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“Exactly.”
Michael continued down the hall to the kitchen. I followed more slowly, looking around as I went, taking in the Christmas decorations in the foyer. I’d expected us to have to survive with minimal holiday decorations this year, since Mother, who normally insisted on decorating for us, would be totally immersed in the show house. But the day before she started work on her room, Mother showed up at seven in the morning with a dozen or so friends and relatives, and they’d transformed the whole house. The usual tall, narrow tree graced the foyer, this year completely decorated in red and gold with a musical theme—gold ornaments shaped like harps, trumpets, fiddles, drums, pianos, and French horns shared branches with chanting angels and singing choirboys. We had about the usual number of poinsettias, though this year most of them were plain red, which I preferred to the white or pink ones. Plain red dusted with a hint of gold glitter, anyway. This year Mother had put up red velvet ribbons crisscrossed on all the foyer walls, with little clips on them to hold Christmas cards. Every afternoon, providing they’d behaved themselves, the boys were allowed to take all the newly arrived Christmas cards and add them to the display. Mother had also festooned every corner of the room with so many tiny battery-powered LED candles in red-and-gold votive holders that the room sparkled like a convention of fireflies.
Just looking at it made me happier. When Michael and I had first moved into our house, I’d made an effort to trim it for the holidays with a wreath here and a garland there, but the sheer size of the space to be decorated overwhelmed me. Mother had taken over the chore of decorating the year I’d been pregnant with the boys—“You have so much else on your plate, dear”—and to my secret relief had never relinquished it. I might poke fun at some of her excesses, but I realized that I was okay with Mother doing the decorating. It brought back memories of Christmases when I was little. Not so much the way the house looked, but the fact that long before I’d have even begun seriously thinking about holiday plans, Mother and her helper bees would show up and transform the house from top to bottom in a single day. In fact, this was even better, because when I was living at home she’d enlist me as one of her minions, and now she preferred to finish the project when I wasn’t even around. Maybe she liked to surprise me. Or maybe she was afraid I’d veto some of her more extravagant notions if I found out about them in advance. Either way, I was content. Especially since I’d found out she had a growing list of clients who paid her hundreds of dollars every December to do to their houses what she did to ours for free. And now that Michael and I had the boys, I focused a lot less on being independent and getting my own way and a lot more on making sure the boys had a fabulous holiday. And they seemed to like their grandmother’s decorations.
The little hidden wireless speakers were playing “O Holy Night,” and I hummed along as I followed Michael to the kitchen.
“Ham sandwich?” he offered.
“Not for me,” I said. “Maybe just a slice of ham. I’m not doing the show house next year.”
“Are we definitely having another show house next year?”
“If it makes a lot of money for the historical society and draws a lot of tourists, everyone will want to do another one,” I said. “But I’m not doing it.”
“We’ll see,” he said.
“I’ve even figured out who to dump it on instead,” I said.
His mouth was full of ham sandwich, but he raised one eyebrow inquiringly.
“Martha.”
“The bossy one?”
“She’s perfect.”
“I thought you found her really a
“I do,” I said. “But one reason she’s so obnoxious is that she’s really mad at the committee for not giving her a major room. She’s taking it out on all the other designers. So if we put her in charge, she might be a lot less hard to live with.”
“You could be right,” Michael said.
“And if I’m wrong—at least she can get the job done, and I won’t be there to be a
“Good plan. So have you figured out which of the designers did in Clay?”
“It’s starting to look as if none of them did.”
I filled him in on the rest of my day, including my success in figuring out alibis for all but one of the designers.
“Of course the chief’s still checking them out, I suppose,” I added. “But I feel a lot better, being reasonably sure I’m not hobhobbing with a murderer all day.”
“Speaking of all day, the rehearsal for the boys’ Christmas pageant is tomorrow at eleven. Are you going to be able to make it?”
“Is that tomorrow?”
“The pageant itself is on Christmas eve,” he said. “And I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but that’s only two days off.”
“Don’t remind me,” I said. “I will make a point of coming to the rehearsal. And maybe we can grab a quick bite afterward. Are they still happy with the costumes?”
“Jamie is,” he said. “And you know Josh.”
Yes, I knew Josh.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t made it to the parents’ organizational meeting, or the first recital for the pageant. Michael was at both, of course, but I felt guilty that I hadn’t been there. And I realized, only a few days ago, that he hadn’t told me the important bit of information.
“We need new costumes,” Josh had said one night.
“Can’t you wear your costumes from last year?” I’d asked. “Or are they too small?”
Jamie had shrugged.
“Mo-om,” Josh had moaned. “We were animals last year.”
Actually, since they’d been dinosaurs last year, I’d have said they were reptiles. And extinct reptiles to boot. Although, as Grandfather was so fond of pointing out, technically, reptiles had just as much right to be called animals as any other living organism. Still, it was a long way from T. Rex to a sheep.
“Well, what do you want to be this year?” I’d asked. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of choices in a nativity play.
Unless Robyn decided to spice things up and add scenes not found in the original text. Based on the boys’ preferences, I suspected a scene with pirates would go down well with most of the participants. Perhaps instead of arriving in Bethlehem on a donkey, the Holy Family could come by boat, allowing Joseph to fend off pirates along the way. Or, better yet, what if the Wise Men could encounter a party of Imperial storm troopers—also bound for Bethlehem and clearly up to no good—and repel the them with their light sabers?
I’d abandoned that train of thought and dragged my mind back to the immediate crisis.
“So if you’re not animals, what are you?” I’d asked. “Angels?”
“Mo-o-om!” I’d been hoping neither of them would learn to roll their eyes like that until they were teenagers. “Girls are angels. And little kids are animals. Big boys are shepherds!”
As it turned out, Jamie would have been just fine with being an animal. And he would have been quite satisfied with Michael’s plan for a shepherd’s costume, which was to cut a hole in a piece of burlap for the neck and tie the whole thing together with a length of rope. Josh, however, had demanded better, and his idea of proper shepherd garb would have taxed the expertise of a Savile Row tailor, to say nothing of my poor sewing skills.
It was December, so he’d wanted sleeves. Nicer sleeves. And his tunic wasn’t white enough. Could I wash it? The hem was uneven. There was a loose thread. His belt was too tight. His crook was splintery, could I make it smooth? His sandals were too small.
And of course, I couldn’t go to all that trouble for Josh and leave Jamie as a ragged lump of burlap. In the end, I’d managed to produce two passable tunics, with sleeves long enough to keep them warm, especially when combined with a blue-and-white striped overcoat. Their crooks were polished till they shone; their belts were made of gold-brocade cord left over when Mother had gotten new curtain ties for her dining room, and we’d delighted them with long, fussy brown beards. It was going to look as if two of the members of ZZ Top were moonlighting in the hills outside Bethlehem.