Free Christmas, Present by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page A

one who looks just

    like me, except your pretty curly red hair. You’ll see my hands because your hands will have grown to look just like mine.”
    “I won’t make regionals,” Rory mourned, “because I’ll be emotionally disturbed.” Laura thought, and grimly, of her mother’s misplaced candor, on the drive from Natick. Her mother would go ahead with her champagne brunch. Laura’s funeral would have to wait.
    “Yes, you will make regionals,” Laura told her daughter firmly. “People go on after horrible things happen and it actually makes them better at whatever they do. You know how Father Delabue always says, when you’re sad, offer it up? That’s how you do it. You offer it up.”
    “To Jesus?”
    Hell, thought Laura. “No, to Mama,” she said, holding tiny Rory against her with all her strength. “I will always be your mama, Rory. I will always be inside you.”
    “I don’t believe in Santa,” said Rory. “Anymore.
    Will Santa come?”

    “Absolutely. Why would Santa punish you because your mom got sick?”
    “Well, I’ll have to miss a lot of school,” Rory con- cluded, her face finally dry, but swollen as a plum.
    “That’s right,” Laura said. ’Tis an ill wind, she thought.

    E

    lliott and Miranda sat knee to knee, Elliott’s jeans nearly touching the sharp camel crease of Miranda’s slacks. Miranda accepted a copy of the Globe from a passing volunteer in pink. Now, Elliott thought, she’s going to read the paper? She said , “You’ll have to make sure they keep in touch with Suzie’s chil-
    dren and Angela’s . . .”
    “Why don’t you, too ?” Elliott cried. “You’re the matriarch. You have the house on the Cape. Why didn’t you build a little compound with guest cottages at the shore? Why don’t you now, in light of this? Why don’t you preserve the extended family?”
    Guest cottages, he thought. That’s a little Kennedy.

    Asking a bit much. “Why didn’t you at least reassure them, all the time, back then? Why don’t you make a resolution to do it now?”
    “Well, Suzie was almost a teenager when Stephen died, and she wasn’t much interested in things like that.. .”
    “She was nine, Miranda! No bigger than Rory. Laura and Angie were little. Angie was practically a baby. I’m sorry for this, but my own father has done a basically crap job with the girls . . . and so has my sister. It’s not only you.”
    Good God, he realized then, I haven’t called my father. Or my sister.
    He glanced at his watch. The time was flooding past; it was already morning, breakfast time on school days. Nurses were hailing one another, wishing one another good holidays. Elliott realized his time with Laura was collapsing slowly, like a spent parachute— that his life A . D . was about to commence. And there had been no time, to tell her how he had never, at a party, lusted for another woman, how he had never felt anything but lucky to glance across the room at his

    innocent little imp in her one fancy black dress, Laura’s mittened hand so trustingly on the crook of his elbow, Laura grimly instructing him that he couldn’t chisel cost when it came to perennials, that one box of sedum was not enough to fill in the cracks in a wall, Laura learning the tango from a videotape and becom- ing furious when she couldn’t teach him, Laura. Laura! But he would not know, not for days, during the bustle of the funeral, the parade of the casseroles, that eventually time would grind down to a slow-motion dressage of seconds and minutes to be hurdled. That time would change character, from the headlong gal- lop of family life to a grim march. Seconds would become weeks, weeks centuries, for months to come. He would glance at calendars and be stunned to see that it was still February, that his tragedy, like a weight he needed virtually to strap onto his back and carry with him wherever he went, had grown no less heavy, so he could not even begin the process of speeding up, of trying to