Chapter 24: Next Christmas

On Christmas Eve, the nursery was yellow again.

My mother had painted it in November, with Joy on her hip and Nate holding the ladder.

The crib stood where it used to.

The moon lamp stood on the dresser, and a new box of hats sat beside it, bigger sizes, because the old ones didn't fit.

Joy was almost a year old.

She was standing in her crib in a red velvet dress with both fists on the rail.

She was shouting a word that sounded like "Dah."

"Nate!" I called down the stairs. "She said it again."

"She said it to the lamp!"

"She said it to you, and the lamp was behind you."

I heard him laugh, and then his boots on the stairs.

He came in with flour on his sleeve.

He took her out of the crib, and she grabbed his nose.

"Ow," he said happily.

I had moved back into the house in June.

I didn't announce it.

On the day the judge closed the file, I took the ring out of his coat pocket.

He had carried it there for four months.

I put it on my own finger in the courthouse parking lot.

He'd stood there, staring at my hand.

"I didn't ask," he said.

"I know," I said. "That's how you can tell I meant it."

The petition was in a drawer now, torn in half.

Downstairs, the dining table had been pulled out and leafed to its full length.

It held plates for everyone.

I looked at them from the doorway.

Lorna and her husband, and my mother, who had brought three pies and wouldn't say what was in the third.

Peggy had the back bedroom now and a seat at the head of the table.

She'd made Nate promise that the sale of her house would be the last thing anyone apologized for.

Nate's old foreman and his wife had come with their son, who was nine.

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