Keeping Christmas

“If we wait until tomorrow the snow will be all gone and it will be forty-eight degrees,” Jacob said, coming through the back door, picking up the thread of the conversation just as quickly as his aunts had done earlier. Katie wondered if it was merely the result of living so closely together for so many years, or something in the Owens’ genes.

“Oh, Jacob, you’re not backing out on us, are you?” Lois asked, looking as disappointed as a child. “I penned Weezer up so she won’t try and eat the bulbs. I have all the boxes down from the attic. I’ve checked all the extension cords, and even un…packed a dozen strings.”

“Untangled, you mean,” Janet said under her breath.

“Unpacked,” Lois insisted. “I saw Mrs. Barnett, down at the crossroads, already has her Santa and reindeer set up out on the lawn. We can’t let her get the jump on us, Jacob. We just can’t.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” Jacob said, giving his aunt a salute. Katie almost thought she saw the glimmer of a smile cross his lips, but it never reached his eyes. They were blue, she noticed without wanting to—dark, dark blue. Navy blue, like the color of his coat and the knit cap on his dark head. Katie took a closer look at his clothes. It was a navy-issue coat, a pea coat, and a watch cap, both of which had seen better days. So Dr. Jacob Owens had been a sailor. One more tiny nugget of information to add to her private list of the things she knew about him.

“Give me a minute to get this tie off,” he said, suiting action to words as he pulled the knot from a gray knit tie and opened the collar of his long-sleeved gray-and-red-striped shirt. “I’ll call the Calhoun boys to come and give us a hand.”

“We don’t need the Calhoun boys, Jacob,” Lois said, smiling across the room at their reluctant guest. “Katie’s going to help.”

“Katie?” Jacob turned on her, tie still in hand, the indulgent half smile he’d been wearing wiped away in the space of a heartbeat, replaced by a frown.

“I’ll be glad to help,” she said hurriedly. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but Jacob made no effort to hide his antagonism for her and she couldn’t help wishing Lois had never asked for her assistance.

“I don’t need your help,” he said bluntly, tossing the discarded tie on the table and reaching for his coat.

“Yes, we do,” Lois piped up. “The Calhoun boys have basketball practice every night after school. They won’t be able to help until the weekend. I don’t want to wait that long to get the lights up. You promised,” she said, crossing her arms across her chest. “You promised.”

“I promised,” he said between clenched teeth as he rebuttoned his coat. “So let’s get going. This family spends entirely too much time and energy worrying about Christmas.” He walked out the door.

“Oh, dear,” Lois said, biting her lip. “Now I’ve made him mad.”

“It’s not you, Lo,” Faye said, offering her Kyle’s plump cheek to kiss. “It’s Christmas. You know how much Katherine loved the holidays. He doesn’t want to remember that she and the baby are gone forever. And Christmas is the hardest time of year for him....”

And the baby. So Jacob had lost a child, as well as his wife. She thought of her own loss. She had loved Michael, and she truly mourned his loss. Sometimes she wondered how she could have gotten through it without Kyle. To have lost the woman you loved and the child she bore you…together… The loss would be incalculable. Perhaps she’d judged Jacob Owens too harshly. Perhaps she should…

An imperious tapping came at the window beside her chair. Katie leaned over and lifted the lace curtain. Jacob’s dark, harsh features stared back at her, below eye level, framed by blooming pink geraniums and green leaves. “Let’s get going,” he called loudly through the old, green-tinged, wavy glass. “It’s colder than a witch’s—”

“Jacob!” Almeda called, holding up an imperious hand. “Watch your language.”

“Yes, Aunt,” he hollered back. The darkness didn’t leave his face, but Katie thought she saw just the slightest hint of softening in his deep blue eyes. He lowered his voice. “I’ll watch my p’s and q’s.”

“See that you do,” Almeda replied. Her hearing was evidently very good for a woman of her years.

“C’mon, Kate Smith,” he said, more softly still. “Get a move on.”

“I will,” Katie said, wondering why she was in such a hurry to do what he told her. He was a thorn in her side. He was moody and distrustful and he made her feel like a criminal for accepting his aunts’ hospitality. Now she was practically falling out of her chair to do his bidding. No, she told herself stubbornly, I’m doing it for his aunts. She squared her shoulders just a little. For his aunts. “I’m coming,” she said, and dropped the curtain.

