Hope Street (12 page)

Seeing him in it made her want to tear it off him.

But she couldn’t do that when Katie, Jessie and Peter were crowded around the kitchen table, whining about how starving they were. With their Christmas stockings drooping from the mantel under the weight of foil-wrapped chocolate Santas and sugar-cookie Santas and Santa-shaped lollipops, they could certainly have found something outside the kitchen to ease their hunger. But no, it was Christmas morning and only pancakes would do.

Ellie mixed some batter and put Curt and Katie to work cooking the pancakes on the electric griddle, then resumed her efforts with the turkey. Her parents would be arriving around midday and expecting to eat by one. If the turkey didn’t get stuffed and into the oven soon, they’d be dining on raw bird.

She hummed while she crumbled a loaf of bread into chunks for her stuffing, and listened to the enthusiastic chattering of her children. Peter boasted that he was going to be the best baseball player ever, and Ellie remembered her brothers making the same proud claims when they were Peter’s age. One had wound up an accountant and the other a high-school teacher, both of them having ultimately opted for practicality over glamour—or perhaps reality over fantasy. Of course, the small wooden bat Peter had received, while perfectly suited to the double-A Little League team he’d be playing on next spring, wasn’t going to power any balls out of Fenway Park. For the time being, though, he believed Santa was the greatest guy in the world because he’d brought Peter such a wonderful bat. The glove was great, too. “But Santa isn’t here anymore,” he concluded, “so Daddy will have to show me how to make a pocket in my glove.”

“I think I can do that,” Curt said, shooting Ellie a grin. Evidently, he didn’t mind coming in second to Santa.

Ellie was still in the kitchen, preparing her sweet-potato
casserole, cutting vegetables into a salad, scouring the griddle and stacking the syrup-sticky breakfast plates into the dishwasher long after the rest of the family had departed—Jessie to listen to music on her Discman; Katie to phone all her friends to find out what they’d received for Christmas; Curt to rearrange his tool bench to make space for the power drill he’d selected for himself and then asked Ellie to give him; and Peter to run around the house with his bat, shouting, “It’s outta here!” as he swatted imaginary homers out of an imaginary ballpark.

“Watch where you swing that thing!” Ellie warned, visualizing all the fragile objects in her house that could wind up in the path of Peter’s bat. Lamps, a set of handcrafted ceramic bowls, the TV…“Just
pretend
your swinging it, Peter,” she called from her post at the kitchen sink. “It’s really an outdoor toy.”

“It’s not a toy,” he shouted back. “It’s a bat.”

“It’s an outdoor bat.”

“I’m being careful.”

She smiled. All the tension that had built up inside her during the weeks before Christmas was finally ebbing. Her children were home and happy, her husband liked the sweater she’d selected for him, she had a cushioned bleacher seat along with a box of Godiva dark chocolates, a pair of fleece-lined leather slippers, a new barrette, some pretty coasters and original artwork from Peter. She had a beautiful white snowscape to view on the other side of the window above the sink—just enough snow to look pretty, not enough to mess up the roads. She had a husband who could make spontaneous love to her on the sofa when she was wiped out after a long day, and leave her feeling as if she was actually competent in the art of creating a holiday atmosphere for her family.

What more could a woman want?

A mother who was a little less judgmental, she thought a couple of hours later when her parents swept into the house, bearing armloads of gifts for their grandchildren. For Peter they’d brought a Lego set and for the girls some stuffed animals that the girls were polite enough to thank them for, even though Ellie feared they might be a little too old to appreciate fluffy toy Persian cats wearing rhinestone tiaras and dangly earrings.

“The gingerbread house is so cute,” her mother said once the frenzy that accompanied their arrival had simmered down and she could join Ellie in the kitchen. “The girls said you made it yourself.”

“Curt helped,” Ellie admitted, then bit her tongue. She should have taken full credit, just so her mother would acknowledge her hard work and her domestic achievements.

Too late. “Curt is a gem,” her mother gushed. “I hope you thank God every day for a husband like him. I can just imagine what your father would say if I asked him to help me bake a gingerbread house.” She clicked her tongue and shook her head. “What kind of stuffing did you make?” she asked, opening the oven to peek. The room filled with the heavy scents of garlic and butter and roasting turkey.

