Hope Street (10 page)

Ten years earlier

“C
AN
I
HELP
?” Peter asked.

Ellie surveyed the mess that had once been her kitchen and decided nothing her seven-year-old son did in the room could make it any worse. Flour had spilled across the table and drifted onto the floor like incredibly fine snow. The shrink-wrapped turkey thawing on the counter had leaked a puddle of pink water that dribbled down into the sink. Jessie and Katie had left their school backpacks on two of the chairs, and a jumble of damp boots lay heaped by the mudroom door. Someone’s scarf had been slung over the pantry door, which stood open to reveal the usual clutter of food and utensils crammed onto the shelves. The room smelled of wet wool and dishwasher soap.

The day before Christmas, people’s houses were supposed to smell of cinnamon and cloves, evergreens and eggnog. They were supposed to be clean and tidy, ready to welcome the visits of neighbors and relatives. New tapers were supposed to stand in candlesticks and chains of holly were supposed to coil around
the staircase railing. People were supposed to be filled with peace. Wasn’t that what Christmas was all about?

Ellie was never filled with peace before the holiday. Most years, the frenzy of shopping and baking and planning and budgeting frazzled her so thoroughly that she fantasized about converting to Judaism, just so she could turn her back on the season’s insanity.

Things were slightly more insane this year because the girls had prevailed on her to make a gingerbread house. Katie had found elaborate instructions on the Internet. Ellie could bake a serviceable cake using a mix—she was quite capable when it came to adding eggs and a tablespoon of oil—and she believed that whoever invented those sausage-shaped tubes of cookie dough deserved the Nobel Prize. However, baking gingerbread from scratch posed an enormous challenge to her culinary skills.

“I could break the eggs,” Peter volunteered.

She peered down at her son. His blond hair was hidden beneath his ever-present Red Sox cap, and his sweatshirt also featured the Red Sox trademark, a gothic red capital
B
emblazoned across his narrow chest. His blue jeans hung loose on his skinny frame, but they were already too short. He must have experienced another growth spurt when Ellie hadn’t been watching.

“We don’t need any eggs in the dough,” she told him. “But if you want, you can whip the cream and vanilla. Would you like to do that?”

Stupid question. Whipping the cream involved the use of her electric eggbeater—a power tool that made noise and moved fast. Of course he would like to do that.

“This is gonna be the best gingerbread house ever,” he said a minute later, kneeling on one of the empty chairs and steering the eggbeater through the foamy white cream in a bowl on the table. “Is this done yet?”

“No.” She glanced up from another bowl, into which she was measuring sifted powdered sugar. Who sifted powdered sugar, other than the folks who’d come up with this recipe? Ellie didn’t even own a sifter. She’d had to race next door, dodging the snow flurries that swirled out of the late-afternoon sky, to borrow her next door neighbor’s sifter. “You’ve got to whip it until it stands in peaks.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s done,” she assured him.

“Danny Barrone is such an idiot,” Peter declared as he stared at the cream he was frothing with the beater.

“Oh?” Who was Danny Barrone? And where had she put the molasses? She spun around, searching the counters until she spotted the dark brown bottle near the microwave.

“He said there’s no such thing as Santa Claus. He thinks he knows everything because he’s the oldest kid in the class. But I think he must be stupid, because if he’s so old he should be in third grade, right?”

“That depends,” Ellie said, carrying the molasses and her measuring spoons to the table. “Just because he’s older than everyone else doesn’t mean he’s stupid.”

“He’s gotta be stupid if he thinks there’s no such thing as Santa Claus. Who does he think brings all the presents?”

Was seven too young to learn the truth about Santa Claus? The girls had been diligent about keeping the myth alive for Peter. He was so young, so trusting, so eager to believe. Every year he was the first one out of bed on Christmas morning, shouting throughout the house that the cookies and milk Ellie had left on the table near the fireplace for Santa had been consumed, which proved beyond a doubt that the jolly old man existed. Of course, all those presents under the tree proved he existed, too.

Why not let him live with the fantasy a little longer?

“You know,” she said carefully, “different people have different beliefs. Some people don’t celebrate Christmas at all. Some celebrate it differently than we do. And some celebrate it the way we do.”

“So Santa only comes to people like us?”

Ellie nodded. “He only comes to houses where people believe in him.”

