Duck the Halls(28)

Mother had gone particularly overboard in the dining room, where she’d adopted an angel theme. Legions of angels marched up and down the dining room table, holding trumpets or songbooks or candles. More angels lolled on the sideboard and peeked out from behind the plates and pitchers in the built-in china cabinet. Angels rioted along the evergreen garlands that festooned all four walls, climbed and dangled from the chandelier. There wasn’t actually a lot of room left for serving food or seating people, which hadn’t been much of a problem so far—we’d just taken to eating a lot more often at our oversized kitchen table—but was definitely going to cause some tension when Michael’s mother arrived to carry out her plan of using our house to prepare and serve her entry in the two dueling Christmas Day meals we were expected to attend. Mother would be serving her own meal over at the cottage, as she’d taken to calling the rambling farmhouse she and Dad had bought to stay in during their increasingly frequent and lengthy visits to Caerphilly. Was I wrong in suspecting that the decor in her dining room would be equally over the top but far less impractical in which to serve a meal?

Looking around, I tried to imagine what Mother could possibly think was missing.

“Didn’t some famous interior designer say when you finished decorating you should take a look and remove at least one thing?” I asked.

“It was Coco Chanel,” Mother said. “And she was talking about a woman getting dressed—not interior decorating, and certainly not decorating for Christmas, where a certain feeling of luxurious excess is quite appropriate.”

She was shuffling through one of the Christmas card baskets, making sure that the top cards were all elegant ones that matched the red, gold, and green color scheme, and banishing any that did not meet her aesthetic standards to the bottom of the basket.

“I’ll leave you in charge of the luxurious excess,” I said. “I’m going to take a nap so I’ll be fit to go to the concert tonight.”

“Splendid,” she said absently. She was holding up both hands making the suggestion of a picture frame and squinting through it at the stairway.

I headed upstairs, resigned to the probability that the hallway would be unrecognizable the next time I saw it.

When I was halfway up, Michael and the boys appeared.

“Mommy, go sledding!” Josh called.

Jamie just raced downstairs and began digging through the coat closet for his snow gear.

“They already napped,” Michael said. “And I assume you still need to. So since there’s fresh snow falling…”

“Wonderful idea,” I said. “How about feeding them while you’re out, and I’ll meet up with you all at the concert?”

I helped stuff the boys into their snowsuits and boots and then climbed upstairs again, ignoring the fact that Mother was still busy with her measuring tape and notebook. I put my cell phone where I would hear it if the chief finally returned my call and fell asleep secure in the knowledge that the boys were safe, and happy, and that I could take a nice long nap before I saw them again.

My phone alarm woke me up a few hours later with just enough time to throw my clothes on and drive into town for the concert. In fact, not quite enough time, since I had to park half a dozen blocks from Trinity.

I despaired of getting a seat for the concert, and was resigned to standing in the back. Or maybe sitting on the floor of the vestibule—I wouldn’t see much but at least I could hear. But when I peeked into the sanctuary, I spotted Michael and the boys, sitting in one of the front row pews, with Robyn and her husband sitting on one side of them and Mother, Dad, Grandfather, Caroline, Rose Noire, and Rob on the other. Robyn caught sight of me and waved, and I hurried to take the seat they were saving for me.

If I’d been picking the seats, I wouldn’t have picked the front pew. Because of limited space, the first two rows of choir members were standing in front of the communion   rail, almost stepping on our feet, so we had to crane our heads up to see them and couldn’t get a glimpse of the rest of the choir. I was afraid we’d get blasted when they opened their mouths and began to sing, and the fact that Jerome Lightfoot had set up his music stand not six feet away, in the center aisle, didn’t exactly make me any happier. But the boys were very excited at being so close to the choir, and it was all we could do to keep them from reaching out and grabbing the red velvet and gold lame of their special Christmas robes.

And we couldn’t keep the boys from standing on the pews when a hush fell over the church and Lightfoot nodded to the organist, who had been playing soft background music. The organist struck up the first few chords of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and the choir all lifted their hymnals purposefully.