with them. I loved the concurrent sense of solemnity and joy, and I guess I hoped that my children would inherit my appreciation of ceremony.”
“It sounds as if there’s a ‘but’ coming,” Jill noted.
“There is,” Nell admitted. “One year Joel announced he’d had enough of church. He said that all he did was sit in the pew and think about football, so there was no point in his going. I felt that without Joel something essential had gone out of the tradition, so I stopped attending church as well, eventually even on Christmas. The girls didn’t seem to mind.”
“Do you miss the church experience?” Jill asked.
Nell thought about the question. She had abandoned church for Joel’s sake. He hadn’t asked her to, and now Nell wondered if her abandoning so much she had cared for—poetry, religious tradition—had been a manifestation of an innate laziness, as she had hinted to Eric the day before, or evidence of a long-standing inability to respect her own needs and desires. Either was a troubling idea. “Yes,” she said finally. “I guess I do.” And then Nell had an idea. “Look,” she said. “Spend Christmas Day with me and the girls. We’ll have a lovely time.”
Jill shook her head. “Thanks, Nell, but I know how much you need this holiday season to be very special for the King women. I can’t intrude.”
“You wouldn’t be intruding. Come on. I’m not letting you sit alone in your house while we’re down the road feasting. Please.”
“I won’t be alone,” Jill countered. “I can invite myself to my cousin’s house in Bangor.”
Nell put her hands on her hips. “Jill. You don’t even like him and you can’t stand his wife. Didn’t she serve moldy meat the last time you were there?”
“All right,” Jill said with a grateful smile. “Thank you. It means a lot to me to share Christmas with your family. Hey, are those cookies cool enough to eat? I’m not sure how much longer I can hold out.”
“Help yourself. I’ll make a pot of tea.”
“While you’re doing that, you can tell me how things are going with Eric. Oh my God these cookies are fantastic.”
“They’re not going anywhere,” Nell corrected quickly. “But I am really enjoying spending time with him again. I—”
“You what? Come on, spill.”
Nell put the kettle on the stove before answering. “Yesterday Eric told me that he believes in me. It was regarding my writing, but somehow I got the feeling he was also speaking in more general terms. What I can’t understand is what he sees in me that inspires belief.”
“He sees what he saw all those years ago,” Jill said firmly. “Look, Nell, it seems to me you’re doing it again, devaluing yourself just like you did when your parents told you that Eric was no good and that your feelings for him were wrong and misplaced. You knew the truth but didn’t trust what you knew.”
“Maybe, but I’ve done so little with my life, Jill, besides raising my children.”
“Eric sees you, not a résumé of accomplishments. Why is that so hard to accept? Love has nothing to do with performance or status. People fall in love all the time just because.”
“I didn’t say he was in love with me,” Nell protested. “Just that he believes in me.”
“Is that really so different? Hey, where’s that tea?”
“Ready to pour,” Nell said. “And there’s one more thing I want to tell you. Molly broke things off with Mick this morning and not in a very nice way. I think she just snapped.”
Jill shook her head. “This holiday season is just full of surprises, isn’t it? How is she?”
“Miserable, I assume, though she won’t talk to me yet.”
“Poor kid, and she really is just a kid.”
“I was thinking the same thing the other day,” Nell told her. “I was thinking of how at her age I made a decision spectacularly against my own interest. Youth is a dangerous time.”
“It is indeed.” Jill finished her tea and reached for her sweater, hung over the back of a chair. “Well, you know where to find me if you want to talk more. Just bring some of those raspberry cookies when you visit.”
When Jill had let herself out, Nell thought about what her friend had said. Was believing
in someone the same as loving them? It wasn’t inconceivable that Eric could love her for the sake of the past; in fact, it was probable. But that wasn’t the same as loving her in the present.
Or could it be?
Chapter 23
“Why did you make eggnog from scratch?” Felicity asked, peering into her glass. The glass was one of a set of nine Nell had found in a local thrift shop. Felicity’s was decorated with an image of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. Nell’s glass featured Comet.
