A Carol Christmas (2 page)

If Beryl the Brit didn’t start acting like some character in a movie and taking all the credit for it. Did I mention that a lot of the big advertising planners are British?

Well, long live the Queen and all that. I have nothing against imports. It’s just the ones who look like Fergie and think like the Antichrist who give me problems. Okay, Beryl wasn’t quite that bad. Just almost. Untrustworthy was probably her middle name.

I tried not to think about Beryl’s untrustworthiness when I called my mom back. Maybe I could hide the ad copy. And if I got back before the art proofs came in …

“I can come, but I have to be home by New Year’s Eve,” I insisted. “How much will it cost to change . . . ?” I gave up trying to complete the sentence since Mom was already talking over me. I think she stopped listening after the first three words.

“This is wonderful! Everyone’s going to be so excited you’re coming home. I can hardly wait to see you, sweetie. Bye.”

When I got the e-ticket, I learned I was expected to come home a whole week before Christmas. And the return departure date said January 2. Of course, I would change it.

My flight touched down at 8:17 on the nineteenth. By 8:30 I was past security and found Mom, Aunt Chloe, and Keira waiting for me. Mom was holding a
Welcome Home Andie
sign like I was a returning soldier, and they were all jumping up and down, waving and calling my name, making me look like a celebrity and themselves look like idiots. Not that it bothered my family what they looked like. It never had.

Keira was tres chic in her faux fur coat and black boots, her blonde hair pulled back into a long, fat ponytail.

My hair was just as blond, but short these days, which would make it easy to tell us apart. That and the fact that Keira was still anorexically skinny. I am not fat, but every time I get around my little sister I feel like Miss Piggy.

Next to Keira stood my Aunt Chloe, all decked out to pose for a tacky greeting card, in black stretch pants (stretched to the breaking point) under a huge, red sweatshirt sporting Tweety Bird in a Santa hat. She had topped her boot-black hair with a hat to match Tweety’s. Oh, yes. Put Aunt Chloe on the cover of a Christmas card and title it
Want to Trade Relatives This Christmas?
or
Who Says Christmas Cookies Make You Fat? Look at Me
. Hard to believe this woman had gone through two husbands. One died, the other she divorced. Both left her financially well off enough to spend the rest of her life in artistic pursuits and torturing her relatives with the by-products. Everyone in the family had at least one lopsided vase from her pottery phase. And poor Grandma had to hang Aunt Chloe’s still life of thawing hamburger on her dining room wall. Mom claims she lost the watercolor Aunt Chloe did of the back yard. I know for a fact she burned it.

Good old Mom. She looked normal—light brown hair cut in a hot new style, slender in jeans, a white tailored shirt, and a cute pink satin jacket. But I knew the moment she turned around I would see some hideous slogan on the back of that jacket, something in truly bad taste.

How did I know this? Because Mom had become a firm believer in self-promotion, and she had a new business to promote: Man Haters, Inc. If you wanted a mug, jacket, tacky wall hanging or T-shirt with some insulting epitaph regarding the male of the species, Mom had it.

Since I hadn’t wanted to come home, I was surprised by the wave of emotion that washed over me at the sight of my family as I rushed to hug them.
My family. The people I care about, the people who made up the fabric of my life growing up, the people who helped make me who I am today . . . which is nothing like them
, I hastily added to myself.

And under all that emotion, something else was stirring: curiosity. What was on the back of Mom’s jacket? And if it was really bad, was there a way I could pretend I didn’t know her, just ’til we got to the car?

“Oh, you look great,” Mom gushed. “Like a real New Yorker, all dressed in black.” She gave me a mother-smother kind of hug, nearly suffocating me. She was still wearing her favorite perfume that gave off poisonous vanilla-skunk fumes. Maybe that perfume was another reason why Dad left, I thought.

Aunt Chloe regarded me with concern. “You’ve lost weight.”

As a size twelve, I was hardly in danger of getting rushed to the hospital and given an IV drip full of vitamins.

“No, she hasn’t,” said Keira, not in the least worried about my starving to death. She hooked her arm through mine and started towing me toward the baggage claim, leaving Mom and Aunt Chloe to follow.