“Well, I sure believe in him. Is this peaks yet?”

Peter grew tired of beating the cream well before it stood in peaks. His hand hurt, he insisted. The eggbeater was too heavy. After lifting the appliance out of the bowl while the beaters were still spinning, and splattering vanilla-flavored cream all over the table, he bolted, evidently concluding that viewing television cartoons in the family room was more important than making gingerbread.

Ellie sighed as the kitchen settled into stillness around her, and then read the recipe again. It seemed awfully complicated. She should have gone with one of those prebaked kits or substituted graham crackers for gingerbread. But the girls had pleaded with her to make the genuine article from scratch. It would be nice if
they’d
offered to help—this was their idea, after all—but they were shut inside their bedrooms upstairs, no doubt wrapping gifts or jabbering on the phone. Their school’s winter break had begun at three-thirty that afternoon. They’d been on the phone with their friends ever since they’d emerged from the middle-school bus and burst into the house, shedding boots and backpacks and then vanishing up the stairs.

Ellie glanced at the window above the sink. The sky was growing dark and the snow was falling harder. She hoped Curt would get home soon. His firm was having its holiday party that
afternoon, and as a partner he had to be a dutiful host and stick around at least until all the associates and support staff received their year-end bonuses. He and the other partners also had to make sure no one consumed too much of the holiday punch to drive safely, and had to summon cabs or arrange carpools for those employees who’d exceeded their limits. Ellie wasn’t sure what, besides guzzling holiday punch and distributing bonuses, went on at the firm’s annual party, but Curt assured her nothing more tawdry than some harmless flirting took place. “If there’s anything X-rated going on,” he added, “I don’t know about it. And I don’t want to know.”

Fine. He was nursing a cup of holiday punch and flirting harmlessly while Ellie confronted her culinary limitations without even a glass of wine to bolster her. She abandoned the dry ingredients for the cream, whipping it with the beaters until it was stiff. She considered hollering for Peter to come back to the kitchen, just so he could see what peaks looked like. But he probably didn’t care. He’d helped her with the gingerbread only long enough to confirm that Santa Claus existed.

Eventually, the dough looked and felt right. Following the recipe’s instructions, she rolled it into two sheets that weren’t quite uniform in thickness but were the best she could produce. Once they were baking in the oven, she searched the kitchen for the templates she’d cut out—four wall pieces, two roof pieces. Why couldn’t she have built a gingerbread tent, instead? A pup tent—two sheets shaping an angle, propped up by stale sticks of licorice.

Through the ceiling she heard the thump of footsteps. The girls were clomping back and forth between their bedrooms above the kitchen. Ellie considered summoning them to help her clean some of the mixing bowls and utensils, but it was Christ
mas Eve. Shrewishness and nagging were not suited to the spirit of the holiday.

So she scrubbed the bowls and utensils herself. Once she had everything balanced in the drying rack, she reread the recipe for the tenth time in preparation for tackling the frosting.

What crazed person had invented gingerbread houses? she wondered. The Brothers Grimm? They wrote all those sadistic German folktales about witches devouring children and mothers giving their daughters poisoned apples to eat. Didn’t the witch in
Hansel and Gretel
live in a gingerbread house? And look at what had happened to Hansel and Gretel: they’d died. Or killed the witch. Or something.

Where the hell was Curt?

By the time he arrived home, the sky had gone black and an inch of snow covered the ground. Wearing a big grin, he swept into the kitchen from the mudroom, his tie loosened and his hair damp. “Whoa, it smells good in here!” he boomed before sweeping Ellie into a hug.

The baking pastry had managed to fill the air with a holiday fragrance. Her frosting was lumpy, and the unevenness in the gingerbread sheets appeared obvious now that they were cooked. When she’d pulled the trays from the oven, she’d seen that the edges of each sheet had turned a dark, tarry hue and the centers were puffy. Somehow, she didn’t think her gingerbread house was going to be up to code.

She hoped it would taste better than it looked—the parts that weren’t burned, anyway. And if it didn’t, at least she could assure herself that she’d tried her best. Certainly her effort had to be worth a few mommy points, regardless of the outcome.

