Free Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke

their families were by now as they attempted to converge on the house from the various hotels they’d spent their nights in? God help her if she had to entertain the Coxes very long without any help. At least Thuy and Pearl and Patty lived only a few miles away. Surely they would have no reason to be late, no matter how much snow was falling.
    The Christmas lights drowned themselves in their own dull brilliance as Tatty peered into them, looking curious, the way she’d peered into Holly’s cell phone, as if something either wonderful or terrible might be hiding in there.
    “What’s wrong, sweetheart? Let’s not fight. I love you so much. It’s Christmas, and we have a lot to do.”
    She waited for her daughter to turn around. When she did, Holly thought, she would take Tatiana in her arms. She would hold her until she warmed and softened in her embrace. They would start the day again.
    But Tatty didn’t turn around. Instead, she said something under her breath, which Holly chose to ignore, and as it became clear that she could stand there all day waiting, and Tatiana was not going to turn around, Holly herself turned around, went to the refrigerator, and opened the door.
    The refrigerator was so crammed full from her shopping trip the day before that Holly had to step backward to see the contents fully. The roast was what she was looking for, but in order to get to it she would have to swim through eggnog and sparkling juice (Eric’s brother Tony didn’t drink) and champagne bottles (his wife most certainly did) and whipping cream and fruit salad. The roast was at the very back, still wrapped in the plastic bag in which she’d brought it home from the grocery store the day before.
    As she always did, Tatty had grimaced at the plastic bag (“They aren’t biodegradable! They never leave the earth!”) as the bag boy slid the roast (sixty dollars’ worth of prime) into it.
    But Holly had given her a look, and said, “We need it in plastic, Tatty. So it doesn’t bleed all over the refrigerator,” to which her daughter had made an even more dramatic expression of revulsion and then hurried away from the checkout line to stare into the glass cage of stuffed animals near the automatic doors:
    How many dollars, over the years, had Holly stuffed into that machine so that Tatty could try to snag a miniature teddy bear or pink cat? Something cheap and synthetic, probably made in China, stuffed with some kind of formaldehyde-soaked substance that had been outlawed in this country for years? It had been remarkable, really, how many times Tatty, as a little girl, had snagged one of those prizes with the machine’s mechanical claw. The cashiers used to comment on it, saying they’d never seen anyone outsmart that game as often as Tatty had.
    At the car Tatty had helped her unload the groceries into the trunk from the cart, steering clear of the roast in the plastic bag, which Holly tossed into the backseat (was she trying to rile her daughter?), where it landed with a ridiculous, decapitated thunk . Tatty sat beside her in silence as Holly maneuvered them out of the parking lot, but when they were in the road and had reached the speed limit, Tatty said, “Before plastic bags there must have been ways to keep meat from bleeding all over the refrigerator, Mom.” She said bleeding in such a way that Holly anticipated that soon Tatiana would be announcing her vegetarianism.
    “That’s right,” Holly had said. “I bet there were, but I bet they didn’t work as well as a plastic bag,” and then she turned the radio on to NPR, where some popular musician Holly had never heard of was being interviewed at length about his influences, which included, but were not limited to, the sound of ticking clocks and flushing toilets. She turned it down so the voices were just a whispering background and tried to engage Tatiana in a bit of conversation by asking her if she knew who the musician was, but Tatty just said, “No.” And