doesn’t matter. If what you saw isn’t troubling you, Barb, then what is?”
“Mom and Dad could have buried us!” Barbara bursts out. “They could have been at that table alone! Not eating turkey and stuffing, they wouldn’t want anything like that, maybe just S-Sp-Spam—”
Holly laughs. She can’t help it. And Barbara can’t help joining in. Snow is gathering on her knitted cap. To Holly she looks very young. Of course she is young, but more like a twelve-year-old than a young woman who will be going to Brown or Princeton next year.
“Do you see what I mean?” Barbara takes Holly’s gloved hands. “It was close. It was really, really close.”
Yes, Holly thinks, and it was your regard for me that put you there.
She embraces her friend in the falling snow. “Sweetheart,” she says, “we’re all close. All the time.”
3
Barbara starts up the steps to the house. Inside, there will be cocoa and popcorn and Scrooge trumpeting that the spirits have done it all in one night. But there’s a final bit of business that needs to be done out here, so Holly takes Barbara’s arm for a moment in the thickening snow. She holds out a card she put in her coat pocket before leaving for the Robinsons’, in case it might be needed. There’s nothing on it but a name and a number.
Barbara takes it and reads it. “Who’s Carl Morton?”
“A therapist I saw after I came back from Texas. I only saw him twice. That was all the time I needed to tell my story.”
“Which was what? Was it like . . .” She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to.
“I might tell you someday, you and Jerome both, but not on Christmas. Just know that if you need to talk to someone, he’ll listen.” She smiles. “And because he’s heard my story, he might even believe yours. Not that that matters. Telling it is what helps. At least it did me.”
“Getting it out there.”
“Yes.”
“Would he tell my parents?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’ll think about it,” Barbara says, and puts the card in her pocket. “Thank you.” She hugs Holly. And Holly, who once upon a time feared to be touched, hugs back. Hard.
4
It is the Alastair Sim version, and when Holly drives slowly home through the blowing snow, she can’t remember a happier Christmas. Before going to bed, she uses her tablet to send Ralph Anderson a text message.
There will be a package from me when you get back. I have had quite an adventure, but all is well. We’ll talk, but it can wait. Hope you & yours had a merry (tropical) Christmas. Much love.
She says her prayers before turning in, finishing as she always does, by saying that she’s not smoking, she’s taking her Lexapro, and she misses Bill Hodges.
“God bless us every one,” she says. “Amen.”
She gets in bed. Turns out the light.
Sleeps.
February 15, 2021
Uncle Henry’s mental decline has been rapid. Mrs. Braddock has told them (regretfully) that it’s often the case once patients are in care.
Now, as Holly sits beside him on one of the couches facing the big-screen TV in the Rolling Hills common room, she finally gives up trying to make conversation with him. Charlotte already has; she’s at a table across the room, helping Mrs. Hatfield with her current jigsaw puzzle. Jerome has come with them today, and is also helping. He’s got Mrs. Hatfield laughing, and even Charlotte can’t help smiling at some of J’s amiable chatter. He’s a charming young man, and he’s finally won Charlotte over. Not an easy thing to do.
Uncle Henry sits with his eyes wide and his mouth agape, the hands that once fixed Holly’s bicycle after she crashed it into the Wilsons’ picket fence now lying slack between his splayed legs. His pants bulge with the continence pants beneath. Once he was a ruddy man. Now he’s pale. Once he was a stout man. Now his clothes hang on his body and his flesh sags like an old sock that’s lost its elastic.
Holly takes one of his hands. It’s just meat with fingers. She laces her own fingers through his and squeezes, hoping for a return, but no. Soon it will be time to go, and she’s glad. It makes her feel guilty, but there it is. This isn’t her uncle; he’s been replaced by an oversized ventriloquist’s dummy with no ventriloquist to lend it speech. The ventriloquist has left town and isn’t coming back.
An ad for Otezla, urging these wrinkled, balding oldsters to “Show more of