“Collier,” my mother said, “Ms. Donovan tells me that you haven’t bought any new clothes yet. Would you like to go shopping with me tomorrow?”
I smiled at her brightly, but before I could answer, the kitchen door opened with a puff of cold air. Taylor and the gang tromped inside filling the kitchen and the rooms beyond with their loud voices and laughter. They carried the smell of burning pine and crisply cooked sausages in on their jackets while they tracked soot from the soles of their boots across Meri’s clean floor.
They nipped from silvered flasks to take the chill off while they jostled and bumped elbows and hunted through the refrigerator for slices of bread, spicy mustard and dill relish. I introduced Taylor to my mother, who shook his hand shyly. He sat next to her, offered her a beer from the cooler and a charred hot dog from a passing plate. I’m not sure, because the kitchen was so full, but I think I saw her laugh. Meri scowled and banged things around on the counter until the collective jokes and good cheer of twenty plus cousins jiggled a smile out of her. Someone handed her a flask. She took a swig and spluttered and coughed, blinking away tears while someone else slapped her on the back and laughed at her.
Aunt Beatrice sat straight in her chair, nibbled on a sausage and sipped her tea through tightly pursed lips, shaking her head and tsking. She leaned in closer to my mother. “Young people these days just have no sense of decorum.”
As night fell, the temperature dropped steeply. A cold wind rattled against the windowpanes. Heavy clouds blocked the full moon and threatened us with snow. I slipped into bed next to Meri and pulled the comforter up around my ears. I snuggled against her as best as my stomach would let me and put an arm around her waist. She didn’t move. I raised my head to look at her.
“Are you asleep?” I asked.
“No.”
“What’s wrong, then? Are you mad at me?”
“A little,” she said without moving.
“Why?”
“You were supposed to go shopping with me tomorrow, not your mother.”
I pulled away from her a bit. “You hate shopping, Meri. Besides, it was very nice of my mother to ask. We’ve never been shopping together. First steps and all that.”
“I don’t hate shopping,” she said. “I just hate the people you run into while you’re shopping. I thought we could buy some baby things while we were out, you know, to start putting together a nursery or something.”
“We can still do that, Meri. You just tell me what to get and we’ll get right to work on it as soon as I get home.”
She turned over. She was scowling pretty fiercely. “That’s not the point, Bea. It was something that we were going to do together. We’re supposed to be a family, remember? You and me and the baby.”
“And sometimes Taylor.”
“Don’t push it, Biker Babe. I’m already mad at you.”
“Meri, come on. You can’t keep getting mad every time someone takes a little of my time.”
She crossed her arms. “Just watch me.”
I rolled my eyes at her, but she was too busy glowering to notice. “Okay then, how about if we compromise a little. I’ll go clothes shopping with my mother tomorrow, you and I can go baby shopping on Saturday, and we won’t invite Taylor over for Christmas dinner.”
“That’s still not the point, and besides, we’re having dinner at Aunt Beatrice’s and there’s no way on God’s green earth that you’ll convince her not to invite golden boy Taylor.”
“Then you’re going to have to tell me what the point of all this is, because I don’t have a clue what you’re upset about.”
Meri’s face crumpled and her eyes squeezed shut. She turned her back to me and put the pillow over her head. “You don’t need me anymore,” she said with a muffled sob.
“Where did that come from?”
She didn’t answer. I lifted the pillow and peeked under it at her. She pulled it down. I grabbed it, tore it out of her hands and threw it on the floor. She grabbed my pillow and put it over her head, and I threw that one on the floor too. “Talk to me, Meri. Don’t hide.”
Meri rolled over again to glare at me. “This morning you needed me to take you shopping, and now you don’t.” She kept glaring, lips pressed tight together, her chin trembling slightly.
“This is about money? I don’t believe it.” Of all the things we could be arguing about, money would have been the very last thing on my list.
“This is about you needing me to help you keep a roof over your head.”
“Are you saying that you think I’ve been staying here only because I need you to provide for me?” I asked, anger creeping into my voice.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” Her glare flickered a little. “Well, maybe it’s sort of what I’m saying. Before today, your options were limited. Now you have choices.”
“And you think that with all my new choices I’ll un-choose you?”
She lay still, her hands clutching at the comforter. “Yes,” she said softly. “The money changes everything. You can go live wherever you want to now.” She drew the cover up and tucked it under her chin. “You can go live in some fancy apartment in some big city and eat artichoke hearts and asparagus salad until your skin turns green. You can buy a big house somewhere a lot more fashionable than here with neighbors who know not to wash their feet in the bidet.”
I laughed because I couldn’t help it. “When did you ever wash your feet in a bidet?”
“I’m not telling, and that’s still not the point!”
“What’s the point, Meri?”
She pulled the covers over her head. “The point is that now you can buy a new motorcycle,” she said from underneath the blankets.
“Meri, you’re a big doofus.”
“I am not.”
