Chapter 9 - Christmas Eve: The Quiet Before the Hearth
The snow began in earnest at four o’clock on the twenty-fourth, just as the last corporate van returned to the shop in Hackensack with fifty empty chafing dishes and three crates of dirty flatware.
It wasn't the light, decorative fluff that Susette liked for her windowpanes; it was the heavy, wet, northeastern slop that sticks to the underside of wheel wells and pulls down the power lines along Route 4. By seven, the red oaks along Lincoln Avenue were bowed double, their black branches groaning under the weight of three inches of frozen slush that was turning to gray glaze wherever the salt spreaders hadn't reached.
Inside our bungalow, the radiators were singing.
They were old cast-iron units, five tubes wide, painted with silver radiator enamel thirty years ago by some previous owner who didn't care about drips, and when the oil burner in the basement kicked on with its heavy, muffled *whoosh*, they banged three times—*clang, clang, clink*—like someone signaling from the engine room of a coal freighter, before settling into a deep, steady hiss that smelled of hot dust and old iron.
We had taken the dining room table—a simple oak trestle Nadia’s father had built out of salvage timbers from the Brooklyn Navy Yard—and pushed it straight through the archway into the living room.
To reach fourteen seats, I had gone to the warehouse on Tuesday night and brought home two ten-foot lengths of three-quarter-inch marine plywood and four heavy steel folding horses. We had planed the edges down until they met the oak without a lip, then covered the whole thirty-foot expanse with two layers of heavy white flannel drop cloths, topped by four linen tablecloths that Nadia had starched and ironed until they were as stiff and smooth as fresh stationery.
There was no centerpiece.
In the middle of the table, running the entire thirty feet down the centerline, Caleb had laid out twenty-four red apples he had polished with an old kitchen towel until they reflected the yellow light from the ceiling fixtures, interspersed with fresh cedar branches that Pete had brought down from his camp in Sussex in the back of his pickup truck, still smelling of wet resin and cold bark.
Every place card was six inches square, cut from heavy brown kraft paper with a pair of kitchen shears.
Caleb had written the names with a flat carpenter's pencil he’d taken from my toolbox.
*UNCLE PETE*
*AUNT CLARA*
*COUSIN MARTIN*
*BRENDA*
*LEO*
*ARTHUR*
*GRANDMA MARILYN*
He had put Marilyn’s card at the head of the oak trestle, right beside the radiator where the draft from the front hall couldn't reach her ankles, and beside her plate, he had set her special horn-handled butter knife—the one my father had bought at the Dutchess County Fair in nineteen-seventy-six that had a small notch in the blade where Garrett had tried to pry open a paint can when he was nine.
At eight-thirty, my phone rang from the butcher block in the kitchen.
It was Garrett.
I didn't take off my apron. I was standing over a twenty-pound ham, scoring the skin into one-inch diamonds with an eight-inch carbon-steel slicer, pushing a whole clove into every intersection until the fat looked like a dark, studded quilt.
"Garrett," I said.
The line was silent for so long I thought the storm had brought down the trunk line near the Paramus substation. Then I heard the sound of ice clinking against glass—the heavy, rhythmic rattle of an eight-ounce tumbler being swirled in a small, carpeted room.
"She’s in the bedroom, Wes," he said.
His voice didn't have the partner-track sheen. It sounded thick, loose around the edges, like he had been sitting in the dark with a bottle of twelve-year-old malt since the sun went down.
"Who’s in the bedroom?"
"Susette. She locked the door at six. She’s got the television on. Some movie with the girl from the commercial."
"Garrett—"
"The harpist called at five," he said, and he let out a short, wet snort that was half-laugh and half-cough. "Said his Volvo couldn't make the hill on North Van Dien because the borough hadn't salted the cul-de-sac. Susette offered him five hundred dollars if he’d walk up from the avenue with the instrument on a sled. He told her to go to hell and hung up."
I set the knife down on the salt block. Nadia stopped her rhythm at the pastry board, her flour-covered rolling pin poised two inches above the round of pie dough, listening.
"Are you coming over tomorrow?" I asked.
Another clink of ice. In the background, through the receiver, I could hear the immense, dead silence of a four-thousand-square-foot house—that specific, muffled quiet of twenty-foot ceilings and thick wool rugs where nobody is walking, nobody is laughing, and nobody is dropping a spoon on the floor.
"She has sixteen settings on the table, Wes," he whispered. "She set them yesterday. The gold chargers. The little crystal salt cellars shaped like swans. She spent four hours placing the name cards with a wooden ruler so they were all two inches from the bevel of the mahogany."
