Free If Only in My Dreams by Wendy Markham Page A

he’s known all his life. And he doesn’t.
    “I can deliver these later this afternoon, Mrs. Bouvier,” he informs his customer, having finished counting and packing. “Or maybe sooner…”
    If Alice ever shows up.
    “Oh, there’s no rush.” She deposits her purchases—a roll of brown paper, a metal cookie cutter shaped like a bell, and a popgun, a gift for her great-nephew—on the counter. “I’ll take these with me now. How is your mother, Jed?”
    “She’s doing just fine,” he lies as he totals her purchase.
    There’s no reason to tell Mrs. Bouvier that his mother has fallen into a state of depression these last few weeks.
    It’s because of Christmas, of course.
    Another Christmas without Pop, who joyfully embodied the holiday spirit.
    That first holiday after he died, with the harsh loss raw as a coastal nor’easter, was a blur of shock and overwhelming grief.
    The one that followed brought the first anniversary—and, in the wake of initial disbelief, a somber permanence that settled over the Landry household like a burial shroud.
    It’s been two years now. Two years, today.
    Two years already
, Jed thought when he stepped into the dim, chilly kitchen early this morning to see the still-empty spot at the head of the big table in the breakfast alcove. Sometimes it seems like just yesterday that Pop was sitting there enjoying his morning paper, a cup of coffee, one last Lucky Strike before heading out to open the store.
    Only two years
, Jed thought later this morning when Mrs. Robertson, oblivious to the shortages created by the war in Europe, demanded to know why there are
still
no silk stockings for sale, and why he can’t tell her when there will be. Sometimes it seems like a lifetime since he was striding jauntily and carefree along a Cambridge street, a stack of books under one arm, Carol under the other.
    Two years
.
    Shouldn’t it be getting a little easier? Shouldn’t there be some mornings when Lois Landry doesn’t emerge from her lonely bedroom with heavy footsteps and telltale red, swollen eyes?
    Jed honestly expected his mother’s grief to diminish as yet another year drew to a close, but time seems to have had the opposite effect on her.
    And it isn’t just Mother. Facing yet another holiday season without Pop is hard on all of them. Grandma sighs a lot, and not just over the news from overseas. Granddad shuffles around the house halfheartedly, glancing often at the chessboard sitting untouched on the shelf. His son-in-law was the only one in the house who knew how to play.
    Gilbert sent a letter claiming that he couldn’t be home until Christmas Eve, and had to be back on campus before New Year’s. Penny and Mary Ann have been bickering even more than usual.
    Meanwhile, Doris pesters Jed every chance she gets about when they’re going to take the cartons of decorations from the attic, and put up the outdoor lights, and cut down a tree.…
    Those were tasks Pop always tended to—only he didn’t consider them tasks.
    The first year without him, of course, the Landry home was newly in mourning; there were no decorations, no lights, no tree. Last year, it was Jed who took over the seasonal rituals, halfheartedly, because Doris insisted and Pop would have wanted him to.
    But he only agreed to indoor decorations: a small Christmas tree and the stockings. Outdoor lights for all the world to see would have seemed garish on the first anniversary of Pop’s death.
    This year, he supposes, the decisions—and the decorating itself—will fall to him again.
    And what about next Christmas? Will he be on some frigid European battlefield or in an island jungle in the South Pacific, longing for home? Will Gilbert know how to string the lights along the porch eaves and remind Doris to hang the shiny lead tinsel on the tree strand by strand, rather than in clumps?
    “Oh, look, it’s snowing again,” Mrs. Bouvier announces as she accepts her package from him.
    Jed follows her glance out the