Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

This is going to be the worst Christmas ever, Bobby thought. The cheerful Christmas music blaring from the airport speakers mocked him. He shrugged off his backpack and leaned against a pillar in the hallway. As usual in an airport, people were rushing and frantic. Bobby had been part of that flow an hour ago. And then his flight was cancelled. He could hear the thunder overhead, so he’d expected delays. He hadn’t expected the flight to cancel.

The challenges of travel. He’d thought he was up to it as he got in line at the airline’s counter. It wasn’t like he was trying to get to the ends of the earth. JFK was a major airport, and he could get home almost as easily from La Guardia or Newark, if it came to that. And then he got to the counter and the airline representative told him the soonest they could get him home was the 26^th. After Christmas.

He’d tried to tell them that wasn’t good enough. What about other airlines?

“The problem isn’t with our flights,” the representative told him. “New York is getting hit by a blizzard. JFK is closed.”

Bobby half-nodded. JFK had closed for snow before. Usually late in the day, like this, always so that the ground crews could focus on the runways and resume full flight operations at dawn. “Until when?”

“The 26^th.”

“No way. JFK never closes for more than a night.”

“It’s Christmas,” she reminded him. “And a whole lot of nasty weather.”

“What about Boston? Philadelphia? Albany? Even Syracuse or Rochester? At least I could get home for Christmas day.”

“I’m sorry, sir. The whole northeast is getting hammered.”

“What’s the closest I could get?” Bobby wanted to yell at the woman, like the man in front of him had done, and like the woman beside him was doing. But Moms wouldn’t like that, and Dad would say it was a waste of breath and advise him to look at the situation rationally. The woman who was helping him wasn’t more than five years older than him. She had no seniority. She hadn’t made the decisions that had him stranded in Florida in the waning minutes of Christmas Eve. It wasn’t even the fault of the airline she represented. They were undoubtedly losing loads of money every minute JFK was closed, and more if La Guardia, Newark, Philly and Boston were also down. They wouldn’t have made this decision. The decision to close any airport during Christmas week had to have been made for safety.

Bobby had glanced at the weather at home several hours ago as he decided whether to stuff his coat in his backpack or leave it in his suitcase. He’d seen that it was snowing, but hadn’t looked any deeper than that. Christmas in New York – of course it was snowing. Apparently, it was more than a little snow. Lately, it seemed global warming’s initial effects on New York City weather involved at least one major blizzard that shut down the city every winter.

Bobby took a breath and focused on his immediate problem: getting home for Christmas when the northeast was snowed in. “What’s the closest airport to New York City—well, White Plains—that is reachable?”

“If this thunderstorm clears, they’re going to try to get one more flight out to DCA tonight, before the runway up there starts to ice up. Chicago expects to have their runways cleared and operational by dawn, so we should be able to resume flights north later on.”

Bobby shook his head. By the time someone drove to meet him, especially with blizzard conditions most of the way, and then they drove back, not only would he still have missed Christmas, someone else would’ve, too. “You’re certain I’ll get home to JFK on the 26^th?”

“As certain as anything is in air travel,” she replied, “The airline doesn’t pay for your hotel, but you will receive a voucher for the flight. Do you want me to book you on the 10:35 flight to JFK on the 26^th, then?”

“Please,” Bobby agreed politely, though inside he was wishing he was still six, when it would have been less socially unacceptable for him to throw a tantrum. For the first time in his life, he was going to miss Christmas at Carbapple Farm.

Once Bobby had tickets for the flight on the 26^th, he moved out of the way so someone else could sort out their ruined holiday plans. As Bobby found a pillar to lean against, feeling gloomy, his phone dinged with an incoming message.

Storming pretty bad out here. You make it out before this hit?

The text was from one of his teammates, who lived in one of the cities along the coast near here. He’d spent most of the day at the airport with Bobby and their teammates, until one by one they all had to get through security and on to their flights home for break.

No, Bobby texted back. Flight cancelled. Stuck until the 26^th.

I’m coming back for you.

You must be home by now, and you said the weather’s bad.

I didn’t go straight home. I’m only ten minutes away. I’m coming back. You are not spending Christmas in some lousy overcrowded hotel you can’t afford anyway, moping.

🔍

By the time Bobby had exited the terminal and reclaimed his checked bag, Zack had found him. “You spent all day hanging around an airport with your teammates and then didn’t go immediately home, even though it was late and almost Christmas,” Bobby summed up.

“Hanging around all day at the airport with my teammates wasn’t entirely altruistic,” Zack replied, popping the rear hatch on his SUV so Bobby could put his bag inside. “Had to pick up my sister, and her flight was delayed, just like everyone else’s. Bobby, Erica. Erica, my teammate Bobby,” Zack introduced as Bobby slid into the backseat. “Our parents are not night owls,” Zack explained. “So, we stopped for food. That’s why we were still in the area when you texted about your flight.”

“If your parents aren’t night owls, you invited me home for Christmas without asking them,” Bobby guessed.

Zack shrugged. “I made a judgment call.”

“It’ll be fine, Bobby,” Erica assured him. “There’s always too much food and Mom would ground him if she found out he left a friend stranded at the airport for Christmas.”

Bobby met Zack’s eyes in the rearview mirror with a grin. Zack said what they were both thinking. “Are we friends, then?”

Bobby laughed. “Freshman year, I’d have never believed we’d end up here. I certainly wouldn’t have taken you up on a pity offer.”

“Freshman year, we’d have never made the divisional championships,” Zack pointed out. “It took four years of you dragging us all, kicking and screaming, to figure out how to actually play as a team, and that we won more games when we did it your way.”

“Not enough to win the championship,” Bobby grumbled, but it was mostly his bad mood about the cancelled flight. He hadn’t expected to win. The other team was the three-time defending champions, bigger, stronger, and faster; in every facet they were just better. Bobby, Zack, and their teammates had put up a good fight, but they’d been outplayed in the end.

“We’ll get it in March, with the basketball team.”

“I hope so,” Bobby agreed. “I know it’s rude to be on my cell while I’m with other people, but I haven’t had a chance to call my family and tell them I’m not going to make it home for Christmas. Okay with you two, if I make a call?”

“Knock yourself out,” Zack assured him and Erica nodded.

🔍

“Bobby! I can’t believe they are still letting planes land in this,” his father said when he answered the phone.

“They aren’t,” Bobby assured his father.

“Where are you?”

“Miami.”

“Actually, we’re in Coral Gables now,” Zack commented from the front seat.

Bobby waved a dismissive hand. “They cancelled the flight,” Bobby explained to his father.

“When do you get in?”

“The 26^th, afternoon.”

“After Christmas.”

“So they tell me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Zack said I could stay with him.”

“That’s very kind of him. I’ll tell your mother, and we’ll save your Christmas presents for when you make it home.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Merry Christmas, Bobby.”

“Merry Christmas, Dad,” Bobby said, trying to sound enthusiastic.

🔍

When they reached Zack’s house, Bobby grabbed his bag and followed Zack into the house. “I’ll give you the full tour later. It’s late, man.” He pointed to a door down the hallway. “My room.” He pointed to the door at the end of the hallway. “Bathroom.” He opened a third door. “Here’s your room. Make yourself comfortable and I’ll see you in the morning. The later morning.”

Bobby smiled. “Thanks, Zack.”

It took Bobby less than five minutes to get settled and to sleep.

🔍

He woke up, hearing waves crash against the shoreline, instead of Crabapple Farm’s chickens clucking. Bobby hadn’t realized the house was on the water when they arrived in the dark. He also hadn’t realized the window of his bedroom was open an inch when he’d gone to sleep. No wonder the water was so loud. Bobby closed the window but noticed that it wasn’t cold and light was the gray light of pre-dawn, which was typical for him. Twenty-two years of living on a farm with the rooster crowing at dawn had accustomed him to waking up at first light. His hosts likely wouldn’t be awake for a while.

He shrugged into practice clothes and made his way silently to the courtyard and, from there, to the beach. Part of him was in awe that he could be walking outside in a t-shirt and shorts on Christmas day; the other part greatly enjoyed the warmth. The sand was packed down near the waterline, from centuries of high tides pounding it, which made for better footing.

Bobby was the only person out. The palm trees waved lightly in the morning breeze. The rhythm of the waves coming in and receding filled Bobby with a peace he hadn’t expected to feel thousands of miles from home on Christmas morning.

Bobby flexed his toes in the sand. Ever since he was a small child, his favorite vacations were always to the ocean. Bobby inhaled, smelling the particular mixture of salt, sand, and brine. He never thought of “sun” as a smell, except when he was at the ocean, and even in the predawn darkness, the smell of the beach wasn’t just the combination of salt, sand, and wet, but also something else he had no word for except “sun”.

For Bobby, who was accustomed to New York’s white Christmases, the idea that he could be outside, before dawn, barefoot, in shorts and a t-shirt, on Christmas morning was a marvel he still hadn’t quite wrapped his mind around, despite shifting his toes in the sand every few minutes as a reminder. Bobby angled down the shore, letting the incoming waves swirl around his ankles and then recede, leaving the wet sand packed tight around his feet. Then another wave came in, and he could feel it wrap around his feet, pulling the sand, grain by grain, out from underneath him.

He knew he still had a little time before anyone in Florida would miss him, and he had come out to the beach for something other than the sunrise, though he had enjoyed the natural phenomenon.

“Merry Christmas, Moms,” Bobby said when she answered the phone at the Farm.

Bobby knew she’d be awake with the sunrise, just like he was.

“Merry Christmas, Bobby! I’m so glad to hear from you.”

“I really wanted to be home for Christmas,” he admitted.

“We miss you, too. But I’m glad you are safe and weren’t in the air or trying to land in the weather we’ve been having. And I’m glad Zack invited you to stay with him, so you don’t have to be alone on Christmas. That was a kind gesture. Are you still expecting to be home tomorrow afternoon?”

“Weather gods willing, that’s the plan,” Bobby agreed.

“Stay in touch tomorrow. I’m not sure they’ve got the trains running the whole way from the city to White Plains yet, so we may need to come get you.”

“It’s just snow, isn’t it? They really haven’t gotten everything back up and running yet?”

“It’s Christmas, Bobby. They’ve got everyone who is still in town working as hard as they can to restore services, but most of the people who would be doing the work are on vacation. And we got a lot of snow. Peter said we’d gotten three inches by the time he shoveled, when we got home from the service last night, and it’d only been snowing an hour and a half out here. The rest of the northeast started earlier. You know the road crews aren’t prepared to deal with that much snow that fast. It’s tapering off now, but it doesn’t look like it stopped overnight. Enough about the blizzard. How is the weather where you are?”

“Not a snowflake in sight,” Bobby replied. “It’s hot. My phone said maybe 90° today. Erica was very excited. She’d been going to school up north and said she hasn’t been warm all semester.”

“And Erica is?”

“Zack’s younger sister. She’s been really nice to me. Plus, she’s cute.”

Moms thought about her oldest son, who had been in love with the girl next door from the moment he met her. She thought about her middle son, who had been mooning over his eventual wife since her first day of kindergarten. She thought about her daughter, who had fallen for a gun-wielding stranger at first fond glance. And her baby boy was spending Christmas with a really nice, cute young woman. There was only one way this was likely to end.

Bobby heard his mother’s silence and could imagine what she was thinking. She always oscillated between not wanting her baby boy to grow up too fast and wanting for him the sort of happiness she thought he’d only have when he found and married his soulmate. “Moms, please don’t start planning a wedding yet. I barely know her.”

Moms laughed. “Okay, Bobby. Just remember, I want you to be happy—”

“And I’ll always be your baby,” Bobby finished for her. “I know, Moms. I love you. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

Bobby tucked his phone back in his pocket and took one more look out across the ocean. The sun was fully above the horizon, turning the water to its normal bright blue and the whitecaps back to a dazzling bright white. Bobby smiled cheerfully. For a doomed Christmas, this one wasn’t turning out half-bad.

🔍

Back in his room, he pulled his bag up onto the bed to see what he had for clean clothes.

He’d expected to do laundry when he got home for break, like every other college student he knew. Now he was to spend two days with Zack’s wealthy family. Did he have any Manor House worthy clothes? Bobby breathed a sigh of relief. He’d packed with the hope that they’d somehow pull off the win. A win would have meant media attention for all the players, not just the skill positions. A win meant Chris – the quarterback – would have arranged dinner for the team somewhere upscale-ish.

Satisfied, he took one of the outfits and his bathroom gear down the hall to the door Zack had indicated earlier.

🔍

Showered and dressed, Bobby wandered down the hallway. Zack’s door was still tightly shut. Bobby wondered if Zack had given his parents any hint that Bobby was in the house. If he had, Bobby hadn’t seen any sign of it. It could make for an interesting scene, if Bobby ran into Zack’s parents before Zack got up.

Fortunately, the first person Bobby ran into was Erica. Her appearance confirmed his suspicion that he’d need the sort of clothes he’d wear to an event at the Manor House. Erica was wearing a sleeveless summery dress and the sparkly sort of jewelry his sister-in-law, Diana, was fond of, though Erica’s color of choice seemed to be emerald rather than amethyst. “Good morning, Erica.”

“Morning, Bobby. Want some breakfast?”

“Sure,” Bobby agreed, following her as she led the way into a spacious kitchen his mother would have been jealous of, but which, nonetheless, did not appear extensively used. Bobby saw bakery logos on the containers of cookies stacked on one counter, instead of the familiar Christmas decorations on his mother’s metal tins.

“Do you have any specific preference for your breakfast?” Erica asked, snapping his attention away from the cookies before he could descend into homesickness.

“No, I’m pretty easy to please when it comes to breakfast.”

Erica smiled, tucking her long brown hair behind her ear as she turned to the large fridge. She pulled out two foil wrapped packages from one of the drawers. “Our cook makes these for Zack while he’s working on dinner. Ham, Swiss cheese, and egg on a bagel.” She put them in the toaster oven on the counter beside the fridge to cook.

Bobby nodded. “Zack’s go-to breakfast.”

Erica laughed. “And what’s yours?”

“Cinnamon raisin bagel with Moms’ crabapple jelly. Not as filling after dawn practice, but I don’t have to find somewhere to cook it while we’re scrambling to get out of practice gear and to our morning classes.”

The timer dinged, indicating the bagel sandwiches were finished. Erica dumped them on plates and reached for two glasses. “Orange juice?”

“Thanks.”

Erica handed him a glass and plate and led the way into the dining room which was every bit as formal as the Wheelers’. Erica skirted the edge of the table, setting down her plate and glass on the corner of the table, freeing her hands to open the glass doors.

Bobby, having perfected managing food and drinks at numerous college events, balanced his plate on his glass, and then did the same with Erica’s, before following her outside. The house wrapped around the courtyard on three sides. The fourth was open to the beach.

“I love it out here,” Erica admitted.

“It’s a great view.”

“Thanks,” Erica said, realizing Bobby had her breakfast. She waved for him to sit at the patio table with her.

“So do your parents even know I’m here yet?”

Erica grinned. “I left a note for them on the kitchen counter when we got in last night. Zack’s not good with coordinating plans.”

“I know. And we did get in late last night. It occurred to me when I got up this morning that they might be startled by a stranger rambling around their house.”

“They might have been,” Erica agreed.

After that they fell into a comfortable silence as they ate the bagel sandwiches. If he couldn’t be at the Farm for Christmas, being at the shore was a favorable second option. He loved hearing the waves crashing; he could have stayed in the courtyard, watching the waves come in and go out, for hours.

When she’d finished her bagel, Erica sighed happily. “I’m warm.”

“Where are you going to school?” Bobby asked.

“Michigan. I love my classes and classmates, but it’s so cold. And then the Christmas music starts playing and every other song is about how great the snow and cold is, how festive. Snow is not any part of my perfect Christmas.”

“You’ve never dreamed of a white Christmas, not even once?” Bobby asked.

“Not unless it’s white sand beaches!”

“Well, you and Zack will have to show me how a hot weather Christmas works. I’ve never had a Christmas that wasn’t snow-filled.”

“I would imagine it’s just like a snowy Christmas, except warmer. And with swimming.”

“I like swimming,” Bobby admitted.

“Good. Then you’ll be fine,” Erica joked.

From inside the dining room, a woman exclaimed, “So this is where you got to!”

Erica got to her feet, embracing the woman who stepped out of the house. “As if I don’t come out here first thing every time I get home, Mother.”

The woman turned to Bobby. “And you must be Bobby.”

Bobby got to his feet. “Thank you for having me, Mrs. P.”

“We’re glad to have you. I’m sorry about your flight. I’m sure you want to be with your own family for Christmas.”

“I’ve been telling my family since I started college that one of the risks of an athletic career was missed holidays. I just didn’t think it would start before I graduated.”

Zack’s mother nodded sympathetically. “And with the university’s change to the academic calendar, missing both Thanksgiving and Christmas must be difficult.”

Bobby shrugged. “I was able to get home for Thanksgiving, despite the schedule. I only live an hour outside of New York City,” he explained.

