Chapter 23
“Why did you make eggnog from scratch?” Felicity asked, peering into her glass. The glass was one of a set of nine Nell had found in a local thrift shop. Felicity’s was decorated with an image of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. Nell’s glass featured Comet.
“Homemade is usually better than store bought,” Nell said.
“Yeah, but it’s definitely a lot easier to buy something than to make it from scratch.”
Nell sliced through the tape sealing a cardboard box of ornaments. “Easier isn’t always better.”
Felicity took another sip from her glass. “Well, it is pretty delicious. Hey, what’s with Molly? She’s been in her room all day. I don’t even know what Mick brought by this morning.”
“He brought a very pretty print of seven swans,” Nell told her. “I put it against the wall behind the tree for safekeeping.”
Felicity put her glass on the coffee table. “Maybe I should get Molly to join us.”
“I’ll go,” Nell said hurriedly. A moment later she knocked on her daughter’s door. “Molly?” she called. “We’re about to trim the tree.”
Molly opened the door a sliver but wouldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. Her own eyes were red and swollen from crying. “I can’t, Mom,” she said very quietly. “Sorry.”
“It might make you feel better not to be alone right now,” Nell said gently.
“I’m fine. Look, don’t tell Fliss what happened this morning. Not yet.”
“All right. Will you be down for dinner? I’m making that eggplant dish you love, the one with the melted mozzarella on top.”
Molly shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not hungry.”
“Okay,” Nell said. “Just let me know if you want to talk.”
Molly nodded and closed the door to her room. Nell stood where she was for a moment, swamped again by that awful feeling of futility, helpless to do or to say anything that might bring a smile of genuine happiness to her child’s face. Slowly, she returned to the living room. “Your sister doesn’t feel well,” she told Felicity. “She said we should start without her.”
Nell began to decorate the giant tree, carefully hanging ornaments the family had collected through the years. Christmas without X means Christmas with Y, she thought. Next Christmas, decorating the tree without the help of the girls will mean . . . But again Nell’s imagination failed her. Decorating the tree had always been a family occasion. Even Joel had joined in the fun, first stringing the tree with lights and then lifting the girls on his shoulders so they could hang ornaments on the higher branches.
“Earth to Mom?”
Nell startled. “What? Sorry, Fliss. My mind wandered.”
“I asked if you want me to put the star on top. I know you don’t like heights.”
“If you would, Fliss,” Nell said with a grateful smile. “Thank you.”
“No problem. I’ll get the stepladder.”
While Felicity went to fetch the stepladder from the kitchen pantry, Nell looked at the ornament she had just taken from its tissue paper wrapping. It was a Swarovski crystal snowflake, a gift from Joel on the last Christmas they had spent as husband and wife. There was a strong possibility that Joel had already begun his affair with Pam before that holiday season. Still, Nell hung the crystal snowflake with care. The past could be honored even when in retrospect it appeared slightly tarnished. Nell truly believed that.
* * *
“I’m glad you were free this evening,” Eric said. “My work habits are so quirky I sometimes forget that not everyone has the luxury of sleeping in of a morning if they happen to have been out the night before.”
Nell smiled. “And not everyone has the pressure of writing hugely popular novels to a contracted deadline.”
“Work is work,” Eric said. “It’s all important.”
“And eight o’clock isn’t so very late to meet,” Nell noted. Still, she had been a bit nervous that Felicity might pelt her with questions when she announced that she was meeting a colleague from Mutts and Meows for a holiday drink. But Felicity had simply shrugged and gone to her room. Molly remained behind her closed door, her dinner waiting to be reheated in the microwave if she found an appetite.
Nell and Eric were seated at the marble-topped bar at the Good Angel. A tall white Christmas tree had pride of place in a corner of the room. It was hung with sparkly silver and blue ornaments. Swaths of what looked like white silk were draped along the mantel over the stately marble fireplace. Even the tablecloths and tableware were on theme; the cloths were red and the plates decorated with a border of mistletoe.
“The new owners have really gone all out,” Nell commented.
“Clearly they have high hopes for Christmas being a season of financial success. Too bad holidays come with so many unreasonable expectations. We’re all bound to be disappointed when the reality doesn’t match the dream.”
“True,” Nell agreed. “Do you want to know the one thing that’s most disappointed me about the Christmas season? The fact that I was never able to get a picture of the girls on Santa Claus’s lap.”
“What do you mean you weren’t able?” Eric asked, taking a sip of his Irish coffee.
“I mean that I tried and failed,” Nell explained. “I had a picture taken of Molly with Santa before Felicity was born, but somehow it got lost. So when Felicity was old enough, I took both girls to the Copley Plaza mall with the intention of having their picture taken with Santa. I dressed them in red velvet skirts with white blouses and white stockings and black patent leather Mary Janes.”
“Sounds sufficiently adorable,” Eric noted.
“It was, before Felicity threw up on Santa before the photographer could shoot. Santa was not amused.”
