The enormous Christmas tree in the middle of the foyer reached almost to the ceiling, and C.J. had not been happy about having to cut off part of the trunk so Cecelia could put the gold star at the top. It had been a first Christmas gift from her parents two months after her wedding to C.J., which was most likely the reason for her insistence that it be put on the top of the tree, much as it was the cause for his reluctance.
Deck the halls with boughs of holly . . . Christmas music sang out from the large stereo console in the parlor as Edith touched one of the beautiful gold and red glass ornaments, the surface reflecting the large colored bulbs that wound through all of the branches—another sore spot for C.J. He would have been happy with a single strand, but had been outvoted by his wife and mother. He’d laughed when Cecelia said that, but there had been a look in his eyes that made Edith worry, an expression that made him appear too much like his father.
Cal began to cry in his room, screaming like he always did when he awakened. Edith paused to see whether Cecilia would go get him. She and C.J. were in their bedroom—the one that had once been Edith’s before her son’s marriage and his request to have the larger room for himself and his new bride.
Edith had heard arguing behind the closed door a little while before, which was the reason she’d put the Christmas music eight-track on the stereo, hoping to shut out their voices. She’d still been able to hear them, making her wonder whether the old house had absorbed the sound of arguing through generations, playing the same sound track over and over. She still held out hope that Cecelia would be different, that her daughter-in-law would be the one to break the pattern. But since Cal’s birth nearly four years earlier, Edith had found herself clinging to that hope as precariously as a sand castle clung to shore.
“Mama!” Cal screamed.
The bedroom door remained shut, so Edith began climbing the steps slowly, hoping her son or daughter-in-law would hear their son before she reached him. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to be with Cal. She loved her grandson. From the first moment she’d held him and seen his mother’s amber-colored eyes, she’d harbored the belief that he was his mother’s son. But lately she’d begun to see chinks in her firm beliefs, and the more time she spent with Cal, the more evidence to the contrary she discovered.
She waited outside the little boy’s room, listening to the rhythmic thumping against the wall and the squeak of the bedsprings before gently opening the door. He stopped when he spotted her, then sat in the middle of his toddler bed, his eyes puffy from sleep, a plastic yellow and blue shape-sorter ball at the foot of the bed. Several yellow plastic shapes were scattered on the floor, far enough from the bed that they’d most likely been thrown.
He looked at her with disconsolate eyes as she approached and sat on the side of the bed. She ran her hand through his fine, sandy-colored hair, sticky with sleep sweat. He was big for his age, just like C.J. had been, with thick, broad shoulders and heavy legs. C.J. liked to say he was born a USC linebacker, but Edith hadn’t had the heart to tell him that a parent’s dream for his child rarely came to fruition just from wishing.
She leaned down and kissed his forehead, and he sighed as if giving up his effort to fight whatever battle he seemed to have been waging since birth.
“Did you have a good nap, sweetheart?”
He threw himself down on the bed, kicking the plastic ball hard with his foot. “I don’t like that.”
Edith retrieved the toy and examined it. It was a baby toy, one that Cal hadn’t allowed her to pack away with all of the other infant and toddler toys when they took down the crib and brought in his new big-boy bed. Two incorrect shapes had been forced into the wrong holes and were stuck. She tugged on each one in turn, but neither would budge. She reached for one of the shapes on the floor and lifted it to show Cal. “This is a triangle—see? It’s got three sides.” She held up the toy. “Then you find the opening that is also a triangle, and it fits right in.” She gave the shape to the little boy, careful to make sure that it was correctly positioned.
“I want it to go there,” he said, pointing to a rectangular opening near the top. “It’s yellow.”
She’d already opened her mouth to correct him, then stopped. The top half of the ball was yellow. And to Cal it made sense that all the yellow pieces should go through the yellow holes regardless of whether they’d fit.
“I see,” she said, putting the toy aside. Since he was an infant, he’d had a clear view of the world and the way it should work. If his bottle was too warm or not warm enough, he wouldn’t drink it. If his shoelaces were uneven, he’d throw a fit until the shoes were removed and retied. If you told him you would take him for a walk after his nap and you forgot, he’d remind you and make you go even if it was pouring rain outside.