“You are, too,” I said, pulling the comforter down and tucking it back under her chin. “First of all, motorcycles don’t come with child safety seats, and second, while I appreciate everything you’ve done for me from Band-Aiding my head to pulling me out of the barn, I don’t love you for it.”
Her eyes went wide and surprised. “You don’t?”
“No,” I said, putting my hand to her cheek. “I don’t love you for the things you’ve done. I love you for who you are, and no amount of money is going to change that.”
Meri shook her head sharply and my hand fell away from her face. “I know you think that’s true, Bea, but you’re being naive. Money does change things.”
I rolled over and frowned at the ceiling. “There’s one thing that I know is going to change.”
“What?”
“You’re going to have to learn to trust me as much as I’ve had to learn to trust you. And if you can’t, well, maybe that should tell us something.” I turned my back to her and pulled the comforter around my ears. My head felt funny resting against the mattress, but I wasn’t about to ask her to pick up my pillow for me.
I felt the bed move as she reached to shut off the light. She settled down, leaving her own pillow on the floor, too. She lay very still behind me. I listened to her breathe, waiting for it to smooth out as she drifted off to sleep, but it didn’t. She sighed heavily, blowing out a long, low whistle. She rolled over and pressed herself against my back. Her arm slipped around my waist, and she kissed my shoulder with a soft brush of her lips.
“I’m sorry, Bea,” she said quietly, her words whispering across my skin. “I’m scared. I’m scared of so many things that I don’t know what to be scared of first. You’re so beautiful that sometimes I have a hard time understanding what someone like you would want with someone like me.” She touched her lips to the back of my neck. “It wasn’t so bad when your only options were to stay here or to run. But that’s all changed now. I don’t have anything to offer you that you can’t get better and cheaper somewhere else.”
I turned in her arms and faced her. The moon shone in through the window throwing soft shadows across her face. She blew sharply against my chin. Toothpaste and mout
hwash, mint and cinnamon. I cradled her face in my hands. “There’s not another Meri Donovan to be found anywhere else in this world for any amount of money in any place other than where I am right now.” She blinked rapidly, and I leaned in to kiss her fluttering lashes. “And where else would I ever find another horse like Sergeant?”
“Do you still want to marry me?” she asked. “You don’t have to, you know.”
I shifted a little to look at her. “I still want to if you don’t mind waiting until after the baby is born.”
“Why do you want to wait?” she asked, her fingers tracing a soft tingly line across my collarbone.
“Well, who ever heard of a maternity wedding gown?”
She grinned. “I’m sure there’s got to be some out there, but who says you get to wear the dress? I’m shorter, I should get to wear the dress and you should have to wear a tux.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “A maternity tuxedo? I think not. You have broader shoulders than I do. You should wear the tux.”
“I have a short torso,” she said shaking her head. “I would look stupid in a cummerbund.”
“I don’t think they even make cummerbunds big enough to fit me. Besides, I’d feel ridiculous in a bow tie. How about if we both wear a dress?”
She pressed her hand flat against my chest, her palm dipping between my breasts. “You would look wonderful even in a bathrobe.”
“Not anymore, I don’t.” I moved her hand down to the bulge of my stomach.
She rubbed her hand in circles over my belly, and things started fluttering inside. “Bea, so many things are changing, and if you think about it, it really hasn’t been that long.”
“What are you asking me, Meri?”
She leaned in closer to me. “Are you sure? I mean, really sure? People change, you know. You might not like me five years from now.”
Her breath came warmly against my lips. I touched her mouth with my fingers and lifted my head to kiss her. My hands moved down her neck and over her breasts. Her nipples tightened under my palms.
“Here’s something that will never change,” I said, feeling the hard nub of her sliding between my fingers.
She laughed in a short, choked gasp and leaned in hard against my hands. “Touch me,” she said in a whisper.
And I did.
Christmas Day dawned with the snow still falling. Fat snowflakes fell silently to the ground, covering and layering, evening things out and smoothing them down, turning the harsh dead browns of winter into soft hills of gray-white. I stood with my nose pressed against the windowpane, exhaling frost onto the glass. It was the first time I’d ever seen a white covered Christmas outside of postcards and old reruns of holiday movies. It was even more amazing when it wasn’t in grainy black and white.
I watched Meri from the kitchen window making the long, slow trek to the west side of the pasture to the old sheep shed where we were keeping Sergeant housed until his new barn could be built. He’d been indignant, at first, to be sleeping in a place that still smelled like sheep, but now he didn’t seem to want to come out. Meri opened his pasture door and he walked out into the snow, made a great big circle and went right back inside. I guess he’d seen enough snow in his life not to get excited over it. I was thrilled right down to my toes. I could hardly contain myself as I bustled around the kitchen.
I heard Meri stomping her boots against the porch before the kitchen door opened with a whirl of cold and wet. She stepped inside, and immediately the snowflakes in her hair started melting into crystal drops.
I frowned at her poor ragged head. “Honestly, Meri, why didn’t you wear a hat?” I asked with my hands on my hips, waving my dishtowel at her, the very picture of a scolding housewife. I tried hard not to crack a smile. “You only have two inches of hair. That’s not enough to keep your head warm. If you don’t cover up, you’ll catch your death of cold and then where would I be?”
