Chapter 22
Felicity had left for school before seven. Nell and Molly were seated at the kitchen table. There were dark circles under Molly’s eyes, as if she hadn’t slept more than a moment during the night.
“You’re not eating,” Nell said.
Molly put down the spoon with which she had been toying with her oatmeal. “My stomach is in a knot.”
“I can guess why. Molly—”
“Don’t say anything, please Mom. Just don’t.”
“All right.” Nell sighed. If only she could wave a magic wand or—
The doorbell rang, and Molly flinched.
“Do you want me to get it?” Nell asked.
“No.” Molly got up from the table and left the kitchen.
For a brief moment Nell debated the rightness of following her daughter to witness the encounter with Mick, but she was already guilty of eavesdropping on the two. It’s a bit late for scruples, she thought, pushing back her chair and moving quietly into the little hall between the dining and living room.
Mick was wearing a red wool beanie and his ubiquitous Carhartt jacket. By his feet there was a mound of crumpled tissue paper. Molly was holding a large rectangular board.
“I found it at that antique place out by the Gascoyne farm,” Mick was saying. “I couldn’t believe my luck when I counted and realized there were exactly seven swans in the picture.”
Molly continued to stare at the print. Suddenly, she thrust it toward Mick. “Stop it!” she cried. “Stop being so nice to me!”
Nell put her hand to her mouth. Oh, Molly, she thought. Be careful . . .
“Why shouldn’t I be nice to you?” Mick asked with a bit of a nervous laugh. “What are you talking about?”
Nell watched as Molly’s expression underwent a rapid and violent change from distress to cold resolve. “Because I have to break up with you,” she said forcefully.
“What?” Mick shook his head; Nell could only imagine the look of confusion and dismay on his face. “Why?” he asked. “What did I do wrong?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just that . . . It’s just that I don’t love you anymore, and you have to stop giving me things.”
Nell winced. For all of Molly’s earlier bravado, when face-to-face with Mick she was acting like an emotionally charged child. And Nell was painfully aware that she had behaved similarly when she had broken up with Eric all those years ago. She had lied to him. It had been a lie born of fear, as she suspected Molly’s lie was as well. The past was playing itself out again, only this time Nell was a horrified witness rather than a cowardly participant.
Mick took a step closer to Molly. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What are you saying?”
Molly moved away. “I’m saying that I don’t love you anymore. Please Mick, just . . . just go.”
Nell held her breath in anticipation of Mick’s protest, but there was none. Instead, he walked rapidly to the front door and left the house.
Quietly, Nell walked into the living room. “Do you want to talk about what just happened?” she asked her daughter.
Molly, who had been standing utterly still since Mick’s departure, shook her head, tossed the print Mick had given her onto the couch, and ran up the stairs. Nell took a step to follow but decided not to. Instead, she retrieved the print from the couch. It was a lovely picture of a magnificent swan and her six cygnets on a calm blue lake surrounded by a smooth green lawn. The mat in which the print was framed was snowy white. Nell sighed and leaned it against the wall behind the Christmas tree where it would be safe.
* * *
Just before four o’clock that afternoon, Nell opened the front door to find Jill standing on the welcome mat that read: MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL WHO ENTER HERE! She was wrapped in the massive cream-colored wool cardigan she had brought back from a vacation in Ireland thirty years before. Jill claimed it was warmer than any coat she had ever owned.
“Hey,” Nell said. “Come in. I’m just about to take a batch of raspberry thumbprints out of the oven.”
“Wow,” Jill said, removing her sweater as they entered the kitchen. “They smell beyond good.”
“They should. I won’t even tell you how much butter the recipe called for. And the raspberry jam is homemade by Margaret O’Connell, the woman who sells in pretty much every specialty food shop between here and Portland.”
“The woman knows her jams and jellies. And her breads aren’t bad, either. Have you had her Irish soda bread? Killer.”
Nell opened the oven, carefully removed the tray of cookies, and set it on top of the stove. “So,” she said, “what brings you by?”
Jill leaned against the counter and crossed her arms over her chest. “Stuart phoned me earlier. He’s decided to spend Christmas in the Caribbean with his girlfriend of the moment. Which means I won’t be going to Connecticut. I didn’t argue. He’s forty-four years old. He’s his own man.”
“I’m sorry, Jill,” Nell said feelingly. “You must be disappointed, especially with this being the first year without Brian.”
“I am disappointed,” Jill admitted, “but I’m not entirely surprised. Stuart’s failed me before. You can say a lot for nurture, but nature has something to do with the way a person turns out. And in too many ways Stuart displays aspects of his father’s faulty character. I can’t tell you how many jobs Stuart has lost due to insubordination or sheer laziness. And as for his romantic relationships . . .” Jill shook her head. “Stuart never met his father, but he’s unmistakably his son.”
“And you love him.”
“Of course,” Jill said. “I might not be particularly proud of how he’s living his life, but that doesn’t mean I won’t go medieval on someone who tries to hurt him.”
Nell laughed. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Still, it’s hard not to blame yourself when your kid doesn’t turn out exactly as you’d hoped he might,” Jill said. “Every time Stuart breaks up with a girlfriend I think, why didn’t I provide him with a solid male role model? And every time he loses a job I think, why didn’t I teach him a better work ethic?”
“But each person is an autonomous individual,” Nell pointed out, carefully sliding the cookies onto a cooling rack. “A parent can’t be blamed for every poor decision an adult child makes.”
Jill sighed. “Of course not. Still, being a parent puts you in a very strange place. Even when you don’t much like your kid, you love him.”
“Though there have to be exceptions to that. Some people must stop loving their children, for reasons they feel are legitimate.”