The university had shifted the academic calendar that semester so that the students only had Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving, instead of the full week they’d gotten in previous years. Many of Bobby’s classmates had bailed and gone home for the full week anyway, and most professors seemed understanding. However, one of the university’s initiatives to prove their athletes were there for the education and not just the game was a stipulation that any player missing a class would be benched, one day for each class missed. Three days’ worth of missed classes would have kept any of Bobby’s teammates out of both the Black Friday game and the following game, both of which were playoff games. Winning both had given them the opportunity to play in yesterday’s game in Miami. The rule had kept Bobby and his teammates on campus until Wednesday afternoon. The Black Friday game meant they’d have had to be back on campus by noon on Friday. For all but a handful who lived close to New York City, that had meant going home for Thanksgiving was out of the question. Instead, the team coaches had arranged a turkey dinner for the team on Saturday. Bobby had enjoyed the second Thanksgiving with his team, but had been glad he’d been able to get his Moms’ cooking, which was, of course, far better than anything else he’d ever eaten.

“We’ll do what we can to provide you an enjoyable Christmas,” Zack’s mother promised. “Let us know if you need anything.”

“Thank you,” Bobby said politely.

🔍

A while later, Zack came out to the courtyard with his own bagel sandwich. “Er, did you let Bobby eat my breakfast?” Zack demanded.

“No. I helped him eat your breakfast,” Erica said, smiling up at her brother as he approached where they were sitting. “Cook made half a dozen of those bagels. Even you won’t eat six of those in a day, and I wasn’t dressed to cook bacon, so bacon and eggs was out.”

“Why do you always have to be so practical?” Zack grumbled, sitting down at the patio table with them.

“Why do you always have to be so possessive about your food?” Erica shot back.

“Growing boy,” Bobby replied, almost in the same breath as Zack. They grinned at each other. Bobby considered for a moment. “I have an idea. Is there a grocery store near here that’s likely to be open today?”

“Sure. Three blocks over on the main highway, and there’s a big one on Grand,” Erica said, “but what do you want? We always have a ton of food in the house. We probably have whatever you want here.”

Bobby smiled. “No offense, but your kitchen doesn’t look like any of you do much baking in-house.”

“No reason to,” Zack said. “The bakery down the street is amazing, almost as good as your family’s.”

“My family’s ‘bakery’ is my mother’s kitchen,” Bobby reminded Zack. “Or my sisters’.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Zack said. “What do you want from the grocery store?”

“Oreos, butter, peanut butter, powdered sugar, heavy whipping cream, chocolate chips and cupcake wrappers,” Bobby answered.

“Please tell me you’re making those single serving peanut butter pie things,” Zack said.

“That’s the idea, so let’s see what’s already in your kitchen and then go to the grocery store and grab the rest of what I need.”

“Oreos, butter, and peanut butter we have. The rest of it I doubt we’ve got,” Erica said, “but let’s go see.”

🔍

Shopping with Zack and Erica provided Bobby with plenty of amusement. Much like Honey Wheeler, upon her arrival in Sleepyside, Zack and Erica had grown up without having to cook for themselves, much less grocery shop. He understood their surprise that when he said they needed whipping cream, he didn’t mean the sort of whipped cream that came in a can to put on ice cream sundaes, but their surprise at the numerous varieties of chocolate chips (and at Bobby’s insistence that the semi-sweet ones were better for baking) and the fact that there was more than one kind of sugar (none of which were in the colored packets that came with coffee) amused him. He knew his amusement would continue if they decided to “holp” him with the baking. If he could actually call it baking, when the dessert he planned to make didn’t require an oven. Was there a different word for baking that didn’t involve an oven? He’d have to ask Mart, when he made it home.

🔍

With three people, Bobby assigned each of them to one of the layers of the dessert. “Don’t you use a recipe or something?” Erica asked when he started giving directions.

Bobby shrugged. “My Moms’ always working on something in the kitchen. Plus, I have three older siblings wanting their turn, and at least one who’s fond of playing pranks. I didn’t ever feel like I had time to dig out a recipe. Even if I did, Mart would have gladly ‘misplaced’ it for me, even though he ‘dores these almost as much as Zack does. Plus, this is the only baking I do at all regularly, so it’s not so hard to remember it.”

“Okay, the Oreos are crushed,” Zack reported.

“Add that melted butter to the bag, zip it up, and shake,” Bobby instructed absently, monitoring the cream he was bringing to a boil and debating turning the heat up under it. He’d gone with a lower heat so it didn’t boil as fast, because he knew he had to keep an eye on Zack’s and Erica’s pieces of the dessert, but it was taking longer than he’d thought and he was getting impatient.

“You’re kidding,” Zack said incredulously, glancing at the melted butter and the bag of crushed Oreos in his hands.

Bobby shrugged. “I mean, you can pour it all in a bowl and mix it, if you want, but it’s just another bowl we’ll have to clean when we’re through, and you’ve already got that nice handy bag from crushing the Oreos. Call me lazy.”

Zack did as Bobby had originally instructed, though he still looked dubious.

Bobby turned to check on Erica’s peanut butter mixture. “Looks good.” He took the Oreo crumble from Zack and began to press it into the bottoms of the lined cupcake tins. “Keep an eye on the cream and let me know when it boils.”

“Bobby, it’s boiling,” Zack told him as he was washing the last bits of Oreo dust from his hands.

“Perfect. Pour it on the chocolate chips for me.” He’d already gotten Erica to start pouring the peanut butter mixture on top of the Oreo crusts in each cupcake well.

Finished washing his hands, Bobby whisked the rapidly melting chocolate chips into a smooth liquid and then began to spoon the chocolate layer over the peanut butter ones, before adding chopped peanut butter cups to the top of each dessert.

Bobby looked around the kitchen. The large refrigerator did not have a freezer section above or beside it, as he’d expected, and his dessert wouldn’t set without a good chill. He wasn’t sure the fridge would be enough. After a moment he spotted the chest freezer that he’d mistaken for extra counter space. “I don’t suppose you guys have an upright freezer anywhere?” He asked. It wasn’t that he’d never chilled these in the basement chest freezer at home, but it was much harder to keep them level in a freezer that didn’t have shelves.

“Uhh, there’s a small one in the bar fridge. We only use it for ice.”

“Will these trays fit?”

Erica snickered. “They did when he was trying to make Jell-o shots and got caught.”

Bobby grinned. He’d heard about the failed attempt, and made fun of Zack at the time, so he didn’t comment now.

Zack shot his sister a dark look before leading the way downstairs to what Bobby had mentally classified as a game room during his tour of the house earlier in the day. At the time, the projector and sound system for the home theater had drawn more of his attention than the full-service bar, but now he could see there was indeed a small fridge with a freezer section just big enough for the dessert trays, and the two ice cube trays that had been the freezer’s only prior occupants.

“Erica! Zack! Bobby! Are you busy?” Mrs. Polland called from somewhere upstairs.

The siblings smiled. “Mom’s ready,” Erica observed, heading for the stairs in a hurry.

“Stockings!” Zack agreed, right behind her.

Bobby followed, asking, “But doesn’t Santa come exactly at 12 o’clock?”

“You know your carols. Good. That’ll help,” Erica said.

“Help with what?” Bobby asked.

Zack stopped for a moment at the top of the stairs, apparently trying to decide what to say. “Before that time you dragged me and Joey out to your place you said something about all families are strange, they’re just strange in different ways?”

“Something like that,” Bobby agreed.

“So, this is part of our strange. We don’t do presents. Probably part of that golden spoon you accuse me of. If I want something, I buy it, so what’s left for presents? But we do stockings. Except not hung on the mantle with care.”

“It started when we were little,” Erica explained. “At the time, neither of us were morning kids. Trying to get us up in time to open our stockings and get ready and get to church on time Christmas morning was a nightmare. If we were late, even a minute, Grandma would lay into Dad about how he was going to end up with spoiled brats if he didn’t even teach us to show up to church on time. Church, and punctuality. That was Grandma P in a nutshell.”

“So stockings started getting opened on Christmas Eve,” Zack said. “Should have been an easy fix, but you can’t tell your toddlers that you’re letting them open stockings on Christmas Eve because Grandma’s forgotten how hard it is to get toddlers out the door on Christmas morning. And you have to tell them something because every other song on the radio talks about Santa coming at midnight on Christmas Eve. So, there was this whole elaborate explanation about how all the carols were written in the North Pole, where, in the winter, the night lasts all season, and how our night, here in Florida, isn’t nearly that long, plus Santa has a whole world full of houses to get to on Christmas Eve, so he has to start a little early…. I think it kind of snowballed on our parents,” he admitted. “Pardon the expression.”

“As did the event of opening the stockings,” Erica admitted. “Yours probably get hung on the mantle with care?”

“Something like that,” Bobby agreed.

“Not ours.”

“I still think it started as an excuse to get us out of the way for a few hours so Mom could finish wrapping,” Zack said. “Back when we did presents.”

“You think Mom actually wrapped any of our presents herself? It was to keep us from trying to open all the fake presents under the trees,” Erica disagreed. To Bobby, she explained, “All the ‘presents’ under the trees here are just empty boxes—decorations—these days, and with both of us in college, the Christmas Eve of it all depends on flights and sports and all.”

“So anyway, it’s basically a treasure hunt,” Zack explained. “Figure out the clues, and we should be able to find our stockings without tearing the house apart.”

“And it matters that I know my carols, why? Because I don’t, really. I know the classics, mostly, but I’m no expert.”

“Neither are we, so let’s hope Mom decided to go easy on you, instead of deciding to make it extra hard this year because there are three of us,” Erica told him.

“The clues are all lyrics from a single Christmas carol, in order. The trick is that we don’t know which one. Mom gives us a less than ten second audio clip and we have to figure out the song and the lyrics,” Zack explained.

“Without the internet,” Mrs. P clarified, meeting them in the den. “Cell phones, hand them over.”

Trixie would love this, Bobby thought as he handed over his cell phone. Maybe when they start having kids.

“Are we all ready?” Bobby, Zack, and Erica nodded. Mrs. P hit a button on the stereo and a familiar tune played for ten seconds.

When it finished, Zack and Erica looked at each other with matching frowns. “She went hard on us because there are three of us. Usually, we at least get some lyrics to help us place the song.”

Bobby waved a hand to quiet them. He knew the song. “That part at the end…” He’d almost had it when the audio cut out. “Can we hear it again, or is that against the rules?”

Zack and Erica’s mother hit play again. This time Bobby tried to hum along, hoping he’d be able to keep going at the end, and with another measure or two, he’d know what song it was. The audio cut out again. Bobby’s humming faltered after a single bar, but it was enough. “… and heaven and nature sing.”

“Is that a name of a carol?” Zack asked.

“No,” Bobby said. “The name of the carol is ‘Joy to the World’. The lyrics from the part I recognized are at the end of the first verse – the part of the song right where the audio in that clip cuts out.”

“Do you know all of lyrics?”

“On the spot? I doubt it, but it’ll come back to me, I think. It’s one of Mrs. Lynch’s favorite carols, so I hear it a lot at Larry and Terry’s.”

“It starts with the name, doesn’t it?” Erica said. “Joy to the World!”

“The Lord is come,” Zack agreed. “That’s as much as I know.”

“Well, then, we start there,” Erica decided. “Or more precisely, we go start at Grandma S’s nativity set in the foyer.”

“Good thinking,” Zack agreed, leading the way.

Within seconds, the trio stood in the foyer. The nativity set was old. Moms had a similar one that had been handed down through her family for generations. “Here it is,” Erica said, fishing a scrap of paper out of the manger. To Bobby, she added, “Moms gives us all the lyrics through the current clue, so if we get ahead of ourselves, we get an extra hint about the clue we’re missing. Not much help if we are in order, other than as a double check.” She handed Bobby the scrap of paper.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King;

Bobby flipped the piece of paper over. “What’s this?” He asked, seeing marks that weren’t lyrics to “Joy to the World” on the back.

“Once we find all the clues, from the lyrics, the stuff written on the back will give us a last clue, to where the stockings are,” Zack said. “First things first, though. Anyone know the next lines of the song?”

Bobby nodded. “‘Let every heart prepare Him room.’ Then it goes into the heaven and nature sings part.”

“How many verses in this song?”

“Uh, four, I think,” Bobby answered.

“Mom does ten clues, so probably three clues in the first verse,” Zack said. “There should be a clue in that line. ‘Let every heart prepare Him room.’ Thoughts, Erica?”

“I think it’ll be somewhere inside. A ‘room’ in the house. Other than that, I’ve got nothing.”

“You guys have a chapel, or a shrine, or anything?” Bobby asked. “Maybe ‘His room’?”

“No, nothing like that,” Erica said.

“What about ‘prepare Him room.’? You think Mom means the storm cellar, where we keep all our disaster preparedness gear?” Zack asked his sister.

“It’s the kind thing she’d do,” Erica agreed. “And we don’t have any other bright ideas, so we might as well check it out.”

“The problem with the storm cellar,” Zack said as he pulled up the cellar doors. “Is the size. Even if I’m right about this, where in the cellar do we think this clue is going to be?”

“In the heart of the room,” Bobby said immediately. “The center of the room.”

“Okay,” Erica said, “that’s about here. So, we’ve got a case of water bottles, a box of instant oatmeal, and Oreos.”

“Definitely the Oreos,” Bobby said. “It’s comfort food. Not much nutritional value for the volume. Food for the heart, not the stomach.”

Zack moved the package of Oreos and found the second scrap of paper. “So now we’re to your favorite part of the song,” Zack said to Bobby. “Heaven and nature sing. What sings in nature?”

“People say whales do,” Erica said as they climbed back out of the cellar.

“Wolves,” Bobby added.

“Birds. ‘Heaven and nature’,” Zack suggested.

“Bird feeder?” Bobby guessed.

Erica shook her head. “We don’t have one, but there is a birdhouse on top of the mailbox at the end of the driveway.”

Bobby looked at Zack. “Race you.”

“Do you have any idea where you’re going?” Erica asked.

“I know where the driveway is. I’m betting I can get to the end of it far enough ahead of Zack to have time to find the birdhouse.”

“You aren’t that much faster than I am,” Zack protested.

“Prove it,” Bobby replied.

“You are so on,” Zack replied.

Bobby glanced at Erica. “My sister would kill me if I blindly assumed you couldn’t keep up with us. Are you in?”

“In this dress, I definitely can’t keep up with the two of you. I’ll meet you there. Don’t solve the whole thing without me. I’ll do the countdown, though. Are you both ready?” The boys both nodded. “Set. Go!”

Bobby took off toward the front of the house. Zack pulled ahead of him at the start, but Bobby wasn’t worried. Zack was a lineman. He needed explosive power off the line, but didn’t need to be able to get downfield fast. Bobby needed to be able to keep up with receivers up and down the field; he might run 100 yards on a single play. Bobby knew he’d catch up in seconds. Sure enough, he caught Zack again as they came around the front corner of the house and onto the driveway.

With the smoother running surface, Bobby didn’t have to worry about his footing anymore so he picked up speed. “Birdhouse, birdhouse,” Bobby muttered to himself, scanning the edges of the driveway ahead.

🔍

“So, who won?” Erica asked when she reached the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

“Bobby,” Zack grumbled.

“But it was close,” Bobby said cheerfully, handing Erica the clue.

“On the plus side, this is one verse down,” Zack said.

“On the not so plus side, do we know the rest of the verses?”

“I’m really not sure about the order, but there’s a verse somewhere that starts ‘No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground’. You said if we got out of order, we’d get the lyrics we missed? So, there’s no reason not to jump ahead if we can figure out the clue or clues that goes with that part of the song, right?”

“Right,” Zack agreed. “Thorns have got to be the rose bushes, along the walls on either side of the courtyard.”

Erica nodded. “The clue will be behind that big anthill. ‘Infest the ground.’”

Bobby followed them around the house. “You said your parents started this when you were three and five?”

Zack nodded. Erica glanced back at Bobby. “Less clues, songs we knew, usually just the first verse, much easier. If we solve it too quickly, it gets harder the next year,” she explained.

“Except the first two years we had smart phones. Mom didn’t think to confiscate them. We had the full lyrics to the carol right from the start, and didn’t have to work very hard to figure out what the carol was. The first year, we solved the carol hunt in under an hour. Mom figured we were getting older and she just had to make it tougher. The second year took us maybe an hour and a half. That’s when she figured out we were using the internet. So now she takes our phones and unplugs the router, so we can’t use the computer.”

“We tried to appeal to Dad, but he said it was good for us. ‘Use your brains. That’s what they are there for.’”

“That was when we were teens and difficult,” Zack said.

“So, you’re not difficult now?” Bobby asked with a grin.

“Shut it, Belden.”

“Less difficult,” Erica said, smiling. “These days we’re cooperative participants. It’s fun, especially after a semester of studying hard. Everything is so serious. And then this. We get to wander around the property for a couple of hours, with no real urgency or consequences for failure.”

Zack picked up the piece of paper tucked behind an impressive anthill behind the row of rose bushes. “This is from the third verse.”

“Then we need to go through the verse we missed line by line,” Erica said.

Joy to the World, the Savior reigns!

