Free Christmas, Present by Jacquelyn Mitchard

go to school, and there was Petty DiCastro, with hers tied just like on the video in JC Penney’s. They had this little TV you could watch to learn how to tie the scarves once you bought one.” Rory had been the child to whom Laura could prattle forever. She always seemed interested and made appropriate comments no matter how far off the path Laura strayed. “What I mean is, I tried too hard to fit in, until I found my sport. What I want you to do, even if you don’t stay in the gym, is try very hard not to be that kind of person even for a little while.” Rory nodded vigorously. “Do you know what I mean? The kind of person someone popular can talk into

    anything? Once, the popular girls—there were four of them, and they wore a knot in their shoes tied exactly the same way—talked me into standing on the edge of Rat Prairie . . . you don’t know where Rat Prairie is, do you? I suppose Rat Prairie isn’t even there anymore; it’s condos. But it was named for what was in it. Anyhow, while they went in there and made out with their boyfriends in the tall grass, someone set a fire, and the rats came running out. The fire department came. I was the one there. They took me to the station. I was hysterical. It was the most horrible thing I ever saw, the rats, Rory, like in the Pied Piper . . .” Why am I rambling, Laura wondered. Is it because of what is going on in my head? No, she thought ruefully, I always rambled. I could never get to the point. Elliott called it backing around the corner to the beginning.
    Was that, she thought , because of what was wrong
    in my head, even then?
    “Rory, listen.” Laura willfully gathered her thoughts and tucked Rory’s small shoulder under her own arm as they reclined on the bed. “Are you listening to me? Nothing, no matter how much it matters at the time,

    is worth doing something you think is wrong. And you always know.”
    “How?” Rory asked.
    “You ask the still, small voice, like Father Delabue said,” Laura told Rory. “And if you feel a doubt, that’s your real self telling you what to do, always.”
    “Even if it’s telling you to be afraid,” Rory ventured. Laura sighed. It was foolish, and Laura knew it to be foolish, to try to impart an encyclopedia of moth- ering into a spare few minutes. But a spare few min- utes were her lot. She could not protect Rory from her eager, anxious personality, from being the child who knew the birthdays of everyone else in her class so she could mourn in advance to which parties she wouldn’t be invited. That was a mother’s job—They’re only jealous of you, sweetheart. When you’re older, they’ll all want to be your friend—all the ready, hopeful false- hoods of parenthood. Perhaps they were jealous? Per- haps Rory really simply was a late bloomer, as Laura had been? She could not confer goodness and confi- dence on Rory like a healing, like the prophylactic

    antibiotics she’d given her for troublesome earaches when Rory was a baby. She could only give Rory a memory, and it had better be a sufficient one.
    “Well, like now, of course, it’s natural you should be afraid,” Laura told her. “That’s simply recognizing your own real feelings.” But Laura also reminded her daughter to think of all the times fear could be a trick- ster, the times Rory’d cried before meets, terrified she would fall on the beam and hurt herself or—worse, for Rory—foul her routine, and how many times she had gone ahead and done it despite her fears, and done it perfectly, landed it perfectly.
    “Should I write this down?” Rory asked. “I wrote it down for you.”
    “Will you be our guardian angel?”
    “If I can.” Laura caught her breath at the sharp veer of the questioning. “Of course I will. But Rory, here’s a secret. Even if I die, you can see the best part of me again. When you get to be forty”—Rory’s eyes widened—“you do this. You look down at your hands, and you’ll see my hands. You’re the