“The usual,” Ellie said. “Apples, celery, whole wheat bread…”

“You should make oyster stuffing,” her mother declared, closing the oven. “Nobody ever makes that anymore, except for me. Your father loves it. Curt would love it, too.”

“He likes my apple stuffing.”

“You could use a little foundation, Ellie. And some concealer. You’re middle-aged. It’s starting to show. You’ve got frown lines sprouting above your eyebrows…”

On cue, Ellie frowned.

But what was the point of arguing with her mother that Curt—the gem—loved her stuffing and didn’t seem to care if
she had frown lines above her eyebrows? Even if she wanted to defend herself, she would have been hard-pressed to break through her mother’s monologue, which touched on Ellie’s job—“Don’t you find it disgusting having to treat all those strange children with stomach bugs?” And her sweater—“Didn’t you wear that sweater last year? It’s getting old.” And the children—“You shouldn’t baby Peter so much. He’s getting to be a big boy.” And, of course, the kitchen floor—“All those boots piled up by the back door leave water stains. If you’re going to be so lackadaisical about cleaning your floor, you should get darker tiles. Something with a pattern, maybe. That would disguise the dirt, the way your highlighting disguises your gray hair.”

Thank you, Mom.

But Ellie got through it, because Curt
was
a gem and her children were magnificent and it was Christmas. Everyone praised the dinner, even though she hadn’t made oyster stuffing, and afterward her parents agreed to watch the
Frosty the Snowman
video with Peter, despite the fact that he’d watched it last night. Katie and Jessie cleared the table and placed the dishes in the dishwasher, and Curt wrapped up all the leftovers and wedged them into the refrigerator, leaving only the pot-scouring chore for Ellie to handle.

Peace—or as close to peace as she could hope to get in a houseful of people—descended, along with a fresh dusting of snow.

She didn’t notice the threads of tension woven into that peace until her parents were saying their goodbyes. Her father fussed about having to visit Ellie’s baby brother—they’d eaten too much, and now they’d be expected to have supper with that whole branch of the family.

Ellie and Curt and the girls assured him that by the time he
arrived at Uncle Mike’s house he’d be hungry again. Peter gave his grandparents as big a hug as he could, not easy since he was wearing his new baseball glove, but his face was taut and his eyes, hazel like Curt’s, glinted coldly.

“Are you okay?” Ellie asked him once her parents were in their car and backing down the driveway to the street.

“Sure,” he grunted, then turned and stormed away.

“What’s that all about?” Curt asked, watching Peter stomp off in the direction of the family room.

“He’s such a jerk sometimes,” Jessie muttered before heading upstairs.

Curt ushered Ellie into the kitchen. It was nearly clean, and would no doubt look cleaner if she installed flooring with a pattern like her hair’s highlights. Remembering her mother’s litany of veiled criticisms sparked a giggle. “God, my parents wear me out.”

Curt laughed. “Scary to think you swam out of their gene pool.”

“And your children swam out of mine. My parents’ chromosomes live on.”

“Thank heavens the kids have inherited all their good traits from
my
gene pool.”

Ellie jabbed him in the stomach with her elbow. “Yeah, right.”

“My height, my talent, my intellect,” he ticked off. “My coloring. My sense of humor…”

“Your inflated ego.” She crossed to the sink, lifted the roasting pan from the drying rack and wiped it with a towel. “Your ugly toes. Your cluelessness.”

“My toes aren’t ugly.”

“Have you looked at them lately?”

Their banter was interrupted by a loud thumping sound and then as cream from Katie. “Peter! You idiot! Why did you do that?”

Ellie nearly dropped the pan. Curt was already out of the kitchen, hurrying toward the living room. As soon as she’d set the pan back onto the rack, she trailed him down the hall, nearly colliding with him when he stopped short in the living-room doorway. “Peter. Give it to me,” he commanded, his voice ominously low, his hand outstretched.

Ellie sidestepped Curt and then froze when she saw what Peter had done: smashed the gingerbread house with his new bat. The confection lay shattered across the coffee table, chunks of gingerbread, flakes of dried frosting and gum drops strewn around it, as if a tornado had descended from the ceiling and demolished it.

Katie shoved Peter away from the table, her eyes glistening with tears. “You stupid idiot!” she roared. “Mommy worked so hard on this, and now you’ve ruined it!”

“What did he do?” Jessie yelled, racing down the stairs.