“Mean anything to anyone?” Zack asked.

Erica shook her head. They both looked at Bobby. “I’ve got nothing. Sounds like regular Christmas to me.”

“Okay, next line,” Zack murmured.

Let men their songs employ;

“Where would men employ their songs?”

“Recording studio?”

“Concert venue.”

“Clubs.”

“That’s it,” Bobby said.

“What’s it?”

“Clubs. Or more specifically, bars.”

“In the cabinet where the controls for the sound system are, you think?” Zack guessed.

“Sounds logical to me. Let’s go check it out.”

🔍

“Okay, five clues down. Half-way there,” Zack said, handing the piece of paper from the sound system to Erica, who was keeping all the clues for their final puzzle. “So now we’re on to ‘While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains’. I don’t know about you, but the only thing I can figure when I hear that is that ‘field’ on the other side of the dune that floods when the tide comes in. But we only have an hour before that’s under water. Do you think Mom counted on us getting there fast enough?”

“She probably thought we’d get there faster. We are out of order.”

“Rather than debating it, if we’re short on time, maybe we should go find the clue?” Bobby suggested.

They hurried up the stairs and out of the house. Zack jogged to the top of the dune. “Where do we think it is?”

Erica started to laugh as she slid down the other side of the dune. “Zack, it’s here.” She fumbled with something tied to one of the plant stalks and then pulled it free. She held it up triumphantly.

“Mr. Duck-Duck! I didn’t know we even still had that,” Zack laughed as his sister brought the bright yellow rubber duckie back to them.

“My Moms keeps everything,” Bobby said. “Especially all our favorite and most embarrassing toys. But where’s the clue?”

“Easy,” Erica said, snagging the duck back and flipping it over. She easily popped the plug out of the bottom of it and eased the scroll of paper out of the duck.

“If the tide had come in, would the clue really have stayed dry?” Bobby asked.

“Empirical evidence says yes,” Zack replied. “We used to think we were so smart, hiding notes from our parents in Mr. Duck-Duck. As if they didn’t get suspicious when we went hunting for bath toys in the middle of the day.”

“So, we’re up to ‘Repeat the sounding joy’ now?”

“Yep,” Bobby agreed. “What do you guys have that makes a sound? A bell, maybe? A Christmas decoration?”

Zack rolled his eyes. “Mom’s JOY. It’s her favorite Christmas decoration. Candy cane stripped plastic letters, lights, motion detector. Plays a couple measures of some syrupy sweet carol every time you walk past."

“And you threatened to chuck it in the ocean last year,” Erica reminded him.

“It’s fine, once in a while. She put it on the bathroom door last year,” Zack complained.

Erica shrugged. “I agree, it was poor placement. You still can’t throw our mother’s favorite decoration out to sea.”

“I didn’t. Where is it this year? I haven’t seen it.”

“She’s probably protecting it from you,” Bobby guessed.

Erica smiled at him. “Probably. It’s on the hall table outside of my room.”

There was no clue anywhere near the decoration, though it played cheerful music every time they moved the slightest bit. “How sure are we that there’s a clue related to ‘repeat the sounding joy’? You said ten clues, right? That’s two clues per verse, three clues in two verses. There were three clues in the first verse.”

“No, there’s a clue. If the previous clue was the last one in the verse, the clue would’ve had the whole verse, not just the line the clue is part of,” Erica explained.

“Then what are we missing?”

“Whatever it is, can we figure it out somewhere else? This thing’s driving me crazy again.”

Erica laughed. “Let’s go out to the courtyard.”

🔍

“Is there any chance we missed it?” Zack asked, flopping down in one of the chairs.

“Zack, we were all over that table and decoration. If the clue had fallen on the floor, or something, we’d have noticed it. No staff in the house because of the holiday, so they didn’t move it or ‘clean it up’. Dad would know a clue when he found it and would leave it there. The clue wasn’t there,” Erica replied.

“Have you guys ever been wrong about a clue before?” Bobby asked.

“Every year,” Zack admitted. “But usually we know we’re guessing.”

“So maybe we were overconfident,” Erica said. “The lyric is ‘repeat the sounding joy’. Mom’s decoration only plays once, unless it detects more motion. We need something that makes the same sound repeatedly.”

Zack nodded. “But what?”

Bobby hesitated. “Does your mother ever play word games during these scavenger hunts?”

“Sometimes. What are you thinking?”

“Just sitting here, looking at the ocean, ‘sounding’ has two meanings: the one we’ve been thinking of—making a noise—and the nautical one.”

“Measuring the depth of the sea,” Erica said, nodding.

“The Jolly Old Yacht, the J.O.Y.,” Zack said eagerly. “Bobby, you might be onto something.”

“The J.O.Y. is docked in the marina, five miles up the coast. The clues are always on the grounds,” Erica argued.

“The clue isn’t on the yacht. It’s with the ‘repeat sound’. The original sounding line, from back when you had to take multiple sounds to get an accurate depth reading. Dad keeps all the original parts in the shed.”

“Why?”

“The boat was his father’s. It’s sentimental,” Erica explained.

Zack was on his feet. “Come on, let’s go!”

“Can we go by way of a drink of water or something?” Bobby requested.

Erica laughed at her brother’s evident impatience. “Why don’t you go check the shed while Bobby and I go pour three glasses of lemonade, and we’ll meet back here in five minutes?” She suggested.

🔍

“Did you find our clue?” Erica asked her brother when they reconvened a few minutes later.

Zack nodded, passing it to her. “So that’s seven of the ten clues. Three more.”

“We’re back to working on the verse that starts ‘No more let sins and sorrows grow, / nor thorns infest the ground’,” Bobby reminded them.

“Is the rest of that verse ‘He comes to make His blessings flow / far as the curse is found’?” Erica asked.

“Sound about right to me, and the rhyme fits,” Bobby agreed.

“Anyone get anything from that? ‘Cause I’ve got nothing,” Zack admitted.

Bobby shook his head and took another drink from his lemonade.

“Me three,” Erica said. “All good song lyrics; nothing that makes me think of any particular place or thing in our house.”

“So what do we do?” Bobby asked. “Moving ahead helped us before, because it got us lyrics we didn’t have. This time we know the lyrics, we just don’t know what they mean.”

“We still might as well go ahead. The other two clues might spark something. Or we try to solve the final puzzle with nine of the ten clues. Maybe what we’re missing in that puzzle will give us a hint about the clue we’re missing.”

“Okay, well, the only problem with that is, I can’t remember the last verse. I mean, I know the carol ends with ‘wonders of his love’, but beyond that, I got nothing,” Bobby confessed.

“So, we problem solve. ‘Joy to the World’ has a consistent rhyme, so two lines before that has to rhyme with ‘love’,” Zack pointed out.

“That’s not very specific. ‘Above’,‘dove’, ‘evolve’, ‘grove’, ‘I’ve’, ‘move’, ‘of’, ‘prove’, ‘rove’, ‘shove’—”

“Wait, go back,” Bobby interrupted.

“Rove?”

“No, ‘prove’. That jarred something.” Bobby rubbed his temples for a minute, trying to pull the memories of singing this carol together. “‘…[He] makes the nations prove / the glories of His righteousness / and wonders of His love.”

“You got it, Bobby. One more line,” Zack encouraged.

“Yeah, but it’s the first one. There’s no context or rhyme.”

“There is context,” Erica argued. “Every memory we have of singing this carol includes the memory of the lines before and after the one we’re missing.” Erica began to sing the carol from the top, softly, almost under her breath. “‘…Far as, far as, the curse is found. / He rules the world with truth and grace, / and makes the nations prove / The glories of His righteousness….”

“Two clues somewhere in that verse,” Zack mused.

“And I know where one of them is,” Erica said triumphantly. “‘He rules.’ I’ll be right back.” She jogged out of sight down the beach, but returned a minute later, waving a clue sheet. “Taped to the beach rules sign at the edge of our property.”

“I’m thinking ‘wonders of His love’,” Bobby mused. “Do you have any family miracle stories? ‘It’s a wonder what love can do’ sort of things?”

“Uncle Mark,” the siblings chorused together. “There was a house in Key West he was going to buy. The deal fell through and he was…not happy,” Zack explained.

“But if he’d moved into that house, he wouldn’t have been living in his apartment when the cutest girl he ever met moved in across the hall. And we wouldn’t have Aunt Sandy.”

“Sometimes horrible events lead to the most unexpected meetings,” Bobby said, thinking about the sequence of events that had brought Jim to Sleepyside.

“But how does that help us find the last clue?” Zack asked.

“Well, aren’t you sentimental,” Bobby said sarcastically.

Erica laughed. “Stockings are important. The whole story of Uncle Mark and Aunt Sandy revolves around the house in Key West. The pictures from our vacation in the Keys with them last Christmas are in the den.”

🔍

“Okay, we’ve got nine of the ten clues. Now we have to figure out if we’ve got enough to solve the final puzzle, right?” Bobby asked.

“That’s the idea,” Erica agreed, spreading the clues on the coffee table. Most of the pieces of paper had a couple of lines and numbers.

“We’re definitely missing something critical with that lost clue,” Zack said. “I have no idea what to do with this.”

“Wait, wait. Here,” Bobby said, pulling one of the clues away from the others. “This is a compass heading. These clues fit together to form a map. Which way is north?”

Both Erica and Zack gave him identical “how in the world should I know that” looks. Bobby shook his head, reminding himself that not everyone had grown up wandering around the preserve, and therefore not everyone would know which way was north. His dawn trip to the beach hadn’t included a thorough study of how the house was situated, so he wasn’t sure which direction the house was facing. Without the compass app on his phone, how was he supposed to figure out which way was north? Bobby looked at his watch. It was still too close to midday for the position of the sun to help him much. “The ocean!”

“What about it?” Zack asked.

“Where is it? What direction?” Zack and Erica both pointed to the wall the Key West photos were hanging on.

“Okay, so that’s east—”

“Are you sure?” Zack asked.

“No, but the shoreline out there looks straight enough, so, unless you’re living on some sort of bay or inlet, the ocean should be east.” Bobby could tell Zack still had doubts. “Think continental geography, Zack. Canada’s north, Mexico is south, the Pacific Ocean is west, and the Atlantic Ocean is east.”

“And south, where it becomes the Caribbean Sea,” Erica pointed out.

“True, but which side of Florida do you live on?”

“Point taken,” Erica agreed. “So, this is north,” she concluded, rotating the clue with the compass heading until it pointed north.

“This clue with the squiggly lines is probably the shore,” Zack guessed, moving it.

“I think this corner here is the outline of the house,” Bobby theorized.

They had pieced together about half of the map before they realized the numbers corresponded to the locations where the clues had been hidden around the house and grounds. With that hint, they were able to put the rest of the clues into place.

“Our missing clue must have the southwest corner of the house on it,” Zack said.

“But the map tells us where that clue is – what number would it have been?” Bobby asked.

“Eight,” Erica answered. She looked at the map. “That’s out near the front door, somewhere. Flow. The water feature in the garden, right there beside the front door. That’s got to be it. I’ll go get it. You two see if you can solve this map while I’m gone.”

“How?” Bobby muttered as Erica left the room.

“Maybe this,” Zack guess, tapping a small triangle at the edge of the missing section. “Maybe it’s an arrow? It’s not a wall of the house or a clue number, and this ‘map’ is very simple, so this symbol is supposed to tell us something.”

“Probably. Where in the house do you think that is?”

“Well, we’re here, at ten, and we know eight is the front door, so… the dining room, maybe?”

“We’d better wait for Erica before we go investigate. I don’t think she’ll be happy with us if we solve this without her.”

“I’m here,” Erica said. She placed the final clue into the map they were building, turning the “arrow” into a star.

“We think that’s in the dining room,” Zack explained.

“What are we waiting for?” Erica asked. “Let’s go find out.”

🔍

“There’s nothing in here,” Erica said, disappointed.

“If this is supposed to be a puzzle for you two to solve, your mother wouldn’t leave the prize out where you could see it. She had to know we’d be through this room at least once while we were hunting clues. What if we’d tried to problem solve in here, instead of out in the courtyard? If I were going to hide something in this room…” Bobby turned a slow circle. “Ah! There. The silver cabinet.”

“Nothing in there but dusty serving platters we never use,” Erica said.

“Usually true,” Bobby agreed, opening the bottom of the cabinet.

Zack crouched down beside him. “Nice thinking, Bobby!” He pulled one large stocking out. In the light, it was purple with “Erica” in green glitter at the top. “Here’s yours, Sis.” Zack pulled out two more, one Santa red, the other Christmas green. “And Mom and Dad’s.” Zack closed the cabinet door and opened the one next to it so that he could reach the remaining stockings better. The fourth stocking was classic red with a white “fur” top. Zack pressed it into Bobby’s hands as he reached for the fifth stocking, which was deep blue with teal letters spelling “Zack” down the front.

“How is there a stocking for me?” Bobby asked. “You guys didn’t know I was going to be here until twelve hours ago.”

“Mom always has the staff buy too much candy,” Erica said. “She likes sweet things.”

“And she knows we’re both on the same teams. She can make some easy calculated guesses about what you might like.”

“Thank you, Mrs. P,” Bobby said as she and her husband joined their children in the dining room to open the stockings.

“You made it hard this year,” Zack complained.

“There were three of you,” she replied.

“Thank goodness for that,” Erica said. “We’d have been toast without Bobby. He knew more of the carol than the rest of us, and he figured out most of the map.”

“Let’s open these already,” Zack suggested. “We worked hard for them.”

“And you are always impatient,” his mother replied. “But it’s Christmas Eve, so we shall open them.”

Zack promptly dumped his stocking on the dining room table. Erica carefully reached into her stocking pulling out one or two items at a time. Bobby smiled. Then he sat down to see what was in his stocking.

Mostly the basics, it turned out: candy canes, chocolates shaped like santas, bells, and reindeers, some other candies that were mostly Zack’s favorites. There were some other small items, mostly things they’d use in practice.

“Thank you,” Bobby said again, touched at the thoughtfulness. He’d still get his stocking from his mother, and his regular Christmas presents, once he got home to Sleepyside. Zack’s family had done enough just offering to host him for the two nights he was stuck in Florida; they didn’t have to go to any further effort to include him in their Christmas, but he appreciated the effort.

Remembering his other planned thank-you, Bobby hurried through the kitchen, grabbing a plate on his way, and down to the downstairs freezer. He removed five of the “cupcakes” they’d made earlier and took them back upstairs.

“What are these?” Mrs. P asked when he returned with them and forks for everyone.

“Mini peanut butter pies, basically,” Zack answered. “And they’re delicious.”

“You didn’t have to go to any effort, Bobby,” Mrs. P told him.

“Neither did you, but you have gone to a great effort to include me and make me not feel completely blue about missing Christmas with my family. I want to be a good guest, and I wanted to show my gratitude, but I’m not crazy enough to want to go shopping on Christmas Eve. So, thank you!”

Erica started took her first bite of the dessert. “It’s really good!”

“Told you so,” Zack replied.

🔍

By the time they finished the snack, Mrs. P encouraged them to go get ready.

“Ready for?” Bobby asked Zack as he followed him toward the bedrooms.

“We go to Aunt Jan’s for presents and Christmas dinner,” Zack replied. “Did we forget to tell you?”

“Or I forgot you told me,” Bobby said.

🔍

Bobby turned from adjusting his tie to find Zack, dressed similarly (Bobby breathed a sigh of relief), leaning in the open doorway of the room Bobby had been sleeping in. “Hey. What’s up?”

“Are you getting ideas about my sister?”

“Plenty,” Bobby agreed. “Though probably not the ones you’re thinking.”

“Don’t forget the bro code, man.”

Bobby raised an eyebrow. “What bro code?”

“They don’t have that where you’re from? You can’t date a guy’s sister. It goes against the bro code,” Zack explained.

Bobby thought about his role models for how friendships between guys worked. Jim, married to his sister, Brian, engaged to Jim’s sister, Mart, married to Bobby’s best friends’ sister, and Dan, who would have dated any one of the Bob-White girls if they’d been unattached when he arrived in Sleepyside. He grinned in spite of himself. “No, we definitely don’t have that rule where I come from. But relax, will you? I met your sister less than twenty-four hours ago. I don’t even know her well enough to ask her out. It’s not like we’re getting married or anything.”

“Married?” Zack hissed. “She’s my sister!”

“You don’t think someone as nice as she is – not to mention as pretty – is going to get married someday?”

“Someday, maybe,” Zack hedged.

“Then what are you so worried about?”

“You even considering putting the words ‘married’ and my ‘sister’ in the same sentence!”

“Relax, already. I’ll make sure you’re invited,” Bobby joked.

“You’re not helping!” Zack protested, knowing from Bobby’s tone that Bobby was just messing with him now because he was getting a reaction.

“Helping is absolutely not my job,” Bobby told him solemnly. “Come on. I think we get in twice as much trouble if we’re late on Christmas.”