Eric laughed. “Not as jolly as you could have wished?”
“Not by half. The next year I tried again. Everything was going smoothly until Molly spotted some awful little plastic doll in the window of a store and demanded we stop and buy it. I said no and Molly pouted and by the time I had wrangled the girls into the line of people waiting their turn with Santa she was in the midst of a full-blown tantrum. The supervising elves asked us to leave. The strange thing was it was the first and only time Molly ever threw a tantrum.”
“Did you try the next year?” Eric asked.
“I would have,” Nell told him, “but both girls were down with a bad flu for the two weeks before Christmas, so I lost my opportunity. Then the following year Molly announced that she didn’t believe in Santa Claus and that there was no way she was going to sit on a ‘fake guy’s’ lap. I thought she was a little young to be so disillusioned, but she was very serious about it. I considered taking Felicity alone, but for so long I’d had my heart set on a photo of the two girls with Santa that I decided to throw in the proverbial towel.” Nell smiled. “The girls laugh at me. They think I’m being too sentimental when I remind them that I’m probably the only mother in the USA who cares about such things who doesn’t have a picture of her children with Santa Claus.”
“My mother’s got a picture of Sarah and me with Santa,” Eric told her. “And every year she puts it on the mantel. And every year my sister brings her sons to the mall for their photo op.”
“See? It’s become an important holiday tradition!” Nell took a sip of her red wine before going on. “Do you remember the Christmas you came to my house?”
Eric nodded. “Of course.”
“My parents behaved so badly. I’ll never forget how my mother managed to avoid looking you in the eye the entire time and how my father grilled you about your grades and your plans for the future. And you were so good about it all, so even tempered. When you’d gone home, I tried to tell them how disappointed and embarrassed I was, but . . . Well, I never could stand up to my parents. I got as far as saying something like ‘you could have been nicer,’ to which my mother said something like, ‘whatever do you mean?’ and that was the end of my protest.”
Eric took her hand for a moment. “It’s okay,” he said. “You were more far more negatively affected than I was. I seem to be able to block a good deal of the nastiness people throw at each other. A gift or a curse, the fact is that I’m remarkably resilient and stubbornly optimistic.”
Resiliency and optimism. Two very good qualities to have when one is facing an uncertain future, Nell thought. Like an empty home.
“Molly broke up with her boyfriend of almost six years this morning.” Nell hadn’t intended on telling this to Eric; the words had just come out. “She’s in a muddle about her life, and the crisis has come to a head now, just days before Christmas. Talk about smashed expectations.”
“I’m sorry,” Eric said. “She must feel awful.”
“She does. And this might be Felicity’s last Christmas at home, at least for a while. She’s been invited to join her father and stepmother in Switzerland next year. It’s all she can talk about.”
“And you’re not happy about it,” Eric observed.
“Not really,” Nell admitted, “but I know I’m being selfish. If spending Christmas with her father will make Felicity happy, then she should take the opportunity.” Nell shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You don’t want to hear about my domestic woes.”
“I want to hear about your family. Just because I don’t have kids of my own doesn’t mean I’m not interested in other people’s children.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t,” Nell said hastily. “I’ve read your books. I’ve seen how you can so perfectly imagine all sorts of lives.”
Eric laughed. “I don’t know about perfectly, but I do try. And anyway, we’re friends, aren’t we?”
Nell nodded. “Yes. I suppose we are friends.”
“And friends share their thoughts and feelings, their desires and disappointments. Right?”
Desires and disappointments. “Right.” Nell looked at her watch. “I should be getting home. It’s my turn to open the clinic tomorrow.”
Eric paid for their drinks and linked his arm through hers as they left the restaurant. When they got outside they found a dark sky bright with stars.
“There are few sights in this world that give me such a profound sense of peace as a clear night sky.” He smiled. “Not a very original sentiment, but true all the same.”
Nell felt a remarkable sense of contentment at that moment, standing arm in arm with the man who was perhaps the dearest friend she had ever known.
“Hey,” she said suddenly. “Why no puffer coat tonight? You must be freezing in just that sweater and leather jacket.”
“I spilled coffee all over it earlier. I washed it as best I could in the bathtub, but it’s still drying out.”
“The hotel could probably have tossed it in one of their washing machines,” Nell pointed out. “It could have been warm and dry by now.”
Eric sighed dramatically. “Sadly, that thought didn’t occur to me.”
Nell laughed. “Next time you have a laundry crisis, call me.”
“It’s a deal,” Eric said, and he drew her into his arms.
Nell rested her head on his shoulder for a moment until she felt him shiver. “You need to get home,” she said, reluctantly pulling away.
“Talk tomorrow?” he asked.
Nell smiled and nodded. She watched as Eric walked to his car. Then she got into her own car and turned on the radio. Frank Sinatra was singing “The Christmas Waltz,” and Nell found herself singing along as she drove toward her home on Trinity Lane. ‘It’s that time of year when the world falls in love . . .’