"Garrett," I said again, softer this time. "Take your coat off. Put the turkey in the fridge. Get in the car and bring her down."
"She won't come," he said, and there was a sudden, ugly crack in his voice—the sound of forty-two years of being the boy who got the blue ribbon finally giving out under the weight of the ribbon's price. "She said if she walks into your house after this, she’ll never be able to look at the women on the library committee again. She said they’ll know."
"Know what?"
"That she isn't who she said she was."
He took a long, wet swallow. I could hear his breath hitching against the glass.
"Mom’s not there, Wes," he said.
I froze. "What do you mean, she’s not there?"
"I went to Verona at four to drop off her coat. The one from the cleaner's. The gray one with the mink collar she likes for church."
"And?"
"Her apartment was empty. Her suitcase—that little brown Samsonite that Dad bought for their anniversary in Lake George—was gone from the top of the closet. The Buick wasn't in the stall."
"She hasn't driven the Buick in two years, Garrett," I said, my heart taking a sudden, hard leap against my ribs. "The battery’s dead."
"The stall was empty, Wes," he repeated, his voice trailing off into a mumble. "Arthur’s boy... Joey... he has that flatbed from the salvage yard. He was seen on Bloomfield Avenue around noon with two sets of jumper cables."
I looked out the kitchen window.
The snow was coming down in sheets now, curling around the streetlights in wild, white funnels. The plow hadn't been down Lincoln Avenue in two hours, and the drift against our front walk was already knee-deep, burying the small plastic candy canes Caleb had stuck along the border of the grass.
"Garrett," I said. "Come eat."
"I have to stay with the beef," he whispered. "If the power goes out, the freezer in the basement doesn't have an inverter. It’s six thousand dollars of meat, Wes. I have to watch the breaker."
He hung up.
The click of the line was small and final, like a dry branch snapping under the snow in the woods behind the park.
I laid the phone on the butcher block and turned back to the ham. Nadia didn't ask what he said. She took the rolling pin, brought it down on the dough with one clean, decisive stroke, and smoothed out the butter-crust until it covered the edge of the stoneware pie plate with two inches to spare.
"Wes," she said, nodding toward the front window.
Through the storm, two yellow headlights were crawling down Lincoln Avenue, their beams cutting through the white haze like two dull butter knives. The vehicle was moving at five miles an hour, its tires throwing up twin roostertails of gray slush as it fought the ruts in the asphalt.
It wasn't a plow.
It was an eighty-eight Buick LeSabre, its rear bumper hanging three inches lower on the left side where the leaf spring had rusted out, its single working wiper slapping against the windshield with a frantic, rubbery *whuff-whuff-whuff*.
Behind it, riding its bumper like an iron sheepdog, was Uncle Pete’s three-quarter-ton Ford, its yellow roof-light flashing, its four-wheel-drive tires chewing through the drift at our curb with a low, hydraulic growl that rattled the storm windows on our porch.
The Buick didn't turn into the driveway; it couldn't make the curb. It simply plowed straight into the drift by our mailbox and died with a wet, steamy sigh from the radiator.
The driver’s door opened two inches, caught on the snow, then was kicked wide by an eight-inch work boot with a steel toe.
Uncle Pete got out of his truck, walked through the three-foot drift without looking down at his trousers, and reached into the front seat of the Buick. When he came out, he was carrying Marilyn’s brown Samsonite suitcase in his left hand, and with his right, he was steadying my mother by the elbow.
She was wearing her gray coat with the mink collar. She had a wool scarf tied under her chin with a knot so tight her cheeks were bunched up like two small, red winter apples, and in her gloved hands, she was carrying an eight-quart blue enamel roasting pot with both handles wrapped in tea towels so the grease wouldn't leak onto her stockings.
Caleb was already at the front door before I could cross the living room.
He threw the deadbolt, pulled the heavy oak door open into the draft, and stood there on the braided rug in his socks, looking out at the snow.
My mother stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, her boots sinking into the white powder, looking up at him through the storm.
"Caleb," she called out, her voice competing with the wind that was rattling the red oak branches above the roof. "Don't you stand there in your stocking feet! You'll catch the croup before the pies are set!"
Uncle Pete hauled the suitcase up onto the porch with a dull *thump* that shook the railing, then turned to spit a stream of brown tobacco juice into the clean snow by the hydrangeas.
May you like
"Get the pot, Wesley," Pete barked, his face red under his greasy wool cap. "The old lady’s been holding eighteen pounds of red cabbage on her knees since Nutley, and if she drops it on the runner, she’s going to make me pay for the steam cleaner."
***