🔍

When they arrived, Zack recruited Bobby to help unload the car. Aunt Jan’s living room was open and airy. In the front corner by the large open window, stood the Christmas tree. Instead of a full towering evergreen, as Bobby would have expected, a large potted palm tree was strung with white lights. Metallic red and green garland was wrapped tightly around the trunk, providing more space to hang ornaments. Nestled in the sandy pot were several large—and, Bobby suspected, fake—pineapples, festively decorated.

Erica shrugged when she saw Bobby’s attention on the tree. “Pine trees just don’t do very well in this heat, especially once they’re cut.”

“I like it,” Bobby admitted. “It fits.” He had noticed the Christmas tree at Zack’s house was artificial, but when they’d told him it was purely decorative, right down to the gifts beneath it, he hadn’t thought any more about it. He hadn’t given any thought to a pine tree’s likely response to year-round temperatures well above freezing.

Bobby turned from the tree to the rest of the festively decorated room. The half wall between the living room and the dining room was laden with all manner of Christmas sweets. Zack was in the other room already, filling a plate.

“This food is not good for us,” Bobby reminded his teammate, even as he started a plate of his own.

“Then have a watermelon,” Zack replied, adding a wedge of the red and green fruit to Bobby’s plate. “We’re between sports and it’s Christmas. Live a little. Eat a lot.”

“I think those are meant to be decorative,” Bobby cautioned Zack. The candy cane Zack had just claimed had been one of a dozen tied together with ribbon to form a free-standing cone in the center of the ledge.

Zack nodded. “It’s a family challenge. The first person to take a candy cane and not be able to get the rest to stand up—without outside support—has to clear the table after dinner.”

“Your family likes challenges, don’t they?”

“I had to get the competitive drive somewhere, don’t you think?”

“What’s the record? For the candy cane challenge, I mean.”

“Two years ago, Erica got two to stand up.”

“Smart and cute.”

Zack made a face. “You said you weren’t into her.”

“No, I didn’t. I said it was early stages. Too early for you to be panicking.”

“What are you two talking about?” Erica asked.

“Nothing,” Bobby said quickly.

“You really are such a liar,” she said calmly before turning to her brother. “What about you? You have an answer?”

“Bobby’s works for me,” Zack replied.

Erica shook her head. “Fine,” she muttered, snagging a piece of the mint bark from one of the plates on the table.

🔍

Waking at dawn the next day, Bobby wasted no time sneaking out onto the beach. He padded along the wet sand and ebbing waves, watching the sky transform as the sun drew nearer to sneaking across the horizon.

His Christmas had seemed doomed to disappointment. He had worked for four years to get his talented teammates to play together as a single unit with a common purpose, an effort which had resulted in the team being invited to play in the championship game in Miami, Florida at the beginning of the week. Unfortunately, his team had lost the game, which was the last game of Bobby’s collegiate football career, and quite likely the last game of his whole football career. He knew the likelihood of making a professional team was slim.

He had arrived at Miami International Airport the morning after their disappointing, but predictable, loss, with the rest of his teammates, many of whom had earlier flights than his. The group had dwindled as, one by one, they had to go through security and off to their gates. Bobby’s flight had been delayed from midafternoon to early evening because of a mechanical issue. Early evening had become late evening as thunderstorms rolled across the southern United States and snow began the coat the northeast, but Bobby was a patient traveler.

The salt in the air as he walked along the beach reminded his taste buds of the heavily salted fries he’d been snacking on that evening, as he waited for his flight. Close to midnight, and more than twelve hours after he’d arrived at the airport, the flight was cancelled. The airline representative who had the thankless job of dealing with a planeful of tired, stranded passengers had had the unpleasant task of informing him that the snow in the northeast was a major blizzard and there would be no flights getting into New York until after Christmas.

He had been ready to declare Christmas a lost cause at that point, but Zack had insisted Bobby could not spend Christmas at an airport hotel and with that Bobby’s Christmas had begun to improve.

His Christmas had definitely been improved by meeting Zack’s sister, Erica. She had gone out of her way to make him feel at home and included in the holiday celebrations; the entire family had. Erica always seemed to know just how to distract him when he started feeling homesick. Bobby hadn’t been able to decide which he liked more: the way Zack got gruff and attempted to assert “bro code” rules to discourage Bobby’s interest in Erica, or the flowy sundress Erica had been wearing yesterday, because it was Miami and she could wear a summer dress in the dead of “winter.” Bobby suspected that meant he’d spent too much time in his formative years with Daniel Mangan.

And she was pretty. Like, really pretty. He loved the way that wavy dark brown hair cascaded down her shoulders and those deep blue eyes, the same color as the ocean was at this time of day, lit on him. Had he met her at some event (the most likely candidate being graduation), he’d have figured she was way out of his league. Tall, slim, gorgeous, fond of fashionable clothes, evidence of expensive tastes; she wouldn’t give a farm kid like him a second look, would she? Erica had proven to be very kind and down to earth, much like Di or Honey.

Bobby smiled, splashing as he continued down the coast. During his early teens, he’d made faces as his older siblings got mushy and ridiculous about the other perfectly fine Bob-Whites. His siblings had, each in their own way, told him he’d understand some day. At the time, he had doubted it. Now, as the waves continued to crash against the shore and his ankles, and the first rays of light were beginning to spread across the surface of the ocean, he knew they were right, just like they always were.

The sky was getting lighter; the white caps whiter, and the ocean was turning from deep blue-black to blue. In a few moments, the ball of the sun would emerge from the ocean out on the horizon. Bobby was still the only one out on the beach. He supposed, for those who lived here, the sunrise over the ocean was no big deal, but he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

Bobby paused to listen to the waves crash, flow, recede, crash, flow, and recede. He breathed in the tranquility of the peaceful scene. As the sun grew on the horizon, Bobby’s favorite carol came to his lips. No one was around this morning, either, not that it would have mattered. Bobby set aside his usual embarrassment at the idea of a big, tough football player singing some sentimental holiday tune and sang the sun into the sky.

Hark! The herald angels sing,
Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth and mercy mild.
God and sinners reconciled.

He smiled as the first rays of sunlight shimmered across the water. The sky turned a vibrant gold as the sun grew larger on the horizon. The ocean reflected back the light and the waves rolled gently.

“Something to be said for white sand beaches on Christmas,” Erica said softly, coming up beside him in the sand.

Bobby startled. He hadn’t heard her walking up in the soft sand. He smiled. “I’m used to snow.”

“I imagine it’s hard to be away from your family and everything familiar, especially for a major holiday.”

“You know, when the airline woman told me they couldn’t get me home until after Christmas, I thought this was going to be the worst Christmas ever, but it hasn’t been. Even when Zack invited me to stay here, with all of you, I had doubts. He and I don’t come from the same worlds. We make it work for the teams, because someone had to. But even now, we’re never sure we’re actually friends outside of practice. He used to call me a poor little farm boy, and it’s true. I wake up at dawn because I expect to hear a rooster outside the window. Getting a scholarship from the athletic department was a huge deal for me. I’m the fourth child my parents had to send to college – and we just can’t afford it. But here I am, with Zack inviting me to his house for Christmas? I wasn’t sure I had the right clothes. I knew the food would be catered – or at least prepared by a paid cook. It’s not that I care all that much about Christmas dinner, but all of my memories of Christmas dinner are of a home-cooked, family meal. I expected to feel out of place. I am out of place. And then you, and your mother, and Zack have gone to so much effort to include me, and you guys have some fun traditions, too, like that carol-stocking-scavenger hunt. My sister would have loved that growing up. She probably still would, but I’m not sure Jim would be quite so thrilled about a ‘mystery’ for Christmas.” Bobby smiled at Erica. “And I’m really glad I got to meet you before graduation.”

“Me too.”

🔍

The train ride from JFK to White Plains had been slower than usual. While the tracks had been cleared there had been some trouble with drifting snow, Bobby learned, and the conductor didn’t quite trust the tracks at full speed.

Few people were travelling on the snowy post-Christmas day, so Bobby didn’t have the usual trouble getting from the train to the parking lot. As soon as he stepped outside, the door of the police car in the parking lot opened. Bobby glanced around but no one else had exited with him. Why were police waiting for him? He and Larry and Terry hadn’t played any pranks recently, certainly nothing illegal.

When the officer came closer, Bobby shook his head at his paranoia. “Merry Christmas, Dan. How did you get nominated to pick me up when you’re on duty?”

“Merry Christmas. I had to come out to White Plains Police Department anyway. And it’s the end of my shift. I just have to stop by the Sleepyside Police Station and clock out. That okay with you?”

“I’m already two days late getting home. What’s another 20 minutes? And what choice do I really have?”

“None,” Dan admitted.

“Are you allowed to give me a ride in the squad car?”

“I might have to arrest you,” Dan quipped. “Throw your bag in the back seat. The trunk’s full of evidence boxes.” Bobby complied. “So how was Christmas in Miami?”

“It wasn’t Christmas in Sleepyside, that’s for sure, but it wasn’t as horrible as I expected it to be when they cancelled the flight.”

“I feel badly for all the people who got stranded when JFK closed, but I was glad they finally called it. Every time a flight landed, people tried to drive home or to wherever they were staying. Most of them ended up off the road. We were going as far as Hastings to help people, because the departments closer to New York City were overextended responding to accidents. If JFK had closed earlier, the governor would’ve closed the highways sooner, and a lot of people would’ve been safer.”

“Grumpier, too,” Bobby pointed out.

“Improving public safety is in my job description. Improving public morale is not.”

“I suppose that’s so. Speaking of public safety, were there any major issues? Injuries, fatalities, major damage?”

“Not that I’ve heard. At least not here. Boston had a pile up early with fatalities.”

“That’s too bad, especially right before Christmas.”

“People in a hurry, not used to driving in snow. It never goes well,” Dan admitted grimly.

Bobby nodded.

🔍

“I know it’s been a while since I was home for more than a night, but I’m pretty sure I still live at Crabapple Farm,” Bobby reminded Dan when he turned up the Manor House driveway.

“Cute,” Dan replied. “I know where you live and I know where we are both supposed to be right now. You should be used to surprises by now.”

Bobby followed Dan into the living room. At this time of year, the room was dominated by a huge, tastefully decorated Christmas tree. Like all of the trees in the Manor House, it was artificial, because Maddie didn’t like the way pine needles got tracked everywhere with a real tree. The artificial tree did, however, have enough pine scent sticks hidden among the branches to make the room smell like it contained a real tree, a touch Bobby always appreciated. Unlike the piles of presents under Zack’s tree, and, indeed, under all of the other trees in the house, the presents spilling out from beneath this tree were usually real, gifts to and from various members of the extended Bob-White clan. But, “Wasn’t Christmas yesterday?”

Moms hugged him in welcome. “It is not Christmas until everyone is home,” she informed him.

Bobby began a silent headcount. Dan had made his way to the corner to lean against the wall with Regan near where Mr. Maypenny was sitting. Trixie and Jim were playing tug with their dog, Jenna, on the floor in front of the fireplace. Moms, Dad, Mr. and Mrs. Lynch, and Mrs. Wheeler filled in the other seats around the room and Bobby spotted Mr. Wheeler over by the bar. His headcount stopped abruptly. “Brian!” His oldest brother had spent the last sixteen months in Asia, providing medical aid to a village that had been hit hard by an earthquake and the ensuing tsunami.

Brian got up to meet Bobby’s bear hug. “I missed you, too,” he said.

“When did you get home? No one told me you were coming home! Are you home for good or just a visit?”

Brian chuckled at his no-longer-six-year-old brother’s enthusiasm. “I got home just before the weather got really bad. And, yes, I’m home for good.”

“You came home and everyone still waited Christmas for me?” Bobby clarified, stunned. He couldn’t imagine Brian’s return home hadn’t been met with immediate celebration, especially if it was a surprise. Then again, maybe that had made postponing Christmas easier, because they celebrated Brian’s return home instead.

“So will you hurry up and pick the first present?” Terry demanded.

“Some of us are dying here,” Larry agreed.

Bobby dutifully went to the tree. He picked up a present that appeared to consist entirely of a huge purple ribbon tied in a big double bow. “To: Di, From: Mummy,” he read as he headed to the couch to deliver the gift. “What gift could possibly be this small?”

“Jewelry,” Honey and Mart said simultaneously.

“Nope,” Di told them both. “I was talking to Mummy about that sunrise painting I’m working on. I was thinking it would look really pretty with gold dust in the sunbeams, but wasn’t sure I wanted to spend that kind of money on supplies when I’m not established enough as an artist to be sure the painting will sell.”

Sure enough, the bow unraveled to reveal a small container of metallic gold shavings. “Thank you, Mummy.”

Di got up and picked one of the bigger presents. “To: Dad, From: Jim and Trixie. Uh, guys, which one?”

Jim chuckled. “You forgot,” he told his wife affectionately.

“And you even reminded me,” Trixie admitted. “It’s for my Dad, Di.”

Di nodded and took it to Mr. Belden.

🔍

When all of the presents were opened, they went into the dining room. Celia was just setting a steaming ham on the table already laden with salads, rolls, yams, and everything else that meant Christmas dinner to Bobby.

“Who has grace for us today?” Mr. Lynch asked as they all found seats around the table.

Bobby usually wasn’t one to volunteer for such a thing, but nothing about this Christmas had been ordinary. “I’ll do it,” he offered. Heads bowed around the table. “Thank you, God, for this food and for the family around this table. Thank you for bringing us each safely home through the storms, and for providing us shelter and company all along the way. For all that has gone well and right since we were last gathered together, we praise you. For all the places where there is pain or discord, or we have failed, in our own lives and in all creation, we ask your healing. Most of all we ask your blessing on the food we eat and the loved ones we share it with. Amen.”

He filled his plate gladly and dug in. Several of the recipes were his mother’s, which was made him even happier. He had assumed the food would be catered or prepared by Manor House’s cook. Apparently, they really had waited Christmas for him.

Chapter Text

Though Trixie had plenty on her to-do list, she had to admit snuggling by the fire with her man was far more inviting. So, when Jim started a fire, while she was loading the dishwasher, her plans for the evening instantly changed.

Jim smiled when she walked into the living room, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. He’d been quiet at dinner, too. That was Jim in December, though. It was a stressful time of year for anyone, a very busy time at Ten Acres, and Jim missed his birth parents especially around the holidays. Trixie had asked, in years past, if there was anything she could do to help him through December better, but he just said she already did.

Tonight, Jim pulled her down on his lap as they watched the fire. She snuggled up against him but said nothing. She itched to ask if he wanted to talk about it, or if there was anything she could do to help, but she knew the answer. He knew she was there to listen, if he wanted to talk. His silence meant he didn’t—or couldn’t. He also knew she’d do anything for him, especially if he thought it would help him get through what they both knew was a challenging time of year for him.

She wasn’t watching the clock, so she couldn’t say whether they watched the fire in silence for fifteen minutes or fifty. “God, I miss them. I miss them so much,” Jim said at last.

“Of course you do, baby. You love them, and they loved you,” she reminded him, hugging him tight. “Do you want to go to Rochester and Albany this weekend?” She’d never get everything on her to-do list done if he said yes, but… she had priorities.

Jim shook his head and voiced her own thoughts. “No, we have other things to do this weekend. That’s okay. But after the first of the year, maybe.”

“We’ll make a plan,” she agreed, already reviewing her mental calendar. “Maybe that weekend Maddie and Honey are doing that mother-daughter spa weekend. We could invite Matt to come with us. I think he’d like that. Or you two could go together, just the two of you.”

Jim shook his head. “I’d like you to come, if you don’t mind. Having you there helps. But, yeah, that’s a great idea. We have nothing else going on that weekend, and Dad will be glad I invited him, even if he declines.”

🔍

“Would it be too simple to call our Christmas present date a ride through the Preserve?” Trixie asked Jim as they left Ten Acres after spending the morning with the boys for the annual holiday play.

“No, that works for me. We’d better go if we’re going, though. That storm’s supposed to roll in this afternoon.”

Trixie nodded. “That’s part of my interest in riding now; we’re likely to be snowed in for a few days. I’m going to leave my phone at the house, since we have the no phones rule.”

“I’m still going to give you mine. We’re playing chicken with the weather; I think one of us should have the ability to call for help in an emergency,” Jim pointed out.

Trixie tucked the phone into the inside pocket of her coat without turning it off, as they usually would for their in-lieu-of-Christmas-presents date.

They both relaxed almost as soon as they were out of sight of the residences along Glen Road. As always, the week leading into Christmas had been chaotic. They were both eager to catch up with each other.

Honey, Di, and Trixie had scheduled their December Girls’ Day late, starting with brunch at a new restaurant in White Plains that Di recommended after she and Mart gave it a try. Brunch had been followed by – thankfully, in Trixie’s humble opinion – a minimal amount of last-minute Christmas shopping before retreating to Manor House to wrap gifts together. Trixie had gladly taken on the job of getting the wrapped gifts to their various destinations as the “excuse” to not go with the other two to the spa for their monthly dose of pampering. Trixie had some of the local gossip to share with Jim from the giggle and gab session, and some tentative plans for Bob-White gatherings and potential vacation days Mart might need in the new year.

