spend Christmas with your mom in California.”
He blushed. “Well, there’s this really cool woman who’s the granddaughter of one of Patch and Britta’s friends. She just moved back to the colony and I met her at Thanksgiving.”
Sweeney felt a tiny, unwelcome stab of jealousy. Why hadn’t he told her about it before? “So why do you want me along? For female companionship if things crash and burn with the granddaughter?”
He grinned at her. “No, it’ll just be more fun.”
“I don’t know, Toby . . .” she said, still staring at the photographs. “I’m so exhausted from finishing up this thing for European Art Criticism. And you know how I feel about staying with people. I’m always tiptoeing around and cleaning up the bathroom as soon as I’m done. I’ll probably spill a beer on the Persian carpet or something. I’d rather just be alone. Christmas is a weird time for me.”
“Come on, Sweeney. It’s been a year since you got back from England. All you’ve done since then is work. You spend too much time by yourself.”
When she looked up at him, he glanced away, embarrassed. She could feel her face flush, her heart catch with hurt. But I’ve been successful, she wanted to cry out, her own shrill voice echoing in her head. I’ve seen the dividends of my emotional exile.
“Look, just sleep on it, okay? I know this stone is up your alley.” He kissed her good-bye and, reluctantly, Sweeney met his eyes. He was right, of course. The prospect of her planned holiday stretched out in front of her now, wan and depressing.
“Okay,” she said, still aware of that small, ugly pang of jealous discomfort. “I’ll think about it.”
SWEENEY WAS ONE OF those Scroogeish souls for whom bright store windows and the inevitable round of Christmas parties and gifts inspired only dread and a longing for the empty, short days of early January, when winter is finally left to get on with it in earnest.
There were good reasons for this. Like many people who dislike December, she had no warm family memories to associate with the holidays. Her father had committed suicide when she was thirteen. She had some vague memories from before the defining event; emotionally complicated, largely silent dinners at her father’s parents’ big house in Newport; her father’s last minute presents, flashlights or batteries from gas stations, wrapped in the ancient Christmas paper her grandmother had kept in a desk drawer in the study. After, she and her mother had gotten through the holidays rather than celebrated them and her Yule-tide associations ran to unclean motel rooms in second-rate resort cities or take-out turkey eaten at the table of whatever house or apartment they happened to be living in.
Another reason was her occupation. Spending her days amongst gravestones, skeletons and images of the dead, Sweeney could not imagine the tiny baby Jesus, tucked into the manger and wrapped in maternal adoration, without picturing the other Jesus, bleeding, dying in agony on the cross. Christmas seemed only a precursor of worse things to come.
But while she stewed inwardly, the rest of the world seemed intent on happiness. Passing through the department’s second floor warren of cubicles on the way to her own tiny closet of an office, Sweeney watched students leaving for vacation hugging each other and dropping off presents for professors and Mrs. Pitman, the motherly department secretary.
After returning a couple of phone calls and sending off a quick e-mail to a journal editor interested in her article on a family of Massachusetts stonecarvers, Sweeney took Toby’s photographs out again and laid them on her desk.
Then she took down from her bookshelf some volumes on New England stones, particularly from the late nineteenth century. Her office was so small that there was only room for her most essential texts, her desk and chair, and an extra seat for student conferences. She spread the books out on her desk and after an hour and a half of reading, she was convinced her first impression had been correct.
The stone was completely, weirdly anomalous.
But before she trekked all the way to Vermont, she wanted to make sure there wasn’t some kind of obvious explanation. There were all kinds of ways she could go about finding out, but the simplest option presented itself as she thought about her conversation with Toby. Why not call the descendant? What was her name? Something Kimball . . .
Sweeney looked over the notes she’d jotted down. Ruth. That was it. Ruth Kimball.