“Well, what do you want to be this year?” I’d asked. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of choices in a nativity play.
Unless Robyn decided to spice things up and add scenes not found in the original text. Based on the boys’ preferences, I suspected a scene with pirates would go down well with most of the participants. Perhaps instead of arriving in Bethlehem on a donkey, the Holy Family could come by boat, allowing Joseph to fend off pirates along the way. Or, better yet, what if the Wise Men could encounter a party of Imperial storm troopers—also bound for Bethlehem and clearly up to no good—and repel the them with their light sabers?
I’d abandoned that train of thought and dragged my mind back to the immediate crisis.
“So if you’re not animals, what are you?” I’d asked. “Angels?”
“Mo-o-om!” I’d been hoping neither of them would learn to roll their eyes like that until they were teenagers. “Girls are angels. And little kids are animals. Big boys are shepherds!”
As it turned out, Jamie would have been just fine with being an animal. And he would have been quite satisfied with Michael’s plan for a shepherd’s costume, which was to cut a hole in a piece of burlap for the neck and tie the whole thing together with a length of rope. Josh, however, had demanded better, and his idea of proper shepherd garb would have taxed the expertise of a Savile Row tailor, to say nothing of my poor sewing skills.
It was December, so he’d wanted sleeves. Nicer sleeves. And his tunic wasn’t white enough. Could I wash it? The hem was uneven. There was a loose thread. His belt was too tight. His crook was splintery, could I make it smooth? His sandals were too small.
And of course, I couldn’t go to all that trouble for Josh and leave Jamie as a ragged lump of burlap. In the end, I’d managed to produce two passable tunics, with sleeves long enough to keep them warm, especially when combined with a blue-and-white striped overcoat. Their crooks were polished till they shone; their belts were made of gold-brocade cord left over when Mother had gotten new curtain ties for her dining room, and we’d delighted them with long, fussy brown beards. It was going to look as if two of the members of ZZ Top were moonlighting in the hills outside Bethlehem.
“What do you think?” I’d asked them, when they finally tried on the finished costumes.
“It’s okay,” Josh had said. He still wasn’t entirely happy with the sandals.
“This looks great, Mommy,” Jamie had said.
Sometimes, just for a few moments, you’re allowed to love one twin more than his brother.
Michael’s voice brought me back to the present.
“Always a chance he’ll find some kind of problem with his costume and pitch a fit today,” he was saying. “But I think I can hold the threat of making Santa’s naughty list over him.”
“Or tell him that if he behaves, Grandma will give him some special passementerie to add to his costume on the night of the pageant.”
“Will he know what passementerie is?” Michael asked. “Because I don’t.”
“It can be a surprise,” I said. “And he’ll be impressed with the five-syllable word.”
“Well, that was satisfying,” Michael said, as he finished off his sandwich. “Time we hit the hay.”
We both pitched in to tidy up the kitchen, and headed upstairs, yawning.
“Is there really that much left to do on the house?” he asked.
“For me, yes,” I said. “Tickets. Programs. Parking and shuttles. Schedules for the docents. Trying to get some more publicity so ticket sales will pick up. And keeping the designers from doing anything else to damage the house.”
“But what about the designers? Surely they must be getting close to finishing?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I can look at a room and think it’s perfect and if I say that, they look at me as if I’m an idiot. These are people who will repaint a room three or four times because the color doesn’t work the way they thought it would. People who can spend five minutes plumping a pillow properly. If I hear the words, ‘it needs … something’ one more time, I might lose it. I think they’re all going to keep tweaking and improving their rooms right up until the last minute. Beyond the last minute. I’m afraid that when the first paying guests walk in, Mother will ask them if they mind helping her rearrange the furniture.”
“Well, it’s only a couple more days,” he said.
“True,” I said. “I can survive anything for a few more days.”
Chapter 15
December 22
As I was driving to the show house the next morning, my phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number. Could it be Boomer, reporting back already? I pulled over to answer it. Fortunately, I only said “Hello” rather than “Well, that was quick” or “I guess Rob was joking about how late you slept.”