Now that Trixie had seen the holiday play, Jim could share some of the more context-dependent outtakes from rehearsals, stories that left them both laughing almost hard enough to fall off their horses.

“Did you get a chance to ask Matt about the trip to Albany and Rochester?” Trixie asked at last, hating to break the relaxed mood but also wanting to ask away from their other friends and family.

Jim nodded. “He said he hoped he’d be able to join us, but had one business obligation that will be some weekend in January and the other parties are refusing to commit to the date before the New Year.”

Trixie made a mental note to see if an opportunity arose to speak to Matt privately because that smacked of being an excuse. If his colleagues were slow-playing the scheduling, he could say he already had plans on the weekend in question, and she doubted Matt actually considered this business obligation more important than his son and deceased best friend. He might, however, use the truth as a smokescreen if he thought Jim had made the offer because he thought he should, not because he wanted his adoptive father to join them on the trip.

🔍

The sky had been the white-gray of a completely overcast day since shortly after dawn. It didn’t darken any before the first snowflakes floated onto the horses’ coats. Jim and Trixie immediately turned the horses back toward the stables, well aware of the predictions for this storm. The forecast didn’t call for the roads to become treacherous until the middle of the night, or possibly dawn, but that didn’t mean it was a good idea to push their luck.

“So, the weather reports were wrong. Again,” Trixie observed. In the past fifteen minutes, the initial slowly floating snowflakes had turned into a whiteout, and the three inches of mostly packed snow they’d started out on was now almost four inches, heavy powder obscuring the packed trail.

Jim chuckled, even as he dismounted to find the edges of the trail.

Trixie looked on. “Should I get down, too? How much are we asking of the horses to plow through this?”

Jim shook his head. “It’s not bad yet. And I think with it snowing so hard, two different perspectives on whether we’re on trail is a good idea.”

“We’re good so far,” Trixie said, with a nod toward the trail blaze on the tree just ahead of them. She understood Jim’s concern, though; everything between the trees: sky, ground, open air, was the same increasingly white gray, and the fast-falling snow was obscuring the terrain with rapid efficiency.

Ten minutes later – on a normal day, they’d be able to see the Manor House stables by now – Jim’s phone rang inside Trixie’s coat. She fumbled to get it out of the protected pocket without letting an undue amount of snow inside her bubble of warmth.

“Hi Regan,” she greeted cheerfully, mostly for Jim’s benefit.

“Are you all alright? How far are you from shelter?”

“We’re most of the way back,” Trixie assured him. “We turned back at the first flakes. The snow and visibility are slowing us down, but we’re okay and the horses are doing fine,” she promised, knowing that was his concern. He’d trust Jim’s woodcraft to keep him and Trixie safe even caught outdoors in heavy snowfall, but he’d worry about the horses.

Maybe he was a little worried about us, Trixie revised her opinion twenty minutes later, finding Regan waiting with thermoses of hot chocolate for Jim and Trixie as well as towels to dry off the horses before grooming them more thoroughly.

🔍

Once the horses were settled, Jim and Trixie accepted Regan’s offer to borrow the truck – the plow had just come down Glen Road as they rezipped their coats – rather than trying to trudge through the storm back to their house.

“I’m not sure when we’ll be able to get it back to you,” Jim warned. “This storm’s supposed to be disruptive.”

“If you aren’t comfortable driving it from Ten Acres up here, I won’t be comfortable taking it anywhere else,” Regan pointed out reasonably.

🔍

Trixie shook her head as she hopped out of the truck. The whiteout they’d ridden home through had tapered off on the short drive, and the sun was trying to fight through the clouds, however unsuccessfully.

Jim shrugged when she looked at him. “I’m not seeing any huge reason to chance it trying to get the truck back right now. If this really holds off, per the original forecast, and we are able to carol tonight, we’ll take it back then.”

The annual caroling had been stormed out once already; this evening was supposed to be the weather date.

“Sounds good to me. Want to open stockings while we await the final verdict on caroling?”

🔍

Trixie rubbed her thumb on the well sanded ear of the donkey carving she’d found in her stocking. First sheep, then oxen, and now a donkey. Did Jim think she missed living on a farm? Not that she’d ever lived on a farm with sheep, oxen, or donkeys. “I take it I should expect this tradition of carved stocking stuffers to continue?”

“For a while,” Jim agreed.

“Sometimes I wonder if there is a method to your madness,” Trixie murmured affectionately, hoping his response would tell her something about what the point of these enigmatic carvings was.

“And the rest of the time, admit it, you just enjoy the mystery. It’s my job to keep you happy.”

Trixie cocked an eyebrow at her husband. “So, the purpose of these creatures is a mystery I’m supposed to solve?”

“If you want to see it that way, you can. I know you’ll figure it out eventually.”

“It’s not exactly a fair mystery when I only get clues once a year.”

“Well, I’m not paying you for speed,” Jim replied, grinning at her frustration.

“You’re not paying me at all,” she muttered.

“So, what’s the hurry?” He parried.

“If it weren’t Christmas,” she groused.

“I know,” Jim said cheerfully. “You’d hate me for being difficult and stubborn. But it is Christmas, and you love me, so maybe you should let the donkey go socialize with his friends and just kiss me.”

Trixie got up and put the donkey on the mantle with the sheep and oxen, but tossed over her shoulder, “What makes you think I want to kiss you right now, Frayne?”

He chuckled, the low sound that only came into his voice when they were alone and when he was thinking things Mr. Honorable would have sent him to his room for. “Oh, nothing. Just that smoldering look in your eyes, and the blush creeping up your neck, and that sway you put in your hips when you’re flirting with me, and the way you lick your lip when you’re thinking about how good this is going to be, and—”

“Enough,” Trixie growled, dropping onto his lap and shutting him up by covering his lips with hers.

“And, well, that,” Jim teased when he got his breath back.

Trixie smacked his arm playfully. “Like you aren’t just as transparent.”

“I never denied it,” he reminded her, running a hand up her back and into her curls until he could guide her face back to his and start kissing her all over again. It was almost a shame the weather was holding clear, and it looked like they would be able to carol. At this moment, he’d rather not move at all, and if they did move, it would only be to abandon the couch for their more spacious bed.

🔍

“Jim, it’s Ten Acres,” Trixie called to her husband, seeing the caller ID on his ringing cell phone.

“I’ll be right there. You can answer it. It’s decision time for caroling.”

“Jim Frayne’s phone,” Trixie answered cheerfully.

“Hi Trixie.” It was Pat, the head dorm monitor at Ten Acres. “Mart and Di came over to help entertain the boys a little while ago, so once we’ve got Jim, I think we’ve got everyone we need to make a decision about caroling.”

Trixie switched Jim’s phone to speaker as her husband joined her in the living room. “It’s Pat, and apparently Mart and Di,” Trixie told him.

“Hi guys. I don’t know if Trixie said while I was bringing the dog in, but we got caught in the squall earlier this afternoon. It’s likely to make me overly cautious about the decision to take the boys out tonight.”

“Everyone okay?” Di asked.

“Yep, us and the horses, and Regan who was probably pacing anxiously in the stables the whole time,” Trixie confirmed. “But I don’t recommend it.”

“I hear that,” Pat agreed. “And I think we should plan on a shorter caroling route tonight, but the forecast does look okay in the early evening. The recommendation is to be off the roads by midnight; and the snow isn’t set to start until 9. Even factoring in a normal level of ‘so the forecast was wrong, again’, we should be okay with the 5-7 window.”

Jim nodded beside Trixie. “I looked at the radar about twenty minutes ago and came to the same conclusion, in spite of myself,” Jim confessed.

“We’re on board,” Mart confirmed. “So, we’ll see you in about an hour to start herding the boys into getting ready to go out?”

“Yes. We’re just going to eat something quick and feed Jenna.”

“See you then.”

🔍

An hour later, Trixie shook her head. The boys were hopped up on sugar and proximity to Christmas. Some of them were, quite literally, bouncing off of walls as they raced around the lobby of the administrative building waiting for the rest of their group to be ready to go out caroling.

“Sometimes I wonder why I agree to this.”

“No more often than I wonder why I wanted to make a career of working with kids,” Pat said, materializing beside her out of the chaos.

🔍

“This is why, isn’t it?” Trixie asked Pat almost two hours later, after a sweet interaction between a couple of the boys and an elderly man whose wife had passed just a couple weeks before.

“Pretty much,” Pat replied. “That and so stories like Jim’s aren’t a surprise. Like the man said: it’s easy to feel forgotten when life gets hard. I’m in this to make sure no one’s forgotten before they’re old enough to take care of themselves.”

“Hopes for the New Year,” Trixie agreed. She looked ahead and saw the group of carolers had stalled at the edge of the green, which made no sense. There were no houses where they’d be caroling on the green, and this late on Christmas Eve, there wouldn’t be any vendors out on the green, unless someone had thought to put together a pop-up hot chocolate stand for the last-minute shoppers? “We should probably go see what the holdup is up there,” she suggested to Pat.

Trixie moved through the crowd of boys and chaperones until she could see the whole green in front of the town hall. It was, of course, completely white under the winter snow, but it was also uninterrupted by any hot chocolate stand or anything else that explained what had brought the group’s return to Ten Acres to a sudden halt.

Then Trixie herself came to a sudden halt as she came face to face with the reason for the delay. “BRI!” She cried as he grabbed her up in a bear hug. She returned it with every bit of fierceness she had in her.

“I get it now,” Brian told her. “I get how wrong I was about the decisions you made. This—coming home, finally—should have been one of the very best moments of your life up to that point, certainly of the journey, and I marred it, made it difficult.”

Trixie shook her head. They’d talked about the journeys that had kept them from home for years already, and Trixie had no interest in revisiting the subject of her homecoming from the National Investigative Bureau and the heavy thoughts surrounding it. “Brian, it’s practically Christmas and you’re finally home. I’ve missed you. I don’t want your apology; I want to celebrate. Christmas. Together. As a family, forever, no matter what or where.”

“I love you, Sis.”

“Love you, too, Dr. Brother. Merry Christmas.”

“The merriest!”

🔍

“I can’t believe Brian’s home,” Jim remarked to his wife as they shed their layers of caroling outerwear.

“I can’t believe I missed Honey’s reaction,” Trixie lamented.

“Yeah, but you did get Moms’ reaction,” Jim reminded her.

Trixie shrugged. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“Not imply he was your Christmas present to your mother.”

“Why not? You really think any present will compare in her books? Especially with Bobby stuck in Florida because of the blizzard?”

“I’m not arguing that part. I’m arguing the implication you personally had anything to do with Brian arriving home tonight.”

Trixie shrugged again. “Merry Christmas?”

Jim laughed, shaking his head. “Where’s Jenna at? We better let her out one more time.” Hearing her name, their golden retriever trotted over to see what they were up to. “Hi Jenna. Want to go out?” The dog wagged her tail and trotted out into the snow eagerly when Jim opened the door. He closed it behind her and turned back to Trixie. “What do you want to do tomorrow, now that everyone decided to wait for Bobby before we have Christmas?”

“You know Moms is going to make breakfast anyway. She’ll be all wound up about Brian being home. Figure if we aren’t completely snowed in, we’d start there. Then spend the afternoon at Ten Acres. I know you like to check in after big storms, and the staff are shorthanded at the holidays.”

“Perfect. That’s what I was thinking, too. I was also thinking maybe you, me, and Jenna could cuddle up by the fireplace and keep an eye out for Santa, like we did the year the Christmas blizzard took out the power.”

“As long as we have heat, I want to sleep in our bed, but I’m completely willing to spend the time between now and then cuddling with my favorite guy and my favorite pup in front of a roaring fire. That seems very festive. Want me to get the air mattress and blankets while you start the fire?”

“Didn’t you complain last time about me just assuming I’d make the fire?”

Trixie shrugged. “I don’t remember, but I do know I’m still sugar- and Brian’s-home-hyped. Since the weather and daylight situations don’t support me running around the yard with the dog to bleed off the excess energy, I thought I’d run around the house and leave you the job that takes focus and patience.”

“As long as I’m not going to be accused of disparaging your survival skills,” Jim teased.

Trixie stuck her tongue out at her husband and skipped off to gather the things they’d need to be comfortable snuggling by the fire until Santa turned up. She dumped the first pile of things behind Jim as he nursed a spark to full flame.

Before making her next supply run, she let Jenna in, turning her energy to toweling the dog off – no simple feat with the golden retriever’s heavy coat. “Alright, girl. I think that’s as dry as you’re going to get without the fire. Go find Jim.”

Jenna woofed agreeably and trotted away toward the living room. Trixie headed for the kitchen. She pulled two mugs out of the cabinet, filling them with apple cider from the jug in their fridge, before putting them in the microwave to heat them. While the appliance was running she dug through another cabinet to find their whole sticks of cinnamon.

Chapter Text

Di relaxed back on the bed. “Finally, he’s asleep!” She breathed.

Mart flopped down dramatically next to her. “I swear I never had that much energy!”

“Shh,” Di scolded. “You’ll wake him!”

“Jeepers, no! I need at least eight hours before I can chase him around the grounds again.”

Di chuckled but then sobered. “I want to have another.”

“You’re ready for another baby? Or two – twins run in your family.”

“It’s okay if you’re not ready,” Di promised, hearing the surprise in his tone.

“I’m ready. I didn’t think you were.”

“Are you sure, Mart?”

Mart rolled over to face her. “I was always ready. From the minute that little energizer bunny put in an appearance. He was everything we hoped for. Perfectly perfect, as our friends would say. And it just made me think that he’s just the beginning of the plans for our future that we’d discussed and the rest of those plans could be just as perfect.”

“That was sixteen months ago. You never said anything like that to me,” Di protested.

“I saw how tired you were during the pregnancy, and delivery, and while nursing. I can’t help with any of that; that part of having more kids is all on you. It didn’t seem fair to pressure you about when we were having more.”

Di leaned up and kissed him quickly. “You’re so sweet.”

“Don’t tell Dan,” Mart begged against her lips. “I have a reputation to maintain!”

Di giggled. “Dan knows you’re wrapped around my little finger, Sweetie.”

🔍

After spending Thanksgiving with the Lynches and their friends at Rosewood Hall, Mart and Di were nearly ready to return to Sleepyside. “Our suitcases are in the car. Whirlwind has been chased all over the grounds so will hopefully make it at least half an hour into the flight before going crazy. Just waiting on you, Fairest Princess,” Mart reported.

“And where is our son, exactly? Aren’t you supposed to be supervising ‘Whirlwind’?” Di asked her husband, carefully washing her brushes. She’d asked Mart to handle the final packing up and run Jonny around to tire him out so that she could finish the painting she’d been working on all week for Miss Julie of a Tiger Swallowtail butterfly on a flowering branch of a dogwood.

“With your dad, making one last snack run.”

“And you’re not with them?”

“I missed your beautiful face,” Mart tried.

Di giggled. “So, they were eating Goldfish again?” Their son adored Goldfish. Mart had lost his taste for them months ago. Her father, on the other hand, was reminded of getting the then-new fish-shaped crackers as a special treat when he was a boy, and loved sharing them with his grandson.

“That, too,” Mart admitted. “The painting looks perfect. Did you manage to finish it?” Mart had to ask. He’d though the painting was done two days ago, but Di had insisted it needed “finishing touches”.

“Yes. It’ll be dry by the time I finish cleaning my supplies. We have time to drop it off on the way to the airport, right?”

“I’m sure your father’s private plane won’t leave without us,” Mart pointed out.

“Okay, fair. I just… I wanted to have it done two days ago, but we’ve been doing so many different things, and I just ran out of time!”

“You could’ve finished it at home and shipped it as a Christmas present, you know,” Mart pointed out.

Di snorted inelegantly. “You’ve worked at Ten Acres longer than I have, and you still believe in free time between Thanksgiving and Christmas?”

Mart laughed. “Not really, but surely an art teacher like yourself could make ‘finishing touches’ a classroom lesson?”

“I could,” Di admitted, “especially with the end of the semester coming up, but still.”

🔍

Sherri Lynch hugged her daughter. “I wasn’t sure you’d still want to do this, after spending the whole week with us at Rosewood Hall for Thanksgiving.”

Di shook her head. “I still love coming home,” she confessed. “And I wouldn’t miss making cookies with you for the world. Even when we had nothing, you made this good.”

“That was a lesson from my Mummy. Depression-era thinking, but she reminded me of it when you were young and I was lamenting how much we were struggling. She said, ‘When you have nothing else to give your children, you give them memories.’”

“Good ones,” Di acknowledged, spreading flour liberally over the baking mat and rolling pin as her mother set out the cookie decorations.

“Or bad ones,” Sherry said. “You’d have had memories of those Christmases either way. That was my mummy’s point, that if I didn’t make an effort to give you good memories, you’d have bad ones.”

🔍

“I thought you silenced that thing!” Di hissed furiously.

Mart waved dismissively. It was just a text. Jonny was asleep now; he’d stay that way. He wasn’t going to dig himself a hole by arguing the point with his wife as they tiptoed out of the baby’s room. Especially not when an ill-timed text had given Jonny a second wind half an hour ago. It still wasn’t really the phone’s fault. It was Christmas Eve. No child was supposed to go to bed easily on the most exciting night of a child’s year!

