Keeping Christmas

“No,” Patrice said, the word exploding from her lips. “I won’t be a party to taking Katie’s baby away from her. I refuse.” She turned and hurried down the length of the long, polished table. Theo stepped aside with a nod.

“Patrice, wait.” Gregory sounded miserable, torn, but Patrice never slowed down.

“Let her go,” she heard Andrew command as she left the room. “She’ll come to her senses soon enough.”

Patrice put her hand over her mouth to keep from sobbing out loud. She’d come to her senses, all right. She was leaving this house, too. Tonight. Just as Katie had.

Chapter 1

“Jacob, you haven’t touched your dessert. What’s wrong? Aren’t you feeling well?” Hazel Owens Gentry addressed her nephew in the same sweet-as-dandelion-wine tone of voice she’d used to reprimand him since he was a little boy. “It’s the last piece of mincemeat pie. I saved it just for you.”

“I’m feeling great, Aunt H, really,” he hastened to assure her. Faded blue eyes regarded him from a face as brown and wrinkled as a berry. His aunt Hazel was an earth mother. She wasn’t completely happy unless she had someone to care for. “But I’m stuffed.” He smiled for her benefit. “I can’t eat another bite.”

“It’s the soup,” Hazel fretted. “Too much pepper? Too much celery?”

“The soup’s great, Aunt Hazel. You make the best leftover turkey soup in Tennessee.” He stretched the smile into a grin. “It’s great.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the meal, sister.” Almeda, the eldest of his five Owens aunts, interrupted her sibling’s lament. “A fitting end for a noble bird.” She picked up her spoon. “Now stop fishing for compliments and sit down and eat yours before it gets cold. If the boy doesn’t want his pie he doesn’t have to eat it.”

Jacob was thirty-four years old but Almeda had called him “the boy” when he was twenty-two and when he was twelve—the year he and his father had come to Holly Ridge, the family home near tiny Owenburg, Tennessee, at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, to live. He suspected she had called his late father, the only Owens brother, the same thing when he was young, as well.

“I’ll eat the pie.” His middle aunt, Janet, added her two cents’ worth. “Mincemeat’s my favorite. And I’d hate to see it go to waste.”

“It won’t go to waste.” Faye giggled and nudged her twin, Lois.

“It’ll just go to your waist,” his youngest—by six minutes—aunt responded with a giggle of her own.

“Girls.” Almeda waved her gnarled, beringed hand in their general direction. “Enough. Eat. The food’s getting cold.”

Faye and Lois were sixty-nine years old and Almeda still referred to them as girls. That’s why Jacob knew he’d always be “the boy.” He handed the pie to his aunt Janet and bent his head to finish his soup, hiding his amusement at the good-natured bickering going on around him.

He owed his sanity, if not his life, to this marvelous eccentric quintet of old ladies. Returning to Owenburg, to his aunts and to his roots three years before, after his wife and baby son were killed, had pulled him through the worst period of his life. For months after the freak accident that had destroyed his family and his happiness, he’d wanted nothing more than to crawl into a hole and die. But the aunts wouldn’t allow that. They’d descended on his little house in Knoxville near the University of Tennessee campus where he was an associate professor of microbiology and refused to leave without him. He’d given in finally, planning to stay in Owenburg a few days only, just to get them off his back, then return to Knoxville—and he didn’t know what.

The few days had stretched into weeks, then months. He’d resigned from the university and taken a job teaching science at Owenburg High School. Three years later he was still here. He no longer thought about dying, but he didn’t think much about living, either. It was a trade-off, he supposed, if you wanted to analyze it, a defense mechanism. If you didn’t want to remember the past, you didn’t dare consider the future.

If you didn’t allow yourself to feel, to care, you could get through the days. And more importantly, you could get through the nights. That was his immediate goal in life. To sleep through the night. He hadn’t quite made it yet, but he was working on it, and maybe in another ten or fifteen years he’d figure out how to do it.

“The television weatherman said it’s going to get down to fifteen degrees tonight,” Faye commented, breaking into his thoughts.

“It’s too damn early in the winter for it to be so cold.” Janet looked up from her pie with a scowl in the direction of the television.

“Janet, that language isn’t appropriate at the dinner table,” Almeda said.