“Homemade is usually better than store bought,” Nell said.
“Yeah, but it’s definitely a lot easier to buy something than to make it from scratch.”
Nell sliced through the tape sealing a cardboard box of ornaments. “Easier isn’t always better.”
Felicity took another sip from her glass. “Well, it is pretty delicious. Hey, what’s with Molly? She’s been in her room all day. I don’t even know what Mick brought by this morning.”
“He brought a very pretty print of seven swans,” Nell told her. “I put it against the wall behind the tree for safekeeping.”
Felicity put her glass on the coffee table. “Maybe I should get Molly to join us.”
“I’ll go,” Nell said hurriedly. A moment later she knocked on her daughter’s door. “Molly?” she called. “We’re about to trim the tree.”
Molly opened the door a sliver but wouldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. Her own eyes were red and swollen from crying. “I can’t, Mom,” she said very quietly. “Sorry.”
“It might make you feel better not to be alone right now,” Nell said gently.
“I’m fine. Look, don’t tell Fliss what happened this morning. Not yet.”
“All right. Will you be down for dinner? I’m making that eggplant dish you love, the one with the melted mozzarella on top.”
Molly shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not hungry.”
“Okay,” Nell said. “Just let me know if you want to talk.”
Molly nodded and closed the door to her room. Nell stood where she was for a moment, swamped again by that awful feeling of futility, helpless to do or to say anything that might bring a smile of genuine happiness to her child’s face. Slowly, she returned to the living room. “Your sister doesn’t feel well,” she told Felicity. “She said we should start without her.”
Nell began to decorate the giant tree, carefully hanging ornaments the family had collected through the years. Christmas without X means Christmas with Y, she thought. Next Christmas, decorating the tree without the help of the girls will mean . . . But again Nell’s imagination failed her. Decorating the tree had always been a family occasion. Even Joel had joined in the fun, first stringing the tree with lights and then lifting the girls on his shoulders so they could hang ornaments on the higher branches.
“Earth to Mom?”
Nell startled. “What? Sorry, Fliss. My mind wandered.”
“I asked if you want me to put the star on top. I know you don’t like heights.”
“If you would, Fliss,” Nell said with a grateful smile. “Thank you.”
“No problem. I’ll get the stepladder.”
While Felicity went to fetch the stepladder from the kitchen pantry, Nell looked at the ornament she had just taken from its tissue paper wrapping. It was a Swarovski crystal snowflake, a gift from Joel on the last Christmas they had spent as husband and wife. There was a strong possibility that Joel had already begun his affair with Pam before that holiday season. Still, Nell hung the crystal snowflake with care. The past could be honored even when in retrospect it appeared slightly tarnished. Nell truly believed that.
* * *
“I’m glad you were free this evening,” Eric said. “My work habits are so quirky I sometimes forget that not everyone has the luxury of sleeping in of a morning if they happen to have been out the night before.”
Nell smiled. “And not everyone has the pressure of writing hugely popular novels to a contracted deadline.”
“Work is work,” Eric said. “It’s all important.”
“And eight o’clock isn’t so very late to meet,” Nell noted. Still, she had been a bit nervous that Felicity might pelt her with questions when she announced that she was meeting a colleague from Mutts and Meows for a holiday drink. But Felicity had simply shrugged and gone to her room. Molly remained behind her closed door, her dinner waiting to be reheated in the microwave if she found an appetite.
Nell and Eric were seated at the marble-topped bar at the Good Angel. A tall white Christmas tree had pride of place in a corner of the room. It was hung with sparkly silver and blue ornaments. Swaths of what looked like white silk were draped along the mantel over the stately marble fireplace. Even the tablecloths and tableware were on theme; the cloths were red and the plates decorated with a border of mistletoe.
“The new owners have really gone all out,” Nell commented.
“Clearly they have high hopes for Christmas being a season of financial success. Too bad holidays come with so many unreasonable expectations. We’re all bound to be disappointed when the reality doesn’t match the dream.”