Once they were safely clear of sleeping ears, Mart pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the messages. He had to admit some curiosity. He’d left anyone who might be texting him on Christmas Eve less than an hour ago, and they were all headed home to hunker down as the snow rolled in. They’d made their plans for Christmas day, and discussed the contingencies, depending on how bad the snow was by morning. What could have changed in the meantime? That warranted two texts?

They were both from Trixie.

Not sure if you were tracking the flight, but Bobby’s flight’s cancelled. 26^th at the earliest.

Mart realized he was a terrible brother. He’d completely forgotten about his youngest brother, coming home from a collegiate football playoff game in Miami. They’d all talked about going, but Bobby had declined the offer. He wanted to spend Christmas at home, he said, and there was no point in all of them travelling so far for a game his team was going to lose. So, they’d watched and cheered from home yesterday, and sent their consolation texts, and then Mart had completely forgotten that Bobby still had to get home from that game and that the weather might interfere. Horrible brother.

Executive decision is to wait Christmas for him. Call when the baby’s down if you want details.

Mart raised an eyebrow and handed the phone to Di.

“Makes sense, especially with the weather. No sense in everyone trying to travel, if we can’t all be together anyway. Plus, it gives Brian a day more to get over the jet lag.”

“What do you want to do? Just spend a quiet day the three of us?”

“We can. If the roads are in decent shape, maybe we can go over to the Lynch Estate? Commiserate with Larry and Terry about Bobby not being home for Christmas.”

Mart laughed but it felt forced. He’d forgotten his younger brother, but Bobby’s best friends were undoubtedly all over it and accordingly miserable. “Yeah, that’s a good plan. No hills between here and there, and only the one stop sign, so even if the roads aren’t great, we should be okay.”

🔍

“Merry Christmas, little man,” Mart greeted his son the next morning, scooping him up from the crib to the changing table. “We got a nice white Christmas out there. Going to Grandmummy and Granddad Lynch’s for the day. Let Uncle Larry and Uncle Terry run themselves ragged chasing you around for a day. That’ll be the best Christmas present anyone can give your mommy, huh? A break. Of course, that assumes she actually trusts her younger brothers to be reformed adults. Those two and your Uncle Bobby were pretty wild pranksters when they were teens. And it’s not like twenty or college is some magic switch. But Bobby’s grown up something fierce, and Larry and Terry are good kids, so I bet they have, too. Alright, there you go, buddy; all fresh and dry. Bet you’re ready for breakfast, huh? I know I am.”

Mart swung the freshly diapered child up on his hip and headed for the kitchen. “Tell Mommy, ‘Merry Christmas’,” Mart advised in a stage whisper as they entered.

Di turned to them, laughing at Mart. “Think it’s a little soon for words like that.”

“Mama! Meymey.”

“Half way there, little guy, half way there,” Mart laughed. Di was right. It was much to soon to expect a proper ‘Merry Christmas’ out of their son, but “Meymey” was a new word he’d developed this holiday season, and they were pretty sure it was supposed to be “Merry”.

“Merry Christmas, Daddy,” Di said, kissing his cheek. “I suppose you want breakfast before you go snow blow the driveway.”

“We both would, please and thank you.”

“Well, hand him here. I have his breakfast ready. Yours is less exciting. We planned to be at the Farm for Moms’ holiday breakfast spread.”

Mart handed over the baby and opened the fridge to contemplate possibilities. “Have you already made whatever casserole or whatever else we’re responsible for whenever the festivities actually happen?”

“Of course. I didn’t know about this delay until late last night.”

“Perfect. Then we have potatoes and eggs and cheese. We can make that breakfast scramble Uncle Monty makes. We still have mint for the festive version?”

“Should. Second shelf of the spinner in the corner cabinet.” Mart nodded, pulling the things he needed out of the fridge and dumping them on the counter next to the stove. He found the mint and the cookware he needed.

🔍

As Mart put the skillet in the sink to soak, he watched Di put a plate together and then stick it in the oven on warm, before taking the remaining two plates to the table. He raised an eyebrow as she passed him. She raised one right back. “You weren’t planning on second breakfasts after snow blowing?”

“Of course I am! Have to warm up somehow!” Mart replied. Of course he was planning on second breakfasts!

“And just think how much better it’ll be when the plate’s already warm when you come back to it,” she pointed out.

“Have I mentioned you’re brilliant?”

“Not today.”

“A grievous failure, to be certain, my most brilliant princess.”

Di giggled. “Thank you for breakfast.”

“It was my pleasure. Have you told your parents we’re coming over? Are we still going over? It looked snowy out there, but nothing we haven’t seen before. I haven’t checked the road reports, though.”

“I scrolled through. Sleepyside Emergency Services bulletin recommends giving the plows another hour to finish up, but I figure it’ll take us at least that to clean the driveway and walkways, eat second breakfasts, and get everything together to take Jonny anywhere.”

“Usually,” Mart agreed.

🔍

“Merry Christmas!” Di called out, Mart only half a syllable behind.

“Meymey!” Jonny added.

All of the servants had the day off, so no one was hovering to take their coats and other outerwear as they shed it in the entryway of the sprawling house. In fact, no one showed up at all. Di frowned. “You know your house might be too large when… you can’t hear a visitor calling out as they enter,” she tried to joke, but it was clear her heart wasn’t in it.

Mart wasn’t going to argue the point. It was downright eerie, coming in and taking off layers and putting them away themselves in the entryway closet, and in all that time not a single soul acknowledged their entrance, either by voice or presence. “They do know we’re coming, right? People without babies sleep in on non-work days.” He remembered those days. Vaguely.

“Yes. Mummy answered my text. She and Daddy and the girls were all awake. Larry and Terry weren’t but I hear water upstairs, so Terry’s probably in the shower.”

“Over/under on Larry putting in an appearance before noon?” Mart joked. Larry was… well, if it wouldn’t make his brother-in-law sound like a vampire, Mart would call him nocturnal by choice.

“Under. Terry’ll wake him. You didn’t have to live through the teen years of Larry begging for his own room and Daddy refusing because we’d never have seen Larry if Terry didn’t keep him halfway diurnal.”

So, I’m not the only one who thinks of Larry as nocturnal, Mart thought with a grin. Out loud he said, “I always wanted my own room, too, but I kept going back to sharing with Brian wherever I tried claiming the guest room.”

Di led the way down the hall. “I bet they’re all in the den. That’s far enough to not hear us. If you want coffee, we’d better stop by the kitchen on the way back.”

🔍

“Merry Christmas!” Di tried again as they approached the doorway to the den, hearing voices inside.

“DeeDee!” Di’s sisters cried in tandem, as usual. Mart repressed a snicker. They were the only two people in the world who were allowed to call Di that, a holdover from infancy. Di only permitted it at the Lynch Estate, and her sisters knew it.

“Merry Christmas, Princess,” Di’s father greeted her as her mother claimed Jonny and then hugged her daughter. He rose to shake Mart’s hand. “Merry Christmas, son.”

“Merry Christmas, Mi—Ed.” He still had to remind himself every single time not to call him Mr. Lynch. The fact that Bobby, Trixie, and Brian all still referred to him that way didn’t help.

“I’m sorry Bobby’s stranded, but this is a treat, to have you three all to ourselves all day today,” Mrs. Lynch declared.

“One of his teammates lives in the area and was still at the airport, waiting for his sister’s delayed inbound flight, so he’s at least not stuck in the airport,” Terry announced as he walked in.

“That’s something,” Mart said, honestly relieved. Missing Christmas with family was bad enough. Spending it stuck sleeping on the floor of an airport – because even if the airline wanted to cover the room, there probably wasn’t a hotel with vacancy for miles – sounded like a nightmare. He hadn’t texted his brother to inquire himself. Still a terrible brother.

“Is your brother going to join us?” Sherri Lynch asked her son.

Terry nodded. “He was headed to the bathroom when I came down. He only threw a pillow and two socks at me, so the holiday spirit is alive and well.”

Mart chuckled. “Better you than me,” he admitted. “Bobby wanted to be as much of night owl as Larry in his teens, but he always had practices and chores and things, so he never got in the habit.”

“Oh, don’t remind me. I got stuff thrown at me by Larry and then had to listen to Bobby complain about how unfair it was.” He laughed though. “Honestly, Larry’s worse now, because he’s able to set his own class schedule so he doesn’t get up before ten thirty unless he’s home.”

“And a Merry Christmas to you, too,” Larry grumbled, hair still dripping as he flopped down blearily in the chair nearest the door.

Terry just laughed. “You’ll forgive me when I bring you breakfast. Anyone else need anything from the kitchen?”

Di nudged her husband. “Go on. I know you’re thinking you could be hungry again.”

“It is almost time for elevenses,” he agreed, following Terry out.

Behind him heard Larry comment, “For your sake, I hope my nephew isn’t half-hobbit.”

🔍

“UNO?” Di’s sister suggested when the boys had finished eating.

Her twin was helping Di feed Jonny some cheerios but squealed in delight. “Yes!”

The four twins pulled up pillows, so that they were all arrayed in a loose circle around the coffee table.

Mart asked for and got a refresher on the house rules, UNO being one of those games that varied wildly depending on who you played with, and, as he’d thought, the Lynch family rules were particularly wild.

“When it’s your turn, you can play everything that plays, unless you would go out without ever declaring UNO. In that case you have to hold one card,” Terry explained. “If nothing plays, you draw until you can play. Otherwise, it’s basically the rules as written.”

“Doesn’t that make for really short games?” Mart asked.

“You’d be surprised,” Sherri said.

“It’s the draw cards,” Di informed her husband. “It’s all well and good that you can lay down a fistful of cards in one turn, but when the player before you does it and their fistful includes half a dozen ‘draw two’s, you’re stuck with ‘draw a dozen’.”

Sherri had dealt out the hands in the meantime. Ed went first, proving it out by playing four cards, ending in a pair of draw twos. Larry scowled, but added four cards to his hand before taking a look. Terry played two cards, skipping Mart, which Mart was actually glad for, figuring it would give him a round to get the hang of things.

At least, he was glad until Di played six cards, smiled, and declared “UNO.”

Di’s sister scowled at her hand and began to draw. She drew two cards before starting to organize her hand. Seven cards went down on the pile, ending on a reverse. Di sighed good naturedly and began to draw, sticking Mart with a Draw Two.

Mart drew two and sat back, feeling like he was losing already.

Terry had to draw, making Mart feel better, until he stuck Mart with a pile of discards that included another Draw Two and a reverse.

“But the Draw Two came first. It’s directed at Larry,” Mart protested.

“Nice try,” Larry said. “Pick up.”

Mart sighed and did so. Di played a card. “UNO.”

The next play was a skip, and another declaration of “UNO” and Sherri got to play for the first time. Sherri played a pile – Mart didn’t get a count – and redirected play to her daughter who hadn’t had a turn yet.

Which almost worked, but her twin sister was able to draw and then play all her cards.

“See?” Mart said. “Quick games.”

“Sometimes,” the winning sister admitted.

“We playing progressive?” Larry asked, studying his hand.

“What’s that mean?”

“Sandy draws seven and it’s Di’s turn. We keep going until someone has three wins.”

Mart shrugged. “Seems like we might as well.”

Di waited for her sister to draw, notched her own first win, and drew her next hand. Then it was Mart’s turn to actually play. He played each of the six cards he thought he could play one at a time so they could yell at him if he was breaking the rules. No one objected. Terry just played his turn, skipping his twin.

Sherri called the next “UNO”. And then Terry. Followed by his first win when Larry reversed play. Mart tried not to feel guilty about making his wife draw eight on multiple Draw Four Wilds, and, adding insult to injury, shuffle the depleted deck.

Sherri was the next winner. Mart was in for his next surprise when a series of five skips were played and play jumped half way around the circle. Then waited as Sherri was forced to draw more than a dozen cards, which she somehow translated into an “UNO” when she finally could play. Her second win followed a round later.

Larry had the next UNO. Terry followed. Di’s sister claimed a win, leaving Mart, Ed, and Larry as the only players without one. The deck was reshuffled. Ed reached UNO. Terry notched a second win. And then Mart finally found himself at UNO. Play got faster, and Mart lost track of the other UNOs that were called out now that they all had the rhythm down.

Mart got his first win. Larry did, too. Leaving only Ed winless when Terry threw down his third win and ended the game.

“Just for fun,” Sherri explained, “We go one more round. Second place goes to everyone who can play all their cards. Following places based on how many cards are left.”

Mart looked at his hand and the discard pile, moved a few things and put them all on the pile.

Di was stuck with four cards. Mandy discarded all but 1. Sandy put all her cards on the pile. Mandy – apparently still “in the game” to be subject to the skips, draws, and reverses of Sherri’s discards – ended up with 5. Di got herself down to three. Larry got rid of his cards. Ed ended with five.

“So where does that land us all?” Mart asked, trying to keep track.

“Terry gets first. You, Larry, and Sandy tie for second. Mummy’s in fifth place. Me in sixth. Daddy and Mandy tied for last.”

“Mandy has more wins than me, so I’d give her seventh,” Ed said magnanimously.

🔍

“We should do that more often,” Mart declared when he, his wife, and his son, finally left the Lynch Estate early enough in the afternoon to still have daylight to navigate the wintry roads.

Di nodded. “I loved playing games with my family when I was younger. With the twins all in college, it’s been hard to get everyone in one room like that. We’ll see when the boys graduate if they’re around at all. If they are, maybe we can volunteer to host game night once a month or something. That way we can deal with Jonny – and any future siblings of his – easier.”

“I like that plan.”

Chapter Text

Brian tried to forget that it was Thanksgiving Day in the United States, but it wasn’t easy. Of all the holidays and special occasions he had missed in the past year and a quarter, Thanksgiving had been the hardest. The whole village had gone to great lengths to include him in the holidays they did celebrate. He still felt connected, despite the challenges, to his family and friends on the other side of the world, so the birthdays weren’t awful. But Thanksgiving was though.

Hanna tried to understand, but explaining the holiday to her had only reminded Brian just how different their cultures were. Why did Americans need a special day set aside for gratitude? Weren’t they grateful the whole rest of the year? She had asked, genuinely puzzled, when he’d first named the holiday, last year. The more he explained, the less it made sense to her. Even in a good year, why would a community gorge at the start of the scarce season? Especially in bad years, the practice just wasn’t practical.

The more questions she asked, the more Brian realized she was right about the oddness and impracticality of the holiday, at least historically, but it only made him miss home, the holiday, and the Open House, more.

So, this year, Brian was spending Thanksgiving Day trying to forget it was Thanksgiving Day. It was easiest when he was busy with patients, but the waves of homesickness broke over him whenever the waves of patients ebbed. As he finished up for the day, and walked back to Hanna’s, he tried to find some good cheer for his amazing hostess, who never seemed to get upset or have bad days. It certainly wasn’t her fault he was homesick tonight.

The house was full of the delicious aromas of home-cooked food. It didn’t immediately occur to Brian that the aromas didn’t match with any foods typical of coastal Myanmar. He poured himself a cup of tea from the pot in the kitchen before walking out to the terrace. He stopped in the doorway, stunned by what he saw on the table. The bird was cooked and dressed in the center of the table; chicken, he assumed, knowing it wasn’t truly turkey. There was fresh bread in the basket, but Hanna made bread almost every day. He approached the table slowly, seeing the vegetables and fruits. Hanna must have bargained with almost every family in the village, Brian realized. Each household grew a different crop, which were shared as needed throughout the village. Brian saw other favorites of his that Hanna would have had to go to the city to obtain. His favorite Burmese dessert, a sugary delicacy, awaited him on the side table.

Hanna’s son came in through the side gate with all his youthful enthusiasm. “Are you hungry?” He asked Brian was a huge grin as he eyed the spread his mother had put on the table.

“I am always hungry for a mother’s cooking,” Brian replied. “Where are your parents?” He asked, after a moment in which neither appeared.

“Gathering the village, I imagine,” a new voice answered him. Brian turned to see Tanner behind him in the doorway to the house.

“I thought you were staying to finish up the order forms,” Brian remarked.

“I was. I did. I knew how much time I had.”

Brian shook his head. “You’d think, after a year, I’d be used to you, or Hanna, or you and Hanna coordinating surprises behind my back.”

“It wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if you did become accustomed.”

Brian heard voices beyond the back gate. Hanna and her husband returned, with the rest of the village in their wake. It was about then that it truly hit Brian that this village that had taken him in had come together to produce a Thanksgiving Open House for him, knowing he was homesick, even though the whole holiday made no logical sense to any of them, even to Tanner, who had experienced it for years, as a student in the U.S.

His eyes filled. He tried to find even a single ‘thank you’, though Hanna, for one, deserved so much more, but his throat tightened and he couldn’t even get that out.

Hanna, realizing he needed time to compose himself, brought him the knife to carve the bird. In his first months, he had deferred the task to Hanna’s husband, as it had always been his father who carved the meat. It had become evident, on the occasions when Hanna’s husband was out with the herds, that Brian did a cleaner job of it, able to carve more meat away with less waste, so he had, eventually, taken over the responsibility. And tonight, Thanksgiving night, he couldn’t argue with the propriety of having the lone American do the carving.