She felt a lot mellower about the project once Curt closed his arms around her. She relaxed against the soft cashmere of
his coat, which was chilly from the outdoors. The scent of baking mingled with the scent of him, of snow and the night air and his aftershave and…another smell. A flowery smell.

Perfume?

“How was the party?” she asked, easing out of his arms.

“The usual,” he said as he pulled off his coat and carried it to the coat closet by the front door to hang up. Unlike his children, he didn’t leave his crap all over the kitchen. “Everyone had fun. A few people got a little tipsy.” He returned to the kitchen, peered at the sheets of gingerbread and then at the recipe. He looked impressed—and ridiculously handsome with his tie dangling loose, his hair mussed and a shadow of beard darkening his jaw. “People were thrilled with their bonuses. That always fills them with holiday cheer.”

Ellie caught another whiff of the unfamiliar perfume, faint yet obvious because it didn’t belong. “Who threw herself at you?” she asked. She wasn’t jealous. She had absolute faith in Curt. She just didn’t like the idea of a female colleague drinking too much and nuzzling him. Didn’t that qualify as sexual harassment?

Curt chuckled. “Four secretaries, two paralegals and Gretchen.” One of the founding partners, Gretchen was in her sixties and resembled a mastiff. “Moira Kernan just couldn’t resist me, and Lindy Brinson made passes at all the partners and also a potted plant. Oh, yeah, and Bill Castillo put the moves on me. Whenever he has a few drinks his true bisexual nature emerges.”

Ellie scowled. “Does he wear perfume?”

Curt slung his arm around Ellie. “Everyone was throwing themselves at everyone. That’s what happens when people get big bonuses and consume a lot of Christmas punch.” He pressed a kiss to Ellie’s temple, which he knew was one of her most sensitive spots. A reflexive heat whispered through her. “Nobody
at the party was as beautiful as you. Did you know you’ve got flour on your nose?”

“I do?” She rubbed the tip of her nose.

She must have missed the spot. He moved his thumb gently along the side of her nose, just below the bridge. “So, you’re really going to build this thing into a house?”

“The girls asked me to. It’s Christmas eve. How could I say no?”

“Like this.” He released her, gazed down into her eyes and murmured, “No.” Then he bowed and kissed her, a real kiss on the mouth. “I wish you could’ve joined me at the party, but we’ve got that damn no-guests rule. If I brought you, everyone would want to bring their husbands and wives, their boyfriends and girlfriends and their cousin from Quincy.”

“I’d be bored at your party,” she said, although being wrapped up in Curt’s arms, the taste of his kiss lingering on her lips, was anything but boring.

“Believe me, there’s nothing boring about listening to Sue Pritchard sing ‘Good King Wenceslas.’ She sings it really slow, like a torch song. I think in another life, she had the hots for the good king.”

Ellie grinned. Sue Pritchard was the firm’s senior-most secretary. She’d been there longer than Curt, and in that time she’d been through three marriages. All her divorces had been handled by Gretchen the mastiff, and Sue had emerged from each one exponentially wealthier.

“Well, some of us actually had to work today,” she said, giving Curt a parting hug before she turned back to the table to arrange her templates on the gingerbread. “I saw two kids with upset stomachs, one with what looked like conjunctivitis and one with a splinter. Then I came home and baked.”

“Santa will reward your hard work,” Curt promised as he
headed toward the stairs. “You’ve been good, for goodness’ sake.” With that he was gone, announcing to his children that he was home.

Ellie didn’t construct the gingerbread house until after dinner—a snack of cold cuts on rye bread. Tomorrow her parents would be coming for dinner; she’d be preparing the turkey, along with stuffing, winter squash, corn bread and steamed beans, and brownies and Christmas cookies for dessert. That plus the gingerbread house seemed like more than enough food preparation to earn her a sleigh full of presents.

The kids didn’t mind a supper of sandwiches, anyway. Ellie suspected that they preferred the light meal to a roasted turkey.

After dinner, the children were giddy. Twelve-year-old Katie considered herself the epitome of cool sophistication, but she couldn’t conceal her excitement about the holiday. Ten-year-old Jessie veered wildly between preadolescent aloofness and childlike glee. She insisted that the family watch a DVD of
Frosty the Snowman,
which even Peter considered infantile, followed by a showing of
A Christmas Story,
which they’d all seen so many times they could recite most of the script along with the characters.