“I was busy this morning,” Cady said, keeping it vague so she wouldn’t worry her family.
“With what? Never mind. I brought you a coat too,” she said, opening the bag to reveal a pea coat with wood toggles in a woodland green that would complement Cady’s hair and eyes. “We’ll figure something out with your hair.”
Cady examined the lining, the carefully stitched label. Emily had obviously spent hours designing, cutting, and sewing the coat. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” Cady said. “Something came up and I was on the phone with Chris. We’ll get the pictures, even with my crazy hair. Can I put it on now?”
“Sure,” Emily said. She shoved the bag on the floorboard at her feet. “Whatever.”
*
Despite the distraction of the sloppy roads and Cady changing her coat in the backseat, Conn got them to church with ten minutes to spare. Emily reverted to flailing teenage girl and dashed off with her friends to choir rehearsal while Cady and her mother snagged a cup of tea from the coffee bar in the gathering space and caught up with old friends. Conn stood quiet and still just off her left shoulder, fading into the background.
“Any chance you’d sing with us?” the choir director asked. “The jazz band would love to have you for a song or two.”
“I’m supposed to be resting,” she said, not wanting to upstage Emily. “But I’ll be in the choirs on Christmas Eve.” Anyone who wanted to sing on Christmas Eve could sing, a tradition that swelled the choir to three times its normal size. After they filed into the sanctuary, Cady closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, and let herself be just part of the crowd again.
The youth choir sang twice, and on the second hymn, Emily had a solo. Her voice was clear and light, filling the room with a pure soprano beauty. Cady smiled at her and gave her a thumbs-up as she returned to her seat with the choir. Emily grinned back, then rolled her eyes as she caught a heel on a cord running from the jazz band’s amplifier.
Sometimes her sister was her normal, goofy self—tall and gangly and awkward and a teenage girl—and sometimes she was distant, aloof, almost angry. For now, normal and goofy had control.
“Where to?” Conn asked when they were all back in the car.
“Jiro Sushi,” Cady said.
Conn’s brows drew down. “I thought we were getting brunch.”
“We are getting brunch. Sushi brunch.”
“Which location?”
“SoMa is better. The location out west smells like tannin and dyes,” Emily said, thumbing away at her phone.
“That’s because the leather shop is next door. SoMa is in the opposite direction from the Christmas tree farm and will be more crowded,” Cady said, mindful of the conversation she had to have with Conn, Chris, Hawthorn, and who knew who else after they bought the tree and got it home.
When they reached the restaurant, the hostess led them to a booth. Emily slid into one side. “I want to sit next to Cady,” she said.
Her mother paused in the act of lowering her bottom to the vinyl seat. “All right,” she said.
Cady shot Conn an apologetic look, but he was wearing that expressionless mask Cady privately called his cop face. He held out his hand to indicate her mother should precede him into the booth, then sat across from Cady. Emily brought up Instagram and started scrolling through posts in her feed, enlarging to examine detail, all the while giving a running commentary on what she saw. Cady looked over her shoulder and made appropriate noises, while eavesdropping on her mother’s attempts to start a conversation with Conn.
“That one’s kind of a disaster,” Emily said, pausing to tap and enlarge.
“Are you from Lancaster, Conn?”
Cady looked at the outfit. “Kind of a disaster” was an understatement, as the outfit involved a felt hat with a floppy brim, a cropped white T-shirt, and a pair of shorts in an unfortunate purple calico. “Yeah,” she agreed.
“Yes, ma’am. Born and raised.”
“No … no … no … oh, that’s nice,” Emily said, scrolling faster than Cady could keep up.
“Slow down,” she said while her mother extracted the list of schools Conn attended. “That teal thing caught my eye.”
“You must have family in town,” her mother said.
A pause. Cady glanced up from Emily’s phone screen.
“Not really, ma’am.”
“Where will you spend the holidays?” Emily asked.
“With friends,” Conn answered.
The waitress showed up with glasses of water, then paused, pen poised expectantly over her pad. “The usual?”
“Please,” Cady said, then added for Conn’s benefit, “We always get the same thing. What do you like?”
“A California roll and a tempura roll,” Conn said.
Everyone handed over their menus. “Mom, Conn’s best friends with Shane McCool.”
“Cady, look at this,” Emily said.
Her mother lit up. “You know the McCools? Shane’s a wonderful mechanic.”
“We went to school together,” Conn said.