I ran down the stairs and saw Girl staring at the back door. “Did we forget you?” I said, rubbing her head. I opened the door and Girl ran toward the woods. I looked around the kitchen but didn’t know where to start.
“What can I do?”
I spun to see Mark standing in the doorway.
“The gifts are wrapped and hidden so I’m ready to help.” It felt just like the times when Sean was a little boy and we’d run around the house like crazy people getting last-minute things done.
“We need to put the leaves in the table.” We hadn’t made the table bigger in four years. I couldn’t even remember where the leaves were. “And I’d love to hang some garland in the dining room—maybe put some decorations on the mantle and find our red tablecloth and that great big centerpiece with the pinecones.” I was talking so fast I could barely keep up with what I was saying.
Mark held up his hand. “Let me go to the garage attic and look for all that stuff before you tell me anything else.” He disappeared into the garage and I started to pull out the china we’d received on our wedding day. We rarely used it; there wasn’t a scratch on it. What a shame, I thought. It was so beautiful and I kept it put away. I pulled out several pieces and began to wash them. I heard rustling at the door and looked up to see Mom and Dad fumbling with grocery bags. I ran to open the door and saw that the ground was covered with fresh snow. A white Christmas for Emily, I thought.
“Ho, ho, ho,” Mom said, coming through the door. She sat the bags down on the kitchen table and looked at the stack of dishes.
“There’s more in the cabinet,” I said. “Once we get these washed and out of the way we can start baking.”
“Is Emily asleep?” Dad asked. I nodded. He bent down and pulled out a set of books with beautiful illustrated covers. “We got her these.” He read off the titles: Alice in Wonderland,Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh, Curious George, and The Chronicles of Narnia. I wondered how much they had spent on such beautiful books but I knew it didn’t matter to them. At one time my mother had been in need and people gave her gifts she never imagined.
“Is Mark home?” Dad asked. I pointed toward the garage and pictured Dad climbing up our rickety attic ladder to find Mark. Mom and I worked side by side washing the dishes and drying them.
“How did her mother die?” she asked.
“Car accident.”
She was quiet as she dried a large serving platter and set it on the counter. “Did you go to the funeral?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, God, help her,” she said to herself. Throughout our lives, if Mom heard of someone who had died or was sick with cancer or heart disease she would grow quiet and I always knew she was praying. She never said she was; she didn’t bow her head or close her eyes or get down on her knees and fold her hands; I just knew. If Walter Cronkite showed a family involved in a tragedy or someone who had lost their life in a foreign country on the evening news she would say, “Oh, God, help them.” When I was a child I wondered how many prayers had been muttered all over the country during those thirty-minute news broadcasts. “It was the prayers of strangers that helped us,” she said to Richard and me time and again after our father left.
With the last of the dishes washed and dried Mom got busy making a piecrust for the pecan pie and I grabbed a pot to make fudge. I reached for my recipe box; it had been so long that I’d forgotten how to do it. A huge thud sounded in the garage and I was certain Dad had fallen from the ladder and was lying on his back on the floor. “Don’t panic,” he said, yelling in through the door. “Just a box of garland.” Moments later he and Mark carried several boxes into the dining room. I never imagined I would see Mark and my dad pulling decorations from a box and discussing color scheme and placement. “That doesn’t look right next to that red glass globe,” Dad said. “Put that ivy-looking thing there.” I could hear Mark move things around. “Yeah, that looks better. Now move those candles to the back. No, take them off completely. They don’t look Christmassy. What’s this?”
“That’s a thing to hold Christmas cards,” Mark said. I heard a thud as Dad threw the “thing to hold Christmas cards” back in the box.
“Here we go. Put that up there on the mantle. What is that? A candelabra?”
“Yeah.”
“Put that in the middle and let’s stick some candles in there. You got any candles? Hey, Patti, you got any candles?”