“What’s on the back of Mom’s jacket?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know. Ben said sorry he couldn’t come to meet you. He had band practice, then he had to hang the Christmas lights for Mom.”

Ah, yes. My older brother the musician. By day he could be found at Carol Music, selling bass guitars to rising rock stars. By night he became a star himself, cranking out hot riffs on his guitar. Weekends, he played all over the county with his band, Fish Without Legs. There probably wasn’t a church kid within a fifty-mile radius who didn’t have one of the band’s autographed CDs. The band even had a manager now, which, I guess, finally made them legit for all the adults in the family. What had started out as Ben’s folly was now the pride of the Hartwells, and everyone was planning to attend their big concert with two other hot local bands, The Red Sea Pedestrians and Heaven Help Us, at the old Roxy theater.

Now Keira was flashing her left hand in front of my face. “So, is that gorgeous or what?”

I thought the rock on her finger was obscenely huge. I mean, it was so big most people would think it was cubic zirconia.

“Wow,” I managed. “That must have set old Spencer back a few pennies.”

“He can afford it, believe me.” Keira hugged my arm fiercely. “He’s such a great guy. I can hardly wait for you to meet him. He’s coming with us to Ben’s concert tomorrow night. Oh, and tomorrow I want you to go house hunting with me.”

“House hunting. You’re not getting married until June. Why are you house hunting now?”

“Spencer thinks we should buy now, before interest rates go up. Anyway, it takes time to find a house.”

In Carol? Who was she kidding?

"And you have to allow time for the deal to close." Speaking of closing deals, Keira had sure gotten a ring out of Spencer in a hurry. He went from being her gynecologist to her fiancé in just six months. Marrying your gynecologist. Why did that kind of creep me out?

“So, you’ll look at houses with me tomorrow?” Keira pressed.

“Doesn’t Spencer want to do that?”

“Oh, I’ll send him pics, then bring him back later to see anything I really like.”

“Okay then. Why not?” I enjoyed poking around houses, pretending I was rich and could actually afford one. And I
had
come home to see my family.

We were at the baggage claim now, and Mom was turning around to look for my battered Samsonite with the pink ribbon, the ribbon that would match the jacket Mom was wearing with
THE NEW MATH: WOMAN
-
MAN = NO PROBLEMS
blazing across the back.

“Is that the only jacket she had to wear?” I moaned.

“It’s good business,” Keira said. She nudged me and nodded at the woman who had just tapped Mom on the shoulder. Now Mom was hauling a business card from her jacket pocket and giving it to the woman. “There. See?”

“And Spencer knows what kind of a family he’s marrying into?” I asked.

Keira shrugged. “He knows it’s just business, nothing personal. Well, at least not toward him.”

“Heaven help him if he does anything to make Mom mad. She could put his face on a T-shirt with bull’s-eye rings drawn around it like she did with Dad,” I said.

Keira waved that possibility away with a careless flick of her hand. “No, she wouldn’t. She knows Spencer would sue her. Oh, look. There’s your suitcase.”

The ride home was quite chatty as everyone filled me in on the plans for my visit. There was, of course, Ben’s concert. And the whole family was planning on attending the Christmas Eve service at New Life Church. This, I learned,
was because Ben was going to be singing a solo. And if Ben was singing, Mom said, we were going to be there to support him.

My whole family in church, that would be a new experience. I hoped the members were ready for an entire Hartwell invasion. I wasn’t sure I was.

Mom had other plans too. She and Aunt Chloe wanted to take me shopping and show me how well the latest Man Haters item was selling. And Grandma was expecting us for lunch later in the week.

“She wanted to come meet you, but she wasn’t feeling good,” Mom explained, still playing the ailing grandmother card.

Lunch at Gram’s. I couldn’t bring myself to think about it.

Aunt Chloe was doing portraits now, and wanted to take some pictures of me so she could start painting mine immediately.

“That way I can have your portrait done in time for Christmas,” she promised.

I didn’t know you could do a painting in just a couple of days. Aunt Chloe must have really made progress as an artist.

Now Mom was staking a claim on my first morning home. She wanted advertising advice. It seemed to me she was already doing too good of a job promoting her business.

I said, “Sure,” trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible.

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” Mom accused.