“Oh, hell,” Janet muttered. “It’s nearly the twenty-first century. I’ll say damn if I want to.” Janet had taught physical education and American history at Owenburg High for forty-five years, retiring five years earlier. At seventy-two she still coached the Owenburg girls’ and women’s softball teams. She swam three times a week at the health club in Knoxville, making the forty-mile drive alone, in her 1972 Chevy Impala.

“Be that as it may,” Almeda began, but Lois cut her short.

“It’s sleeting outside,” she informed her sisters. “It’s so slippery I almost fell on my fanny taking Weezer’s food out to the barn.” Weezer was a huge, bad-tempered goose, the family “watchdog,” thirty-five years old and still going strong. Jacob had read somewhere that geese could live to be a hundred years old. In his opinion Weezer was certainly ornery enough to last that long.

“If it gets as cold as they say,” Faye chimed in, “the ice on the ground will last all night.”

“Oh, dear,” Hazel said, with a worried frown. “Think of all those pour souls traveling home from Thanksgiving with their families.”

“And all the snowbirds heading down the interstate to Florida,” Janet added with a touch of acid.

“Oh, yes,” Hazel said, ignoring the sarcasm. “I’ll remember to say a prayer for all of them. Maybe they’ll cancel school tomorrow, Jacob, and you can sleep in.” She reached across the table and patted her nephew’s hand.

“I could use the extra day off,” he agreed. “But not for sleeping in. The woodpile’s getting low. I wouldn’t want to head over here for breakfast one morning and find the fire in the stove’s gone out.” He had his own cabin a hundred yards up the hill but he took a lot of meals, and spent a lot of time, at his aunts’ home.

“No, indeed,” Almeda said, folding her napkin carefully before laying it beside her plate. “There’s been fire in that cookstove every day since I was a girl.”

“The world wouldn’t end if there wasn’t,” Janet said under her breath.

“I like cooking on the old stove,” Hazel, always the peacemaker, broke in quickly. “But I don’t have anything against electricity. And to tell you the truth, I’d just love to have a microwave.” She shot a defiant glance at her older sister out of the corner of her eye.

“Microwaves. Ridiculous appliances.”

“They really are very convenient,” Hazel began. Almeda snorted. For seventy-five years she’d ruled her sisters’ lives. She didn’t intend to stop now.

“Get one if you want it,” Janet told Hazel. “Quit being such a baby.”

“We’ll look at them for you the next time we go to the travel agent,” Faye offered.

“Yes. The office is only a couple of miles from the mall in Knoxville. I think Wainwright’s department store would be the best place to check, don’t you?” Lois decided with a pixiewise nod of her gray-streaked red head. Both the twins were small, barely five feet tall and slender as children.

“Yes, Wainwright’s. We’ll look into it when we go pick up the brochures for our trip to Argentina.”

“Argentina?”

Jacob hid another smile. His twin aunts had been planning the trip of a lifetime ever since his grandparents had passed away fifteen years ago. As far as he knew they’d still never ventured farther away from home than Memphis, but they kept planning, and someday he hoped they made it to all the faraway, exotic places they dreamed about.

Dreams were another thing he’d learned to do without.

“Yes, Argentina,” Faye insisted when Janet had stopped laughing. “It’s a great travel bargain this winter.”

“I’ll bet it is. If you get there before the next coup attempt.”

“It’s time for Sixty Minutes,” Almeda announced imperiously. “I don’t want to miss is. Mike Wallace is doing an exposé on the savings and loan scandal.”

“Another one?” Hazel sighed. “Isn’t that ever going to be settled? You go ahead. I’ll tidy up in the kitchen.”

“I’ll help you, Aunt H,” Jacob offered. “Then I have to get back to the cabin. I can’t count on the weather being bad enough for them to cancel school tomorrow. I still have half a dozen midterm exams to mark.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” Janet said, pushing her chair back from the table as she turned to help Almeda, crippled by arthritis, to rise from her chair. “Sixty Minutes bores me to death.”

“Thanks, Aunt J,” Jacob said as he prepared to carry a stack of plates and bowls into the kitchen. “But they’re essay questions. Still want to volunteer?”

“I withdraw my offer,” Janet said with a cackle. “I’ll find something else to occupy me until bedtime.”