He focused on carving the chicken, for it was indeed chicken, as he swallowed the lump in his throat and acknowledged once again how grateful he was to this entire village for taking him in, for welcoming him so warmly, and how grateful he was to his family in Sleepyside for encouraging and supporting him through this journey.

“Thank you,” he told everyone gathered on Hanna’s terrace. “You cannot understand what this means to me, to have this piece of ‘home’ here. If you had asked me two years ago, if there could be any place in the world, other than Sleepyside, that felt like home to me, I would have told you it was impossible. But then I came here, stepped into this journey that I knew I had to take, as crazy as it seemed, even to me. Sleepyside still is, and always will be, my home, but I have felt at home here from the very first weeks.”

🔍

As they all finished eating and looked toward the delicious dessert with longing and no room left, Tanner slipped back into the kitchen to retrieve an envelope from her bag. Eyes turned expectantly to her—most knew she had something planned; many knew exactly what that was. Brian was leaning against a pillar near the middle of the terrace, as well placed as she could have planned it, though he was the only one completely and intentionally unaware of what was coming.

“Now, if I learned anything about holidays in the United States,” she began as she walked over to him, “it’s that—at least in commercial districts—Christmas starts the day after Thanksgiving, and in Sleepyside, at least, Black Friday has begun. So, I don’t think it’s completely improper to give you our Christmas gift early.”

Brian’s expression was puzzled as he accepted the envelope. He opened it, fishing out plane tickets that would get him home in time for Christmas. He looked through the connections again, mostly to buy time to compose a response, and he saw Tanner’s second gift—two and a half days with Sarai on the way to Sleepyside.

Tanner gave him a hug when he looked up. “We might have been able to bring you a little Thanksgiving, but we all know there’s only one thing you want for Christmas.”

“There’s no place like home for the holidays,” he agreed apologetically. “Thank you.”

Tanner shook her head. “It’s only a small attempt to return all you’ve done for me. Brian, you know Phil pushed me, encouraged me, dragged me kicking and screaming, at times, through our undergraduate study, and he was the one who talked me into going after the M.D. He always believed in me more than I could ever believe in myself. One of the first questions I asked myself, when it finally sunk in that Phil was really gone, was how I was even going to finish medical school without his encouragement. And the next question was why, why should I bother to try to finish without him and the clinic? He was better at the administrative, ‘business’, side of making this work. The deal was always that I’d finish medical school and there’d be a job waiting, because, in the years between when he finished and when I finished, he was going to get this clinic built and working. Then the tsunami. No Phil, no clinic, no job waiting when I finished. It was about a week before course selection for the fall semester, and I wasn’t sure I’d even be selecting courses, when you called and said, ‘I can’t believe I’m thinking this, and I truly can’t believe I’m saying this out loud, but I think I have to do this thing.’ And you’ve done this thing. You’ve gotten the clinic rebuilt, worked out most of the kinks and issues, and the job was waiting for me when I finished medical school, just as had always been promised. Sure, the job’s bigger than I thought it was going to be, back when Phil first envisioned this, and I was going to be helping him, not doing it all myself, but you’ve encouraged me, pushed me, dragged me through this past year, when I needed it, just as he always did.”

“You know,” Brian reflected, “When Sarai first called me with the news, I knew what the loss would mean in terms of healthcare for this village, this region. Sarai kept telling me it was bigger than just Phil, bigger than one person. She asked me what I could possibly do: give up my whole life, move half way across the world, leaving behind my family and everyone else important to me. And I knew she was right: I couldn’t give up everything I have in Sleepyside forever, no matter how needed it might have been. But I knew I didn’t have to give up everything, because of you, Tanner. I knew, that if I could put a year or two into this project, you could take it the rest of the way. That was what made the idea something I thought I could really do.”

“Something you have done,” Tanner replied. “You have more faith in my ability to keep this going than I do, just like Phil always did. But, what you have taught me, this past year, is that I’m not alone. There are people—people who have never met me, or Phil, or anyone from our villages, or even our country—who believe in me, in this clinic, and want to see it succeed. And, I know, even as we let you go home to your family, who has surely missed you as much as we will miss you, I know that whenever I need encouragement, or to be pushed, or dragged, you’re only a clear connection away. Sleepyside and Wetthe aren’t as far apart as they look on the map.”

“Nor nearly as far apart as I feared when I boarded the plane over a year ago,” Brian agreed, hugging Tanner again. In her ear, he added, “Believe in yourself. Phil and I believe in you because we see what you are capable of; if they haven’t already, so will this village, your village, and your country.”

Tanner nodded, releasing him to wipe away tears.

Brian picked up the tickets again. “Even knowing I’ve accomplished what I came here to do, even knowing how much I miss my family and home, I don’t know how I’d have come to the decision that it was finally time to go home. I will miss all of you, your beautiful country, and the adventure of building this clinic. That makes it hard to leave. So, thank you, for once again, being far more gracious than you had to be and seeing what I needed, even before I asked for it.”

“Everything we’ve done for you, it’s a thank you to you, and yours. We’ve been lucky to have you for a year and half, fortunate your family and community support you and were willing to loan you to us, but it’s time we returned you,” Hanna told him.

Brian embraced her as well. “If I had even half of Honey’s way with a needle and thread, I’d make you the superwoman cape you’ve earned so many times over. Red, because I know it’s your favorite color, and because it’s a superwoman cape, so it just should be red.

“Blue waves at the bottom, the color whose name was the first word you taught me, the blue of where the sky meets the ocean, the blue of the tears we still share for Phil. So often, in the attention I got for what I did, in my grief, I felt it took away attention you and your parents deserved. I knew him for a few years, as a classmate and a friend. You knew him for life as family.

“Two stripes of undyed goatshair wool, for all the effort you put into the herd; I know you are up before the sun to help with the milking, and have stayed up into the dark hours to make sure each new kid is birthed successfully. So much of your days are spent moving the goatshair from hair to fiber to yarn or weave. And the rest of it is spent in your sanctuary, in the kitchen, so there would have to be fruit, vegetables, rice cross-stitched into your cape. I’d make sure there were plenty of bright purple plums,” he promised. Hanna loved plums and had taught him a much greater appreciation for them than he had in the United States.

“Despite such busy days minding the farm and feeding your family and me, without a bit of help, you never seemed frustrated or too busy when I needed you to come over to the clinic and help explain something that I just couldn’t get across in translation. I’d put the clinic’s red cross in the center of your cape, just for that. But also because the clinic wouldn’t have gotten rebuilt without everything you’ve done for me in the past year plus, hosting me, making things work for me so much more smoothly than they ever should have. And don’t think I didn’t notice that I never had to explain things twice, how much effort you went to—despite no passion for the field of medicine and healthcare yourself—to learn the terminology, in two languages, no less!

“I’m sure there are a hundred other patches and decorations your superwoman cape deserves that I never noticed you doing to smooth my way, and everyone else’s. And that’s just the way you like it, isn’t it? But, even though I know I probably don’t know the half of it, I am so incredibly grateful and indebted to you for all you have done for me in the past fifteen months. I know there is no way I can ever fully thank you for all of it. You made me feel at home half way around the world, welcomed me into your home as if I had always been a part of it, a part of the family, not just a houseguest.”

🔍

Sarai was waiting for him when he deplaned after the first of a series of flights that would eventually take him home. He hugged her. “Tanner says I did it, that she can take it from here.”

“She’s the only one who would doubt it.”

“Everyone’s been thanking me since Thanksgiving. It wouldn’t have happened without you. I know you feel like it was just a couple of weeks, compared to my sixteen months, but it wouldn’t have mattered whether I was there for days or weeks or months, if you hadn’t been there the first few weeks while I learned the language and the culture. You deserve all the thanks they’re giving me, too.”

“So you’ve said, gushingly, every chance you’ve gotten since I agreed to your insane plot to rebuild.”

Brian laughed, following her out into the sunny afternoon. “Have I also mentioned that you were right all along? That it was bigger than one person, bigger than just Phil, bigger than something I could fix all by myself.”

Sarai frowned. “I was wrong,” she replied. “I thought it couldn’t be done.”

Brian nodded. “Not by one person alone.”

“But one person could motivate enough people to get involved.”

“Phil was good at that, too,” Brian reminisced. “He didn’t have family friends with pockets as deep or rolodexes as full as Mr. Wheeler’s and Mr. Lynch’s, but I think he’d have figured it out in the end.”

“It’s morbid, in hindsight, but I heard him say, to those who doubted, that he’d picked up an American idiom that he thought perfectly described the ferocity of his determination to do exactly that. He’d tell them, ‘Come hell or high water.’”

Brian winced. “It came.”

Sarai nodded sadly. “But the clinic continues anyway, because he talked it up to the right people, made you, and Tanner, and even me, believe he could’ve done it enough to want that to be his legacy.”

🔍

Though all the usual perils of travelling, especially by air, at Christmastime, plagued him, from weather delays, to lengthy lines, to understaffed customs checkpoints, Brian found it easy to hold on to his patience, even when one frazzled businessman, who had been travelling with him since the transpacific flight, snapped at him, “How the hell are you so damn calm and cheerful!” after another delay was announced.

He had just smiled at the man and offered to buy him a coffee while he was making a drink run. After sixteen months somewhere that delays were typically measured in days and weeks, hours were easy. After sixteen months in a village that was painfully aware of how quickly Mother Nature could turn cruel, watching well-equipped crews clearing the snow and ice—from the safety and warmth of a heated, fully-enclosed building—was more reassuring than aggravating. After sixteen months in the tropics, just the sight of snow made him smile. After sixteen months away from home, just going home was enough to keep his mood high. They’d be home for Christmas, both of them, and that was all that mattered.

As Brian stood in line for coffee, he saw the newsstand was also selling fruit, including red apples. While Myanmar had a variety of apple that he quite enjoyed, red apples were another sign he was home. He’d missed the particular flavor of his favorite variety. He bought two and the two coffees before returning to the gate.

“Apple?” He asked his frazzled companion.

The man accepted fruit and coffee, shaking his head. “Seriously. We’ve had delay after delay. How are you so calm?”

Brian shrugged. “I’ve been in a small village in Myanmar the last sixteen months. I missed my family, and snow, and red apples, and four seasons, and 24-7 electricity and running water. I’ve been trying to keep a medical clinic appropriately stocked when laws limit how much can be ordered at once, and the frequency of orders, but shipping of orders can be delayed weeks and months at a time. I’m not going to die of these delays, and neither are any of my patients, because I don’t have any at the moment. So the delays we’re facing today just don’t seem so important. I’ll still be home for Christmas.”

“Perspective often helps,” the man admitted. “Sixteen months in Myanmar. Are you with an organization that responded to the tsunami?”

“Not exactly,” Brian said. “I went to medical school with a man from one of the coastal villages that got hit.”

“Friendship draws bonds broader than any border or distance,” the man reflected. “I, too, was visiting an old friend whose life has taken him far from me. Perhaps that is why the delays are bothering me so much – if it weren’t for the delays and distance, I would see him far more often, and I’d like that.”

“The world’s becoming a smaller place, bit by bit. It will bring us all together, if we let it.”

“We can only hope.”

“Attention all passengers on flight D1735 with service to New York – JFK.”

The man groaned.

“Flight D1735 will begin boarding momentarily at gate E12.”

“Finally!”

Brian looked at the gate signs. “We’d better head over there. They’ve changed the gate again.” They were sitting in an over flow area between E6 and E8.

“As long as we’re boarding.”

“They’ll get us home for Christmas,” Brian replied confidently, gathering his bag.

🔍

As Brian had suggested, the flight eventually got them to JFK in midafternoon, before Christmas. Though tiring from spending so much time amongst so many stressed and anxious travelers, Brian found a bounce in his step as he travelled from the airport to the train station. Even when the usual hour trek from JFK to Sleepyside dragged out, due to increasingly bad weather, the trip seemed brief in comparison to the three-hour adventure that was involved in getting to the airport from Wetthe, and this journey would bring him, finally, home, adding to his joy.

At last, Brian stood in front of town hall. The sun was setting, the last light of the day striking the underbelly of the weathervane, causing it to glow like the Magi’s star. It wasn’t until he heard himself say, “Hello, Hoppy!” that it really hit him that he was home, and the tears began to run, unchecked, down his face.

🔍

Honey was at the front of an energetic, but tiring, group of carolers as they returned to the town square. As she made the last turn, she saw a lone figure standing in front of town hall. She was almost directly behind him, and his presence there was so unexpected, so it took her a second to recognize him. She froze in shock.

Honey stopped so fast that Di nearly ran her over. Just as Di was about to demand an explanation for Honey stopping dead in the middle of the walkway, Honey broke into a run, and then a sprint, dashing across the snow-covered green, completely heedless of the snow.

“So much for not letting the salt ruin her jeans,” Mart remarked, wrapping an arm around his wife.

Di giggled. Honey had insisted they stay on plowed or shoveled walkways and had been meticulous about ensuring her pants were tucked inside her boots, telling those who questioned her that she didn’t want the deicing salt to ruin her pants. Di looked up at her husband’s face. “Some people are worth ruining clothes for,” she told him softly.

Mart smiled and leaned his head down to kiss her, before asking, “So how long do we have to give them? She’s not the only one who has missed him.”

“Honey knows that. We give them as long as they need. She hasn’t seen him in ten months, Mart.”

“Uh, Di? Sixteen months here.”

“Not the same,” Dan informed him, having come forward to see what the holdup was.

🔍

“Brian!” Honey shrieked as she slammed into him, causing them both to fall into the snowbank.

Brian wrapped his arms around her instinctively, pulling her close. His eyes closed and he fought against more tears, having only just gotten them under control when Honey arrived. He started to say something, only to find her lips already against his, so he gave up trying to find words and answered her kiss with every bit as much passion and hunger as she had.

When she pulled away, panting breathlessly, she flushed, embarrassed. “And, um, welcome home,” she said.

He chuckled. “I love you so much, Honey. What are you doing out here at dusk? I thought everyone would be home, wrapping gifts, or doing last minute shopping.”

“We’re caroling. We got all this snow in a single storm, and then the temperature dropped to below zero the usual weekend. No one wanted to be out door-to-door in sub-zero cold. This was the weather date, so we figured we’d try to get out before the blizzard hits in earnest. We’d better get up. Di and Jim are probably bodily holding back half the town over there. But first, are you home for the holidays or home for good?”

“Home for the holidays forevermore,” Brian answered.

Honey rubbed her nose against his. “Then I’ll be good, so Santa doesn’t have to repack the sleigh last minute, but I want you all to myself after Christmas.”

“Deal.”

Brian got to his feet and pulled Honey to hers. “Oh, god, I’m so glad to be home,” he told her, pulling her close again.

“I’m so glad you’re home, too,” Honey agreed, “but we really have to go over and let everyone else welcome you home, too, or else we’re going to end up back in the snowbank, and Jim’s students are going to see things he didn’t intend them to see when he agreed they could come caroling with us.”

Brian laughed. “Wrong kind of holiday cheer? But I make no promises when I have you all to myself.”

“Deal,” Honey parroted, dragging him back across the town square.

🔍

Everyone in the crowd of carolers engulfed and embraced him, showering him with welcome and Christmas cheer. Brian hugged everyone, glad to see each and every one of them. But, after Honey, there was one person in particular he wanted to see. At last, he found the person he was looking for amidst the crowd.

She met his bear hug with as much enthusiasm as he had. “I get it now,” he told his sister. “I get how wrong I was about the decisions you made. This—coming home, finally—should have been one of the very best moments of your life up to that point, certainly of the journey, and I marred it, made it difficult.”

“Brian, it’s practically Christmas and you’re finally home. I’ve missed you. I don’t want your apology; I want to celebrate. Christmas. Together. As a family, forever, no matter what or where.”

“I love you, Sis.”

“Love you, too, Dr. Brother. Merry Christmas.”

“The merriest!”

🔍

Once the boys were returned to Ten Acres, Honey, Brian, Trixie and Jim headed to Crabapple Farm for milk, cookies, and more time with Brian before the service. Trixie reached for Brian’s hand, making him smile, as they walked up to the front door of the Farm. As they entered the house, Trixie called out, “Moms, are you home?”

“Trixie?” Moms called from upstairs. “Is that you and Jim?”

“And then some,” Jim called back. “Merry Christmas, Moms!”

Trixie got a twinkle in her eye that made Brian very nervous. “You and Brian and Honey go sit at the kitchen table. Get some cookies and milk, like any other day. I’m going to go get Moms.”

Honey dragged Brian to the kitchen before he could protest. Trixie bounded up the stairs, with all the energy of her thirteen-year-old self. It was nice to know his family was as excited about his homecoming as he was.

“Moms, I found your Christmas present while we were in town caroling,” they heard Trixie telling her mother.

“Really, Trixie, you don’t have to go to any great lengths,” Moms protested.

“Just come downstairs and see.”

