Christmas, Present by Jacquelyn Mitchard

parent.”

    “Her arch is small . . . ,” the woman commented. “Are you a dentist?” Elliott asked.
    “Yes, I am,” the woman told him. “I’m a children’s dentist. Children are never afraid, you know. It’s their parents who instill the fear.” They proceeded into the line before the exit, when Elliott remembered the bag nestled in his pocket.
    “I have to do something, so if you want to, you can go on,” he suggested. “I’m sorry.”
    “What? Take a photo? I’ll wait.”
    “Well, it’s . . . embarrassing, a little private.” “Oh, I wouldn’t want to . . . ”
    “It’s my mother’s ashes,” Annie interrupted. “Well, some of them. She’s dead. Well, obviously. And she always wanted to go to Paris with Dad; but instead she had a brain hemorrhage on the Big Dig, in Boston, in our car.”
    “The Big Dig? In Boston? Don’t tell me they’re still at that! I went to school in Boston,” the woman said. “I live in the Berkshires.”
    “It was quite a long time ago,” Elliott said.
    “On Christmas Eve, it will be four years,” Annie

    corrected him. “That’s not so long. She died at five o’clock at night. I was thirteen. I’ll be seventeen in a month.”
    “Christmas?” The woman removed her sunglasses and covered her eyes with one hand. “That is what is unbearable about having a family. To love and let go. At least, that’s how I comfort myself, because I’ve never had children, though I wanted them. My hus- band didn’t. And then, I imagine I didn’t want him, as a result. I’m talking too much. I always talk too much. But I suppose it’s why I do the work I do. Not because I talk too much. Children. Being with children. I don’t mean I can identify with your life. I would never suggest that not having something is the same as los- ing it. How unbearably sad. On Christmas?”
    Elliott looked down and fiddled with his pockets, as if to cover up a shameful spot. “Yes,” he admitted. “We go away at Christmas. To my father’s in Florida. We’ve done okay. My mother-in-law virtually gave up her business to help out with the girls . . . we managed.”
    “Her heart went to a boy who was born with his heart backwards—not Grandma’s, I mean my mom’s.

    He was twelve and he was on his last legs,” Rory said, shooting Annie a triumphant look. “And her eyes went to a lady who’d never seen her baby. And her lungs . . .”
    “That’s okay, Rory, that’s enough,” Elliott told her gently.
    “I’m impressed by that, all of that,” the woman told Rory, seriously, without condescension. “She must have been a very remarkable woman.”
    “Not really,” Rory said. “She could do back walkovers, even though she was an older lady, like you. She was nice, but Karen is a better cook, even Dad says so . . .”
    “Your . . . girlfriend?” the woman asked Elliott, glancing at his left hand. He had removed his ring only two years before, on the night that Whitney, one of Laura’s friends, arranged a date for him with one of the women who worked with her at her catering com- pany. They’d had six dates. Elliott enjoyed her. Then, one day, when they were finishing a tennis match, the woman, Clare, a lively, compact brunette, tapped him on the rear with her racquet and told him, simply, she

    sensed that his heart wasn’t in it—and Elliott knew she didn’t mean the tennis.
    “No, Karen is the woman who helps us out,” Elliott explained, “at home. She is a great cook. She’s worked for us since Laura died. Laura was more interested in the kids and the dog, in reading instead of cleaning. She did like to iron, but it took her all day to do two shirts. We didn’t care. She could spend two hours making a giant macaroni mosaic with Amelia. And she could cook, Rory. Remember the Christmas cookies?”
    “I remember the Christmas chocolate tree.”
    “See?” Annie said sharply. “You don’t remember her.
    It’s called a Bûche de Noel, Rory.”
    “No. None of you