She hunched her shoulders inside her jacket and stomped heavily across the kitchen floor. Her face was scowling, but her eyes were laughing at me. “Leave me alone, woman. And where’s my breakfast?” she growled and hitched at her pants. Her lips twitched.
We both started snickering. “That wasn’t very convincing.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek with winter cold lips. “Sorry. I guess I didn’t have the right role models.” She rubbed her hand over her head slicking her hair against her scalp. “The snow does sting a little when it hits my bald spot.”
“You do have a hat, don’t you?”
“Sure do. There are four or five of them in the hall closet.”
I watched a drop of snow melt from the end of a spike of hair and drip onto her shoulder. “Can I borrow one?”
“You know you don’t have to ask,” Meri said as she slipped her coat off and hung it over the back of a kitchen chair. She looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you need one?”
“I want to go outside and make a snowman,” I answered with a grin. “We should make it in the pasture, so Sergeant can come out and eat the carrot if he wants to.”
Meri shook her head as she went to pour herself a cup of coffee. “He’d be just as likely to kick the whole thing into next week as eat the nose off it.” She added cream and sugar and stirred. “And what’s this ‘we’ stuff?”
“Don’t you want to build a snowman?”
She shrugged and blew into her cup. “I’ve built them before,” she said and took a sip.
“Well, there you have it. I need your expertise.”
“It’s not complicated, Bea. The big ball goes on the bottom, medium one in the middle, little one on top.”
I laid a hand on my stomach and gave her my best puppy dog eyes. “And you’re going to make me lift all that snow by myself?”
Meri snorted into her coffee. “Can it wait until after breakfast?”
I grinned and crossed the kitchen to kiss her on the cheek. “You always say the most charming things.”
“Shoot. If I were so charming, I’d convince you to go back to bed instead of agreeing to go outside and play in the snow,” she said with a hopeful glance.
“How about a compromise? Snow right now and we’ll go to bed early tonight.”
She shook her head. “That’s no good. You know Aunt Beatrice is going to stuff us tighter than the turkey. We’ll come right home and fall asleep.” She tilted her head. “How about if we stay in bed all day tomorrow?”
There was a flutter in my belly at the thought of a whole day of languid nakedness and Meri’s skillful hands. “That sounds like a reasonable compromise,” I said as calmly as I could.
Meri grinned. I wasn’t fooling her one bit. The phone rang. Meri set her coffee on the counter and reached to answer it.
“Good morning, Auntie. A Merry Christmas to you, too.” I heard her say as I turned to rummage through the refrigerator. I took out the eggs and a block of sharp cheddar thinking that I could make a couple of omelets that Meri probably wouldn’t hate too much. I shot her a glance over my shoulder while I dug through the vegetable drawer for the green peppers and onions. Her back was turned, but there was an all-too-familiar set to her shoulders.
“All right,” she said into the phone a little ungraciously. “What time?”
I closed the refrigerator door and leaned against it to wait for the bad news. No doubt, Aunt Beatrice had something she wanted us to do that I probably wouldn’t like very much, like come early and bring an extra dish, or maybe she wanted Meri and me to sit at the children’s table. Whatever it was, Meri had already committed us with her “all right.”
Meri hung up the phone, turned and gave me a look.
“Hey, now,” I said holding up a hand, “whatever it is, I didn’t put her up to it, so don’t go looking at me like that.”
Meri still looked sullen. “Aunt Beatrice says that she accidentally invited too many people to fit into her dining room.”
I took that to mean we were being banished to the children’s table. I set the onion down on the counte
r with a thunk. “I guess it would be too much to hope that she’s uninvited us.”
Meri shook her head. “She wants us to have Christmas dinner over here.”
“What? There’s no way that can happen. We don’t have enough food here to feed twenty people.”
“It’s now thirty people, not including all the children.”
“Good god, Meri, what’s she thinking? We don’t have that much room either.”
Meri’s shoulders slumped. “We do if we open the connecting doors between the dinning room and the parlor. We can put the kids at tables in the den.”
“Even if. We still don’t have time to put a dinner together. It’s Christmas. All the stores are closed.”
“She said that everybody would bring a little something. She’s got two turkeys and a ham going now.”
“And you’ve already told her that we would.”
“She seemed pretty set on it.”
“Crap.” I turned back toward the kitchen counter and selected a knife, bigger than necessary, to chop the onion. “I really wanted to build the snowman before we had to go to dinner. Now we have to clean.”
“No, we don’t.” Meri grabbed a bowl from the cupboard and cracked an egg against the side. “Auntie is sending over an advance scouting party to do whatever cleaning and setting up that needs to be done. We don’t have to do a thing but let them in.”
My knife froze in mid-chop. “Then what are you so unhappy about?”
Meri cracked an egg hard enough so that half of it dribbled onto the counter. “She invited forty people, but some of them won’t come if it’s being held over here.”
As Far As Far Enough Page 19