“He destroyed the gingerbread house!”

“Can we still eat it?” Jessie asked.

Ellie was too stunned to absorb their words. Her gaze shuttled between the mess on the table and her son, who glowered at her even as he relinquished the bat to his father. Why was he staring at her as if he wished he’d smashed her rather than the gingerbread house? What had she done to provoke his rage?

“You lied,” he answered her unvoiced question. “You’re a liar.” Tears streaming down his cheeks, he ran up the stairs and into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

“He’s such an idiot,” Katie murmured, hurrying to Ellie’s side and hugging her.

I lied?
she wondered. What had she lied about?

Curt exchanged a puzzled glance with her. The bat looked
adorable in his hands, so small and harmless. Yet Peter had used it as a weapon, wrecking Ellie’s hard work. Suddenly, she hated that bat.

“I’ll go talk to him,” she said, then pursed her lips, squared her shoulders and marched up the stairs. She knocked on Peter’s door and, when he didn’t respond, inched it open.

He was seated on his bed, red-faced, wet-cheeked, clutching his new glove. “Care to tell me what this is all about?” she asked from the doorway. His forbidding expression kept her from entering the room.

“You lied,” he said accusingly again. “You told me Santa exists and Nana told me that’s a lie.”

Ellie opened her mouth and then shut it, utterly stumped. Why would her mother have said such a thing?

“She told me I was a big boy and I should know the truth. Danny Barrone was right. There’s no such thing as Santa Claus, and you told me there was.”

Ellie felt her strength draining from her like air from a balloon. How dare her mother interfere? How dare she deny Peter the chance to believe, just a little longer?

“What I told you,” Ellie reminded him, swallowing to steady her voice, “is that Santa exists for everyone who believes in him. Maybe Nana doesn’t believe in him, so he doesn’t exist for her.”

“No, she said there was no such thing as Santa, and I was a big boy and I should know the truth.” Peter glared at her. “She said all the presents came from you and Dad, except for the Lego set. That came from her and Poppa.” Fresh tears spilled down his cheeks.

“Oh, Peter.” Ellie ached to hug him, to urge him to hang on to his dreams and myths for as long as he wished.

“You lied,” he said. “You treat me like a baby.”

Ellie heard footsteps along the hallway behind her, and then the warmth of Curt joining her in the doorway. He still held the bat. “Say goodbye to this bat. It’s going into storage for a while,” he told Peter sternly.

“I don’t care.” Peter rolled away from his parents and hid his face in the corner where his bed met the wall.

“Let me talk to him,” Curt whispered to Ellie.

She hated to leave Peter when his resentment was gusting toward her like a toxic fume. Just the sight of his slender back, his drooping gray sweatpants and his little feet, the soles of his socks permanently stained a smudgy gray, sent shudders of grief through Ellie. Had she blown things so terribly by allowing Peter to believe in Santa for one more year? Did Ellie’s mother loathe her enough to undermine her relationship with her son? Why couldn’t her mother get over the fact that Ellie had not fulfilled the promise of her youth? She’d made a good life for herself and her family and she’d never regretted her decision not to attend medical school. Why couldn’t her mother accept who Ellie was?

She was so overwrought she realized she’d be useless in any conversation with Peter right now. Relinquishing that task to Curt, she stalked down the hall to the stairs. And decided Curt’s taking over was just one more shred of proof that Ellie was inadequate as a mother.

The girls were in the kitchen when she arrived. They’d salvaged what they could of the gingerbread house and stacked the bigger chunks on a plate. “We’ll cover it with red-and-green wrap,” Katie announced, pulling the holiday-hued plastic wrap from a drawer. “That’ll make it look good.”

“And Peter can’t have a single piece,” Jessie added. “He’s such a jerk.”

“Yeah, Mom.” Katie flung her arms around Ellie’s shoulders—when had Katie gotten tall enough to stand eye-to-eye with Ellie?—and hugged her hard. “You should’ve stuck to having daughters,” she said. “Boys are creeps.”

“Except for Tyler Berlin,” Jessie singsonged, teasing Katie. “He’s so cool.” She issued an exaggerated sigh.

“He
is
cool,” Katie said defensively. It dawned on Ellie that her daughter had a crush on this Tyler boy and Ellie hadn’t known anything about it until now. “He’d never do anything this asinine.”