“No, I am,” I said, trying to pump more energy into my voice.

“You have to give her some time to get used to the idea of your business,” Aunt Chloe said.

“Why?” Mom asked.

“Because it’s slightly tacky,” said Keira the Bold. “I mean, you’re building a business on insulting half the human race.”

“So? That leaves the whole other half to buy my products,” Mom reasoned.

“Mom. Not everyone hates men,” Keira said. “In fact, it’s out of style to hate men. Everyone I know is obsessed with finding a good one.”

“Which proves how few there are,” Mom crowed, making Keira roll her eyes. “Mark my words, girls,” Mom continued, “Man Haters, Inc. is going to make all our fortunes.”

“I don’t need a fortune,” Keira said. “I’ve got Spencer. And Andie’s going to be a rich ad exec.”

“Well,
I’ll
take the money,” said Aunt Chloe. “I’m just a starving artist.”

That statement was questionable on two counts, but Keira and I kept our mouths shut.

Downtown Carol was dressed for the holidays. Red bows ringed the old-fashioned lamp posts, and every storefront window was festooned with swags of greenery entwined with those old-fashioned, fat red Christmas lights. All we needed was some snow. Although the chances of that were rare. We got plenty of rain in Carol during the winter, but the temperatures rarely dipped low enough to turn it into snow.

We moved on and headed for the outskirts where the housing developments lay. All two of them. The newer development consisted of bigger and better houses for bigger and better people. Our development, Pleasant View (which didn’t have a view of anything, but oh well), was a mishmash of houses built in the sixties and seventies. Our house was a typical tract rambler, complete with double car garage, one half of which my parents converted to a family room when we were kids. The house sat on a large corner lot, where First and Noel met. Besides the address, the house lent itself well to the holidays, with a huge holly tree in the front yard (great for Christmas, but a prickly pain to get a lawn mower around) and a low roof, perfect for stringing colored lights. At Christmas it always looked cheery and welcoming. Well, except that one Christmas I came home and found Dad moving out. No one had bothered to put up lights that year.

No lights again this year, I noticed as we drove into the driveway. And, “Where’s the holly tree?”

“I had it cut down,” Mom said. “I always hated it. I swear, I’m going to strangle your brother with that string of Christmas lights,” she added. “He promised he’d come home from band practice in time to get them up for your homecoming.”

“He probably lost track of time,” I said in Ben’s defense.

“He does that a lot,” Mom said, “especially when it involves coming over and helping me with something. Men,” she added in disgust.

Oh, dear. Maybe Ben would be the next one to end up on a T-shirt with those bull’s-eye circles.

“Well, his truck’s here,” said Keira.

I looked at the dilapidated old Toyota parked by the curb. It looked like a wind-up toy that had been played with one too many times. My brother, the successful musician.

Mom aimed the garage door opener and the door lumbered up to reveal a tall, hunky guy with light brown hair standing in the garage, shielding his eyes from the glare of the headlights. At his feet sat a big box with a snakelike tangle of lights overflowing it.

“Well, I guess I’ll have to let him live another day,” Mom decided as we got out of the car.

Ben picked up the box and came ambling over to kiss Mom on the cheek. He smiled across the car roof at me. “Hey, Bruno. Welcome home.”

Here was another reason not to come home—brothers who refused to abandon insulting childhood nicknames.

“That’s Andie to you, Christmas turkey,” I told him.

He just chuckled. Typical guy, I thought, clueless and irritating.

Then I realized I was sounding like Mom. I was going to get that departure date changed first thing in the morning.

Ben moved on with the lights, calling over his shoulder, “Save some eggnog for me.”

At least the inside of the house looked unchanged. Nostalgia settled over me like a warm blanket as I took in the living room. There was the same burnt-orange couch splattered with flowers that looked like they’d been watered with steroids—and the matching chair. There was the Early American rocking chair, and the coffee table Mom had been threatening to refinish since I was twelve. Beyond the living room, I could see the dining room with its Early American dining table and china hutch. Mom had even put out the old Nativity set on the buffet. It had a cow with a broken horn and only one wise man, who was headless, and the baby Jesus was missing. Leave it to my family to have a Nativity set like that, and display it.