“I’m not as impatient as I once was, Trixie, I can wait until we exchange gifts as a family,” Moms said, with a laugh in her voice. Trixie reminded her so much of her younger self. No patience, it seemed at times.

“I don’t think your gift will stay put that long,” Trixie replied. “Come downstairs, Moms.”

“Okay, okay,” Moms agreed.

She followed Trixie into the kitchen, unsuspecting, and found her future daughter-in-law sitting at the kitchen table, facing her, with a Cheshire Cat grin on her face. On one side, her son-in-law was getting up to hold Trixie’s chair for her. But it was her first born, sitting on Honey’s other side that captured Moms’ immediate attention.

“Brian!”

Brian rose to his feet, crossing to his mother in two long strides. “Merry Christmas, Moms!” Brian greeted her, swallowing the lump in his throat.

“Merry Christmas, my baby boy,” Moms replied as he engulfed her in a hug. Had it really been 32 years since that first family Christmas? Sometimes it felt like only yesterday that she’d been preparing for her baby’s first Christmas. And this year, she’d have all her babies home for Christmas again. She had raised four wonderful young adults and she was thrilled for them as they each sought roads that led them to happiness and the work they were meant to do. But it didn’t get any easier to face the Christmases when one or more of them wasn’t coming home to Crabapple Farm for the occasion.

She had known she was fortunate; all of her children had settled for good in Sleepyside, near enough that she would see them frequently throughout the year. How much harder must it have been for her parents, when both she and Alicia had moved out of state, coming home once a year, at best?

At last, Helen found her voice again. “Peter! Peter, come here. Brian is home!”

Peter came quickly to the kitchen. “Brian. Welcome home, son.”

“Thanks, Dad. I’ve missed everything about home,” he admitted.

🔍

When all the greetings had been settled, they gathered around the kitchen table, as the Beldens had done for generations. “What does everyone want?” Moms asked. “Cookies and milk or apple pie and ice cream?”

“We can’t have both?” Trixie asked.

“You can do what you want,” Brian told his sister, “but I’m having pie and ice cream.”

Trixie sighed. “So much for teamwork. Everyone’s still so excited about you being home they’re going to do whatever you want.”

“I seem to recall you and Mart having a cookie eating contest not six hours ago,” Jim reminded her. “A whole plate of cookies and several glasses of milk, wasn’t it?”

“There’s always room for more cookies,” Trixie informed him.

“Fact,” Mart agreed, entering with Di after dropping the student carolers off at Ten Acres. “But the pie does sound good.”

“Everyone else?” Brian asked, already slicing the pie.

As others chimed in their agreement, Jim got up to scoop ice cream before Moms could.

“How does he always guilt me into these things without even saying or doing anything?” Trixie muttered, getting up to help bring the plates of pie and ice cream to the table and perpetually hungry Beldens.

“I do not guilt you into anything,” Jim informed her, giving her a kiss as they sat back down. “It’s bribery,” he whispered in her ear.

Trixie raised an eyebrow. “I call your bluff. You’d have kissed me anyway. Especially if I hadn’t gotten up to help, because that would’ve meant you’d have been ‘away’ from me for several minutes. You’d have missed me.”

“So much for teamwork,” Jim echoed her earlier complaint.

Trixie kissed him back. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

“Merry Christmas,” Jim replied. He tried to grumble it, to hold his stance, but he failed miserably.

“It’s cute when you try to act like I’m not right about you.”

“You always did know me better than anyone else,” Jim admitted. He offered her a spoonful of ice cream. “We’d better eat up, before the ice cream melts.”

“Can’t let the ice cream melt,” Trixie agreed. “That would be a Christmas tragedy.”

Chapter Text

Helen and Trixie had mostly finished their lunch and were just munching on the last of the chips. “Have you found everything?” Moms asked her daughter. She and Trixie were finishing up their holiday shopping together, about a week before Christmas.

“Jim got the present for the Wheelers. I got the present for you and Dad on that shopping trip. I’m set for Jim, and Honey, and Honey for the Bob-White exchange, and Mart from girls’ shopping day. So, it was just stockings, Bobby, and something for Brian today,” Trixie reminded herself, reviewing her mental list.

Moms had seen her buy a present for Bobby, and the non-edible stocking stuffers she’d need. “What are you going to do for Brian?”

“The whole time he’s been gone, I haven’t tried to send him things for birthdays and Christmas and the like. I’ve just been trying to keep memories, something to give him when he gets back. I just need one more something. I’ll know when I see it; that’s how it’s worked with all the rest. We’ve got a few stores left at this end of the mall. I’ll find something before we get to the candy store to finish our shopping for the stockings. What about you, have you found everything you need?”

Moms had done most of her shopping on the quieter mid-week days in early December. She really just needed the stocking stuffers today. “Yes, aside from finishing off the stockings, as you said.” The shopping wasn’t the point, really. She could have done it all online or on her own. The point was spending a little time with her whirlwind daughter who was always so busy.

🔍

Helen was upstairs, putting away the last load of laundry when she heard voices downstairs. No doubt the Bob-Whites had finished caroling with the boys from Ten Acres and had stopped in for cookies. “Moms…home?” She heard someone, Trixie she thought, call out.

“Trixie?” Moms called back. “Is that you and Jim?”

“And then some. Merry Christmas, Moms!” That was Jim for sure.

Before Helen could put Peter’s socks in the drawer, Trixie had bounded up the stairs (Helen would know that sound for the rest of her life, she imagined). “Moms, I found your Christmas present while we were in town caroling!”

That Trixie hadn’t finished her shopping yet on Christmas Eve was really not news.

Helen shook her head. “Really, Trixie, you don’t have to go to any great lengths.”

“Just come downstairs and see.”

“I’m not as impatient as I once was, Trixie, I can wait until we exchange gifts as a family,” Moms said, with a laugh in her voice. Trixie reminded her so much of her younger self. No patience, it seemed at times.

“I don’t think your gift will stay put that long,” Trixie replied. “Come downstairs, Moms.”

“Okay, okay,” Moms agreed, praying they hadn’t gotten her a puppy. She did not have the energy for another Reddy. And they’d found it out caroling? A stray then, with who knew what behavioral issues? She did not have that in her at this stage of her life, she really didn’t, but Trixie was clearly so excited about whatever gift she’d found. Helen wasn’t sure she’d be able to say no, especially when that excitement was paired with an undoubtedly adorable puppy face.

She followed Trixie into the kitchen, unsuspecting, and found her future daughter-in-law sitting at the kitchen table, facing her, with a Cheshire Cat grin on her face. On one side, her son-in-law was getting up to hold Trixie’s chair for her. But it was her first born, sitting on Honey’s other side that captured Moms’ immediate attention.

“Brian!”

Brian rose to his feet, crossing to his mother in two long strides. “Merry Christmas, Moms!” Brian greeted her, sounding emotional.

“Merry Christmas, my baby boy,” Moms replied as he engulfed her in a hug. Had it really been 32 years since that first family Christmas? Sometimes it felt like only yesterday that she’d been preparing for her baby’s first Christmas. And this year, she’d have all her babies home for Christmas again. She had raised four wonderful young adults and she was trilled for them as they each sought roads that led them to happiness and the work they were meant to do. But it didn’t get any easier to face the Christmases when one or more of them wasn’t coming home to Crabapple Farm for the occasion.

She had known she was fortunate; all of her children had settled for good in Sleepyside, near enough that she would see them frequently throughout the year. How much harder must it have been for her parents, when both she and Alicia had moved out of state, coming home once a year, at best?

At last, Helen found her voice again. “Peter! Peter, come here. Brian is home!”

Peter came quickly to the kitchen. “Brian. Welcome home, son.”

“Thanks, Dad. I’ve missed everything about home,” he admitted.

🔍

Trixie and Jim had stopped back in at the Farm after the service, apparently no more ready to let Brian out of their sight than Helen was, but they were saying their goodbyes when Peter’s phone rang. There was only one reason for that – their youngest’s much-delayed flight finally arriving. Peter clearly had the same impression as Helen, answering his phone with a stunned, “Bobby! I can’t believe they are still letting planes land in this.”

Helen frowned when Peter didn’t move to gather his keys and things to go pick up their boy, but instead asked, “Where are you?” and then “When do you get in?”

Helen knew, even before Peter confirmed it. “After Christmas.”

Brian’s arrival had given her such high hopes for Christmas with all her babies!

Helen missed the next part of the conversation, and knew it was over when Peter said, “Merry Christmas, Bobby.”

“No dice on the flight home?” Trixie guessed when Peter hung up.

Peter nodded. “Early afternoon on the 26^th, they’re saying. You remember his friend, Zack? He lives in the Miami area, took Bobby home with him for the holiday.”

“That’s something,” Trixie said. “We’re waiting Christmas for him, right?”

Helen hadn’t considered that, but Jonny was the only child involved, and her grandson was too young to notice if Christmas had a weather delay. “Yeah, yes, we are,” she agreed.

“I’ll text Mart when we get home. You’ll tell Honey, Brian?”

Brian nodded. He could do that, and take advantage of an extra day or two to get his time zones straight.

🔍

Helen was the only one awake as dawn broke in the east. She hurried to grab the house phone when it rang out.

“Merry Christmas, Moms,” Bobby said when she answered.

“Merry Christmas, Bobby! I’m so glad to hear from you.”

“I really wanted to be home for Christmas,” he admitted.

She didn’t want to put her burdens on him, but she’d really wanted all her kids home, too, especially with Brian’s return! “We miss you, too. But I’m glad you are safe and weren’t in the air or trying to land in the weather we’ve been having. And I’m glad Zack invited you to stay with him, so you don’t have to be alone on Christmas. That was a kind gesture. Are you still expecting to be home tomorrow afternoon?”

“Weather gods willing, that’s the plan,” Bobby agreed.

“Stay in touch tomorrow. I’m not sure they’ve got the trains running the whole way from the city to White Plains yet, so we may need to come get you.”

“It’s just snow, isn’t it? They really haven’t gotten everything back up and running yet?”

“It’s Christmas, Bobby. They’ve got everyone who is still in town working as hard as they can to restore services, but most of the people who would be doing the work are on vacation. And we got a lot of snow. Peter said we’d gotten three inches by the time he shoveled, when we got home from the service last night, and it’d only been snowing an hour and a half out here. The rest of the northeast started earlier. You know the road crews aren’t prepared to deal with that much snow that fast. It’s tapering off now, but it doesn’t look like it stopped overnight. Enough about the blizzard. How is the weather where you are?”

“Not a snowflake in sight,” Bobby replied. “It’s hot. My phone said maybe 90° today. Erica was very excited. She’d been going to school up north and said she hasn’t been warm all semester.”

“And Erica is?”

“Zack’s younger sister. She’s been really nice to me. Plus, she’s cute.”

Moms thought about her oldest son, who had been in love with the girl next door from the moment he met her. She thought about her middle son, who had been mooning over his eventual wife since her first day of kindergarten. She thought about her daughter, who had fallen for a rifle-wielding stranger at first fond glance. And her baby boy was spending Christmas with a really nice, cute young woman. There was only one way this was likely to end.

“Moms, please don’t start planning a wedding yet,” he begged. “I barely know her.”

Moms laughed. “Okay, Bobby. Just remember, I want you to be happy—”

“And I’ll always be your baby,” Bobby finished for her. “I know, Moms. I love you. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

🔍

Brian went to bed as soon as Trixie and Jim left. Peter wiped down the table and counters helpfully while Helen washed the last dishes. “Are you alright, Helen?”

“With Brian finally home, I let myself imagine that I’d have all my chicks in the nest this Christmas. It’s fine; I’m fine. Just disappointed. I’ll get over it. I have to. I can’t let any of them think I don’t support them in these grand pursuits that take them away from home for years at a time. It’s the nature of chicks to fly the nest. I know I’m blessed that they keep coming back.”

“It’s okay to want to have the whole family together for Christmas. The kids won’t think you don’t support their careers or life ambitions if you tell them that,” Peter reminded her.

“Not consciously. But the next time they have a choice, they’ll factor my disappointment into a decision it has no business being part of.”

Peter hugged her. “We raised them well, taught them to be practical thinkers. They’ll understand, and make the right decisions when they have to.”

🔍

Moms was still rolling and coiling the cinnamon roll dough around a mixture of cinnamon, brown sugar, and butter when Brian padded into the kitchen. “Merry Christmas,” he yawned.

“Merry Christmas, Brian. Breakfast will be a while. I didn’t expect anyone would be up quickly, given how late we were all up last night. You can go back to sleep if you want.”

Brian shook his head. “My body has no idea what time of day it is. It won’t get sorted out until I pick a rhythm and stick to it. Better to tough it out today.”

“You’d know best. I’ve rarely travelled outside this time zone, let alone the country. It’s good to have you home.”

“I’m glad to be home. Can I help?”

“The rolls are just about ready for the oven. I think Peter brought home some sausage, if you want to cook that up.”

Brian nodded. “Just the three of us this morning?”

“I suspect Trixie and Jim will pop in.”

🔍

Even though she’d made breakfast two days ago, on actual Christmas, the traditional Belden family Christmas breakfast would be today, consistent with their decision to wait Christmas for the youngest of her children. Fortunately, most of the things – like the cinnamon rolls – had been made for Christmas, and she just needed to set them out, maybe warm them up. She really just needed to make pancakes, scramble a platter of eggs, and – if neither Brian nor Peter was awake by then to do it for her – fry some bacon.

She started with the pancakes, which could be kept warm in the oven as long as necessary. She sighed as she used the last of the eggs in the house for that. She’d have to go out, feed the chickens, and gather the eggs. Just what she needed, more work to do.

🔍

“Merry Christmas, Grandmoms!” Di called out as she and Jonny came in the Farm through the back door.

“You didn’t walk in this snow!” Moms cried, startled.

“Jeepers, no,” Di assured her. “Mart just pulled up to the barn, hoping it’d keep the car a bit warmer. He’s going through a phase of being concerned that every little thing is going to do irreparable damage to Jonny.”

Moms shook her head. “He always did things on his own schedule, but seventeen months is a weird time to get new father jitters even for him. I’ll have Peter talk to him.”

“Appreciate that.”

“Where is he, anyway?”

“He said the noise the chickens were making meant they hadn’t been fed yet, which meant the eggs probably hadn’t been gathered, which meant if he wanted scrambled eggs, quiche, and pancakes, he’d better do his part. I don’t know if chickens make a different noise when they’re hungry, but I wasn’t going to subject myself to a lecture on his decades of experience feeding them just to challenge the fact.”

“It’s not a different noise, it’s the amount of it,” Moms said.

“Ah. Let me get this little one squared away and then I can help.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. The eggs are the biggest help, if Mart brings them in.”

“I’ll send him back for them if he doesn’t,” Di vowed. “He’s got all his snow gear on still, so he might as well.”

🔍

Mart did indeed come in with red ears and a hat full of eggs. “It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have anything to gather the eggs in,” he admitted sheepishly, rubbing his chilled ears.

“I appreciate your sacrifice,” Helen said, sincere but too bemused to hide it.

“Me too,” Bobby agreed, taking in the scene in the kitchen.

“Hey, Squirt. Missing the 90° sun, sand, and surf yet?”

Bobby shrugged. “Not going to lie, taking a walk along the shore, watching the ocean give up the sun, is a great way to spend dawn. But I like my Christmas snow white, not sand white. I’ll fight Erica on that.”

“Am I still not allowed to start planning?” Helen asked with a studiedly innocent tone Trixie had thought wasn’t suspicious when her daughter used it in her teens. Like Helen, who she’d gotten it from, didn’t know exactly what it meant.

“Start planning what?” Brian asked. “Who wants OJ?”

“Moms thinks I’m going to marry Erica, Zack’s younger sister. Yes, to the juice.”

“Me too. Thanks, Brian,” Di chimed in. Mart nodded when Brian looked at him.

“Love at first sight?” Mart asked.

“She’s pretty at first sight. And she’s kind at first meeting. We’re not even dating yet. It’s entirely premature, just because Brian fell for the girl next door at first sight, and Trixie fell for the boy next door at first threat, and you… well.”

“I knew in kindergarten.”

“Precisely. So Moms thinks Erica’s a certainty.”

“You know she’ll never let you live it down if you do end up marrying Erica, right?” Mart warned.

Bobby rolled his eyes. “I’ve known Erica for…” he made a point of looking at his watch. “Still less than sixty hours at this point.”

“And you’re not dating yet?” Trixie teased, having come in the back door with Jim and Jenna as Bobby calculated. “Shame. You must have picked up the Belden habit of dragging these things out.”

“You’re not helping,” Bobby grumbled.

“My mistake. Moms, what can I do to help?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Bobby called after her as she skipped over to the stove.

🔍

Half an hour later, Helen looked around the table. Make no mistake, she loved every member of what the children had dubbed “the extended Bob-White clan” and all the holiday traditions they’d built together, but there was something particularly special to her about having her husband and four children and one (so far!) grandchild under the roof of Crabapple Farm for Christmas breakfast, even if it was the 27^th. Everyone is home. Everyone is safe, healthy, happy. And that is everything.