“True,” Nell agreed. “Do you want to know the one thing that’s most disappointed me about the Christmas season? The fact that I was never able to get a picture of the girls on Santa Claus’s lap.”
“What do you mean you weren’t able?” Eric asked, taking a sip of his Irish coffee.
“I mean that I tried and failed,” Nell explained. “I had a picture taken of Molly with Santa before Felicity was born, but somehow it got lost. So when Felicity was old enough, I took both girls to the Copley Plaza mall with the intention of having their picture taken with Santa. I dressed them in red velvet skirts with white blouses and white stockings and black patent leather Mary Janes.”
“Sounds sufficiently adorable,” Eric noted.
“It was, before Felicity threw up on Santa before the photographer could shoot. Santa was not amused.”
Eric laughed. “Not as jolly as you could have wished?”
“Not by half. The next year I tried again. Everything was going smoothly until Molly spotted some awful little plastic doll in the window of a store and demanded we stop and buy it. I said no and Molly pouted and by the time I had wrangled the girls into the line of people waiting their turn with Santa she was in the midst of a full-blown tantrum. The supervising elves asked us to leave. The strange thing was it was the first and only time Molly ever threw a tantrum.”
“Did you try the next year?” Eric asked.
“I would have,” Nell told him, “but both girls were down with a bad flu for the two weeks before Christmas, so I lost my opportunity. Then the following year Molly announced that she didn’t believe in Santa Claus and that there was no way she was going to sit on a ‘fake guy’s’ lap. I thought she was a little young to be so disillusioned, but she was very serious about it. I considered taking Felicity alone, but for so long I’d had my heart set on a photo of the two girls with Santa that I decided to throw in the proverbial towel.” Nell smiled. “The girls laugh at me. They think I’m being too sentimental when I remind them that I’m probably the only mother in the USA who cares about such things who doesn’t have a picture of her children with Santa Claus.”
“My mother’s got a picture of Sarah and me with Santa,” Eric told her. “And every year she puts it on the mantel. And every year my sister brings her sons to the mall for their photo op.”
“See? It’s become an important holiday tradition!” Nell took a sip of her red wine before going on. “Do you remember the Christmas you came to my house?”
Eric nodded. “Of course.”
“My parents behaved so badly. I’ll never forget how my mother managed to avoid looking you in the eye the entire time and how my father grilled you about your grades and your plans for the future. And you were so good about it all, so even tempered. When you’d gone home, I tried to tell them how disappointed and embarrassed I was, but . . . Well, I never could stand up to my
parents. I got as far as saying something like ‘you could have been nicer,’ to which my mother said something like, ‘whatever do you mean?’ and that was the end of my protest.”
Eric took her hand for a moment. “It’s okay,” he said. “You were more far more negatively affected than I was. I seem to be able to block a good deal of the nastiness people throw at each other. A gift or a curse, the fact is that I’m remarkably resilient and stubbornly optimistic.”
Resiliency and optimism. Two very good qualities to have when one is facing an uncertain future, Nell thought. Like an empty home.
“Molly broke up with her boyfriend of almost six years this morning.” Nell hadn’t intended on telling this to Eric; the words had just come out. “She’s in a muddle about her life, and the crisis has come to a head now, just days before Christmas. Talk about smashed expectations.”
“I’m sorry,” Eric said. “She must feel awful.”
“She does. And this might be Felicity’s last Christmas at home, at least for a while. She’s been invited to join her father and stepmother in Switzerland next year. It’s all she can talk about.”
“And you’re not happy about it,” Eric observed.
“Not really,” Nell admitted, “but I know I’m being selfish. If spending Christmas with her father will make Felicity happy, then she should take the opportunity.” Nell shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You don’t want to hear about my domestic woes.”
“I want to hear about your family. Just because I don’t have kids of my own doesn’t mean I’m not interested in other people’s children.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t,” Nell said hastily. “I’ve read your books. I’ve seen how you can so perfectly imagine all sorts of lives.”
Eric laughed. “I don’t know about perfectly, but I do try. And anyway, we’re friends, aren’t we?”
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