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

our standards, Miranda,” Elliott said abruptly. “I thought you were asking if I was doing okay .” A hatred so foul and siz- zling it felt like internal combustion gripped Elliott’s gut; he was surprised Miranda did not feel it lick out and scorch her composed face.
    “Well, good,” Miranda complimented him. “What Rory said is normal, Elliott. Children want to know what’s going to happen to them. They can’t grieve if they’re afraid that their beds will be taken away. I know that much.”
    “How are you, Miranda? Are you okay?”

    “I’m not stupid,” Miranda said, opening the clasp on her bag, extracting a perfectly clean handkerchief. “I know you’re asking how I feel about Laurie. She’s my child. I expected her to outlive me by many, many years. I suppose I’m in shock.”
    “But you didn’t act that way while she was alive,” Elliott interrupted. “God!” He slapped his forehead. “I mean, during our marriage.” He could not believe his audacity. No one living ever spoke this way to Miranda. “You weren’t motherly . Or grandmotherly . You agreed to come on holidays. That’s not all there is to it. You didn’t . . . call for no reason. Do you know you never once had the girls stay overnight?”
    “But I worked at night . . .” “You didn’t have to . . .”
    “I did, and also . . .”
    “You just found it easier to deal with perfect strangers and make their dreams come true than to deal with your own children,” Elliott said thickly, aware this would have none but an ill effect and dis- gusted with himself for saying it. “Don’t you see what a mess Stephen is? That he lives like a college boy?”

    “We had card parties,” Miranda said. “Card parties?”
    “And charades. And the children would play, oh, whatever they did, hide-and-seek, outside in summer, that game with the flashlights . . . hordes of them, cousins and kids from the block.”
    “Ghosts in the Graveyard,” Elliott told her, sud- denly cold.
    “We would have these get-togethers, when Stephen Senior was alive. We’d make a bowl of punch, rum, and apple cider. All of us were so poor. My sister, Juliet, and Stephen’s friend Jimmy from work, and his wife, she was Greek.” Miranda went on, “I can remember us literally rolling up the rug in the old house, to dance. We have old eight-millimeter movies of us dancing . . .”
    “And after?”
    “I honestly tried. I remember a Fourth of July bar- becue I tried to put together. I burned my eyelashes off starting the grill.”
    “I don’t know what this has to do with how you were to your own children . . .”

    “I didn’t know how to do things! How to do the things to keep their lives the same. You’ll have to do that, Elliott . . . ,” Miranda said, her face flushed.
    “I will,” he said stoutly.
    “Take care you do, because otherwise . . . nobody invited us, Elliott,” Miranda said. “A widow with four children is not an asset to a gathering. And I suppose they were naughty. Stevie was. Angela was.”
    “Why didn’t you just read to them? Listen to the same music as you had before, with Stephen Senior? Watch the home movies, together?”
    Miranda folded her hands. “Well, Elliott, I suppose I was afraid it would hurt me too much,” said Miranda. “To be honest, I did not feel the same. I didn’t feel like doing the same things. I could always say I was busy. With work.”
    A widow with four children is not an asset, Elliott
    thought.

    * * *

    W

    ith Rory nestled beside her, fiddling with the dials on the bedside radio, Laura told
    her daughter that she knew how it felt to want to be the most popular one. “I was that way, too. I would try to tie my scarves around my neck—we all wore these little silk scarves the size of a bandana, but wrapped around with little clips on them, and I could never get them right. I would try to tie them on for forty min- utes in the morning, until the scarf was filthy and damp from my hands, and then I