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

softly, glancing back in. “Am I going to have to quit?”
    “Quit what?”
    “The gym? I know how expensive it is, and Mom says I’m ready for private lessons, but you don’t have to get them for me . . .”
    “We’ll have to . . . figure things out,” Elliott said. “It’ll be all right.” Rory left the room, and they heard

    her drop the quarters, then the clang of her pop can hitting the tray. “Why is she thinking about selling the dog?” he wondered aloud, half to Miranda and half to himself.
    “Children do,” Miranda said. “They did, mine, when their father died. They were going to . . . Elliott, you certainly can tell me to shut my mouth if you wish to, but I have been here. Mine, they were going to hold a garage sale and sell their old clothes because they were afraid of the very same sort of things. It wasn’t exactly selfish. It’s not exactly as though they’re self-centered . . . it’s more as though they’re pro- grammed for self-preservation first . . . I can’t explain.” “You’d think they’d think of nothing but their
    mother.”
    “But Laura looks the same to them as she always did. She hasn’t lost her hair, or been in a wheelchair... how can you expect them to grasp how sick she is?” Miranda asked, and then added, “You are okay, aren’t you?”
    “My wife is dying,” Elliott told her, shocked. “How can I be okay? I’m not sobbing and screaming, but.. .”

    How am I, Elliott thought? I’m an idiot buying cards that say “Way to Go, Graduate!” I’m a flatliner, trotting around on the tile.
    “I mean, are you okay financially?”
    “What . . . ? How can you bring that up? Or, more to the point, only you would bring that up, Miranda. Now, of all times.”
    “Because I care. I can help, that way. Do you really have enough to take care of them? Without Laura’s income?”
    “Actually, we have very good insurance. Laura insisted.”
    “That’s very odd. Her income was not significant.” “It was a big help. It paid for the girls’ lessons. As for the insurance. Laura wanted to get it while we were younger because the premiums were cheaper. And it was like an investment. For the girls. We did it years
    ago.”
    “Mmmm,” Miranda mused. “It’s almost as if she had a presentiment.”
    “No, Miranda, it’s almost as if she thought we could get low rates, and it would be an investment A savings

    account we couldn’t touch every time one of the kids wanted a GameBoy.”
    “Well, what has it . . . how has it done?”
    “We should realize . . . a couple of hundred thou- sand. Or more.”
    “That won’t go far.”
    “ A hundred thousand dollars ?” Rory cried. Elliott and Miranda started. They exchanged perhaps the first synchronic gaze in their entire acquaintance: Nothing Rory said would make either of them rebuke her. “We’ll be rich! We’ll be as rich as the Priors or the Wisens! We could put in a pool!”
    The price being one mother, Elliott thought, giving Miranda a poisonous smile, which she did not deserve. “We won’t be as rich as the Priors or the Wisens and we aren’t putting in a pool because Amelia can’t even swim and could fall in, and . . .” He could not stop himself. “Rory, I can’t believe you just said that.”
    “What?” Rory asked.
    Elliott sighed. Rory had no sense of the social vice comprised by mentioning money in the same breath with death, the awkward cross-tied position of the

    heir. Though shocked by his child’s naked material- ism, he knew mortal irrevocability was still unreal for Rory. Someone at work had once told him that chil- dren grieved in reverse, that while adults were stricken sharply at once and slowly recovered, children were initially blasé, but the longer the loved person was absent, they experienced greater recognition of loss.
    He and Miranda watched Rory wander back to her mother’s room. Simultaneously, Miranda and Elliott released deep breaths.
    “We actually would be quite flush by