The last thing in the world he wanted was to be hanging Christmas lights with the alleged Kate Smith as his helper. He hated Christmas because it reminded him more than at any other time of year of what he had lost. But for his aunts’ sakes, especially for Faye and Lois who celebrated the holidays with the intensity of children, he tried to hide his bitterness. He was surprised they hadn’t already come up with a scheme to keep Katie and her little boy with them until after New Year’s. Christmas was for children, after all. And they had no children or grandchildren of their own to spoil, as they would have lovingly and joyfully spoiled his son. Resolutely and quickly, because he’d had so much practice at it, he changed the direction of his thoughts.

“Let’s hurry this up a bit,” he said, tugging on the string of big, old-fashioned, teardrop-shaped outdoor lights that Katie was feeding up to him. “I’d like to be down off this ladder before dark. Did you hear me, Kate Smith?” He twisted his head around and looked down at his assistant, standing half a dozen rungs below him on the heavy wooden ladder. “I’m freezing my can off out here.”

“So am I,” came the spirited reply. “And I don’t like being up on this damned ladder any more than you.”

“No one asked you to come up,” he reminded her, enjoying the play of emotions across her expressive face, despite his reluctance to be in her company.

“It’s a dirty job, but someone had to do it,” she shot back, sniffling into the tissue she had wadded into her glove. “If I didn’t volunteer, you really would be up on this thing all night.” She looped a coil of lights in her hand, grabbed the sides of the ladder and leaned back, the better to glare up at him. “I suppose you expect your seventy-five-year-old aunt to come crawling up here and be your gofer.”

“Hey,” Janet yelped from the ground. “I’m not seventy-five. Hazel is. I’m seventy-two.”

“I was speaking in round figures,” Katie said, swiveling her head to shower one of her glittering, disarming smiles down on his aunt. Jacob felt a small, unwelcome twinge of regret that she wasn’t going to be smiling when she looked up at him again. Her smiles were really marvelous, something to behold.

“Not round enough,” Janet responded and laughed. Katie laughed, too. Her laugh was even more infectious than her smile. When she laughed she reminded him the least of Katherine. His wife had been a passionate and caring woman, but her emotions were always under control. Katie X—he’d taken to calling her that in his thoughts—wore all her emotions on her sleeve.

“I was trying to make a point,” Katie said, hooking her arm around the rung of the ladder in front to feed Jacob another few feet of lights that he looped through hooks set permanently under the eaves of the house.

“You succeeded.” Jacob tugged hard enough to cause the fragile colored-glass bulbs to bang together dangerously.

“You have no sense of humor,” Katie said. Provocatively? He couldn’t be sure. She tilted her head, watching him, challenging him. The lights were tangled just below his reach. Janet had stepped away from the base of the ladder to answer an urgent plea for help from the twins. He was alone, twenty-five feet in the air, with Katie X. He reached down for the string of lights just as she lifted them toward him. Their gloves hands met, but it was as if the barrier of cloth didn’t exist. He felt a jolt of sensation go through him as strong and as real as if the Christmas lights had shorted out in his hands.

“I lost my sense of humor and everything else three and a half years ago,” he said bluntly. He yanked on the lights again. The tangle came loose and he started back up the ladder to the peak of the roof.

“That’s when your wife and child were killed?”

“Yes,” he said. The word was scarcely more than a growl.

“Was your child a boy or a girl?” She wasn’t going to let him alone until she had the information she wanted, it seemed. He remained silent for a long moment, hooking the lights with mechanical efficiency, searching his heart for any weak spots in his defenses before he spoke again.

“A boy.”

“How old?” Her voice was soft, caring, but he refused to hear anything but the prying words.

“Eighteen months.”

“Near Kyle’s age,” she whispered, but he heard her, anyway.

“Yes.”

“His name was Kent Jacob.” It was a combination of Katherine’s father’s name and his own. He was surprised he’d been able to say it out loud.

“How did it happen?” She passed him another loop of lights and he started methodically stringing them down the far side of the roof peak, as far as he could reach.

He considered telling her to mind her own business but somehow he knew it would do no good. Katie X was nothing if not single-minded.

“It was a freak accident,” he mumbled, tightening a green bulb that had come loose in its socket with more force than necessary. “They were sitting in the car, in our driveway, waiting for it to stop raining when lightning struck a tree next door. Half the damn tree came down on top of the car. They were both killed instantly.”

“I’m sorry,” Katie said, so softly he could barely hear her.

“Being sorry doesn’t help.” He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He never wanted to talk about it.

“My husband died very suddenly, too,” she went on, ignoring his bad manners. “A little less than a year ago. On Monday he said he didn’t feel well. On Wednesday he collapsed. On Friday he was dead.” She sounded as unbelieving as he had been when he learned of what had happened to his wife and son. “It was pneumonia. Some kind of virulent strain.”

“No one dies of pneumonia anymore.”

“Michael did. And now Kyle and I are all alone.”