“Yeah, right.”
She shrugs. Her mother never wasted much time feeling guilty for being a working mom, and she tries not to, either.
She used to be a stay--at--home mom. Giving it up hasn’t always been easy, but she’s never questioned that it was the right decision for her family, or her marriage.
Mick was three when she resumed the teaching career she’d launched back when she and Jake were newlyweds. She could have waited to go back until the kids were older if they’d stayed in the New York City suburbs and Jake had stuck with the higher--paying advertising sales job that kept him away for weeks at a time. But that would have been tempting fate, because . . .
She doesn’t like to think back to those days. Things were so different. She and Jake were different -people then: different from each other; different from the way they are now.
He quit his job and they sold the house and moved back to their hometown. The cost of living is much lower in Mundy’s Landing than it had been in Westchester County, allowing Jake to take a lower--paying, less glamorous job as a sales rep in Albany. He was promoted within the first year, but they still couldn’t make ends meet on one salary. She had to work, too.
“Oh geez! Poor Goliath!” Mick waves the Christmas card at her.
“Antlers?” she guesses.
“Worse. An elf hat. A whole elf costume. Look at this!”
Rowan takes in the sight of a humiliated--looking German shepherd decked out in green felt and red pom--poms alongside her sister’s picture--perfect family. “Poor Goliath,” she agrees. “But everyone else looks great. I miss them. Maybe we should try to get together for Christmas.”
“Mom—-you said never again, remember?”
“That wasn’t me, that was Dad.”
“That was all of us, including you. It took us a whole day to get home in traffic last time we went to see Aunt Noreen for Christmas.”
“That was a freak blizzard. It doesn’t usually snow on Long Island over the holidays.”
“Well, it always snows here.”
Mick is right. In Mundy’s Landing, Currier and Ives Christmases are the norm. On the bank of the Hudson River, cradled by the Catskill Mountains to the west, the Berkshires to the east, and the Adirondacks to the north, the village sees more than its share of treacherous weather from October through May. But as the hardy locals like to say, “We know how to handle it.” Plows and salt trucks rumble into motion, shovels and windshield scrapers are kept close at hand, and it’s business as usual.
Rowan opens three drawers before she finds a pair of scissors to slit open the packing tape on the box.
It’s not from Amazon or Zappos or any number of places where she does most of her online shopping. There’s no return address, just her own, computer--printed on a plain white label—-yes, the kind overachievers like Noreen refuse to use for their Christmas cards.
Inside is a layer of crumpled newspaper.
Slightly yellowed newspaper, which strikes her as strange even before she sees what’s beneath it.
“What is it?” Mick asks, looking up from his pie.
“I . . . I have no idea.” She pulls out a flat black disk, turning it over in her hands.
“Who sent it?”
She shakes her head, clueless.
“I bet it’s from your Secret Santa.” Mick is beside her, rummaging through the box.
“That doesn’t start until next week, and we leave the gifts for each other at school. We don’t mail them.”
“There’s a bunch of those things in here,” he notes, counting.
Yes . . . a bunch of what? Charcoal? There’s a charred smell to the disks, whatever they are.
“There are twelve,” Mick tells her. “Thirteen altogether, with the one you’re holding. Unlucky number. Hey, this newspaper is pretty old. Cool, check it out. It’s the New York Times from fourteen years ago. I was only two.”
Fourteen years ago . . .
A memory slams into her.