Read Online Christmas, Present by Jacquelyn Mitchard - Free Book Online

forms—he and Laura joked that school for three children generated more paperwork than the Pentagon—all on him, all for him, all without Laura to remind him that none of it mattered, that tomor- row would be soon enough? Amelia looked up at him with her widely spaced, always tentative gray eyes.

    “It’s okay,” he told her. “Everything will be okay.”
    He washed Amelia’s hands between his own and dried them on a cheap, nonabsorbent paper towel. Why give people in crisis such short shrift? he thought. Why not pillows, blankets . . . muffins?
    He supposed such niceties were reserved for the birthing rooms, the places where relatives waited for good tidings.
    “You were going to say . . .” His mother-in-law ambushed him when he and Amelia emerged.
    “I wondered what you had told the girls,” he finally said, “so I would know later.”
    Miranda sighed. “I wasn’t going to tell them any- thing, but Annie asked right away if her mother was very sick, and of course then it was how sick, and then it was who would look after them . . .”
    “All this on the way from Natick?”
    “I’m sure you can explain things better later on,” Miranda told him. “I certainly didn’t volunteer any- thing they didn’t ask.”
    “That’s good.”
    Miranda sighed again. “Her father . . . Laura’s

    father.” She sighed in reverse, a long, repentant, inward breath, but her expression—so far as Elliott could tell— was not fond but exasperated. “He’d fallen in the shower and cut himself shaving. I heard him fall, or Suzie did, and I thought it was the cut that made him so woozy; he was bleeding. They stitched the cut . Can you imagine? He died four hours later.”
    “I suspect they thought he’d live, even if he were impaired somehow.”
    “They may have; but that’s not what they told us,” Miranda said decisively.
    “So you feel as though you’ve been through this.” “I don’t mean this as an insult to you, Elliott, but
    however much you love your husband, it can never feel the same as losing your child. Your child dying. I still don’t believe that it will happen. I keep thinking the surgeon will find some . . . some way. I can’t look at her, sitting there all shiny and with her hair brushed, and make that square with her being fatally ill. Dying while we watch, helpless to do anything for her.”
    Elliott said, “He said there was no hope. Doctor

    Campanile. Virtually. That we could put her on life support to harvest her organs.”
    “You refused that.”
    “No. It’s what she wants.”
    “Elliott, that’s . . . beastly. Don’t you think it actu- ally encourages doctors not to try as hard?” Miranda asked. “That’s what Juliet thinks.” Juliet was Miranda’s younger sister.
    “This doctor is a pretty square shooter.”
    Rory, her eyes rubbed nearly raw, walked into the room and asked for a Pepsi. Elliott fished in his pock- ets and gave her a dollar in change.
    Rory sat down. “It’s exhausting me,” she said solemnly.
    “And so it should,” Miranda told her granddaugh- ter. “You are very brave, Aurora Miranda.”
    Rory leaned against Elliott’s knee. She felt immense, weighty, her sixty sprightly pounds a limp mass. “Dad,” she said.
    “Hey?” Elliott hugged her, subtly shifting her weight from his tingling knee.

    “Are we going to have to sell our car? And our house? Because Mommy died?”
    “No, who told you that?”
    “Caitlin Carver’s mother got divorced and she had to sell their house.”
    “Oh, Rory. Mommy and I aren’t getting divorced. We’ve never been mad at each other like that and we never would be. We won’t have to sell our house. Everything in our house will stay just the same. Don’t worry, baby girl.”
    “How about the dog? She eats, like, ten pounds of food a week. We’ll have to sell Athena . . .”
    “We won’t have to sell Athena.” Rory kicked off her shoes and padded out into the hall to the pop machine. “Dad?” she asked