Jill shuddered. “Probably, but I’d rather not think about that sort of thing. Christmas is supposed to be a time of peace, love, and understanding. I want to fill my head with visions of sugarplums, whatever they are, and not with thoughts of family strife.”
“I agree. You know, I’ve been remembering so much about Christmases past this season. The good memories are simply flooding my consciousness.”
“Share some of the good memories,” Jill requested. “Distract me from my woes.”
“Okay,” Nell said. “For one, I keep thinking about the years when the girls were small. Christmas mornings were Norman Rockwell perfect, the girls in their flannel pajamas, Joel wearing one of his fine wool bathrobes, me in one of the silk robes he liked me to wear. The girls would literally squeal with excitement as they tore the wrapping paper off their presents. It was idyllic.”
Jill raised an eyebrow. “How much are you romanticizing the past?”
“I don’t think that I am,” Nell countered. “And if I am remembering only the good things, I guess I’m grateful for that.”
“Fair enough. Go on.”
“I’d make eggs Benedict for me and Joel and pancakes in the shape of angels for the girls. Later in the day our neighbors would bring over a traditional homemade Christmas pudding. They’d lived in the States for years but were originally from England.”
“What about church?” Jill asked. “I took Stuart to an Episcopal church for a few years, but he never seemed to enjoy anything about the services, not even at Christmas time. I even enrolled him in Sunday school, but he got kicked out.”
“Why?” Nell asked with a laugh. “I’d think you’d have to be pretty naughty to get kicked out of Sunday school. You know, God forgives sinners and all.”
“Well, Reverend Moore didn’t forgive Stuart for throwing spitballs at him whenever his back was turned. So, what about church?”
“When the girls were little,” Nell told her, “I insisted the four of us go to church on Sundays and on Christmas and Easter morning. My parents had been churchgoers, though not in the least bit spiritual, and I’d always enjoyed attending services with them. I loved the concurrent sense of solemnity and joy, and I guess I hoped that my children would inherit my appreciation of ceremony.”
“It sounds as if there’s a ‘but’ coming,” Jill noted.
“There is,” Nell admitted. “One year Joel announced he’d had enough of church. He said that all he did was sit in the pew and think about football, so there was no point in his going. I felt that without Joel something essential had gone out of the tradition, so I stopped attending church as well, eventually even on Christmas. The girls didn’t seem to mind.”
“Do you miss the church experience?” Jill asked.
Nell thought about the question. She had abandoned church for Joel’s sake. He hadn’t asked her to, and now Nell wondered if her abandoning so much she had cared for—poetry, religious tradition—had been a manifestation of an innate laziness, as she had hinted to Eric the day before, or evidence of a long-standing inability to respect her own needs and desires. Either was a troubling idea. “Yes,” she said finally. “I guess I do.” And then Nell had an idea. “Look,” she said. “Spend Christmas Day with me and the girls. We’ll have a lovely time.”
Jill shook her head. “Thanks, Nell, but I know how much you need this holiday season to be very special for the King women. I can’t intrude.”
“You wouldn’t be intruding. Come on. I’m not letting you sit alone in your house while we’re down the road feasting. Please.”
“I won’t be alone,” Jill countered. “I can invite myself to my cousin’s house in Bangor.”
Nell put her hands on her hips. “Jill. You don’t even like him and you can’t stand his wife. Didn’t she serve moldy meat the last time you were there?”
“All right,” Jill said with a grateful smile. “Thank you. It means a lot to me to share Christmas with your family. Hey, are those cookies cool enough to eat? I’m not sure how much longer I can hold out.”
“Help yourself. I’ll make a pot of tea.”
“While you’re doing that, you can tell me how things are going with Eric. Oh my God these cookies are fantastic.”
“They’re not going anywhere,” Nell corrected quickly. “But I am really enjoying spending time with him again. I—”
“You what? Come on, spill.”
Nell put the kettle on the stove before answering. “Yesterday Eric told me that he believes in me. It was regarding my writing, but somehow I got the feeling he was also speaking in more general terms. What I can’t understand is what he sees in me that inspires belief.”
“He sees what he saw all those years ago,” Jill said firmly. “Look, Nell, it seems to me you’re doing it again, devaluing yourself just like you did when your parents told you that Eric was no good and that your feelings for him were wrong and misplaced. You knew the truth but didn’t trust what you knew.”
“Maybe, but I’ve done so little with my life, Jill, besides raising my children.”
“Eric sees you, not a résumé of accomplishments. Why is that so hard to accept? Love has nothing to do with performance or status. People fall in love all the time just because.”
“I didn’t say he was in love with me,” Nell protested. “Just that he believes in me.”
“Is that really so different? Hey, where’s that tea?”
“Ready to pour,” Nell said. “And there’s one more thing I want to tell you. Molly broke things off with Mick this morning and not in a very nice way. I think she just snapped.”
Jill shook her head. “This holiday season is just full of surprises, isn’t it? How is she?”
“Miserable, I assume, though she won’t talk to me yet.”
“Poor kid, and she really is just a kid.”
“I was thinking the same thing the other day,” Nell told her. “I was thinking of how at her age I made a decision spectacularly against my own interest. Youth is a dangerous time.”
“It is indeed.” Jill finished her tea and reached for her sweater, hung over the back of a chair. “Well, you know where to find me if you want to talk more. Just bring some of those raspberry cookies when you visit.”
When Jill had let herself out, Nell thought about what her friend had said. Was believing in someone the same as loving them? It wasn’t inconceivable that Eric could love her for the sake of the past; in fact, it was probable. But that wasn’t the same as loving her in the present.
Or could it be?