Chapter 10 - Next Christmas in the Sunlight
The wood stove in the Albemarle cottage was larger than the one in Lexington, built of dark soapstone that held the heat until three in the morning and released it with a faint, mineral sweetness that smelled like river rocks in August.
It was December twenty-fifth.
At twelve o’clock noon, there were no suitcases sitting on a dark porch in Virginia Beach. There were no police cruisers idling with their yellow hazard lights reflecting off wet gravel. There was no thirty-two-year-old man shouting into a cell phone at an Exxon station while his aunt complained about her sciatica.
In the small, bright kitchen of the cottage, the afternoon sunlight poured through twenty-four panes of restored 1840s cylinder glass, throwing long, golden rectangles across a heart-pine dining table that had never seen a piece of commercial letterhead in its life.
On the table was a six-pound pork loin roasted with winter apples, a bowl of buttered parsnips, and a loaf of brown soda bread Nora had baked that morning from a recipe she found in an old Virginia historical society pamphlet.
Julian Vance sat at the head of the table, his tweed jacket hung over the back of his chair, carving the pork with a silver-plated knife he had brought from his home in Church Hill. His wife, Clara, was pouring a dry cider into four heavy tumblers that didn't match.
Nora sat across from me.
She was wearing a faded denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her hair clipped back with an ordinary black plastic claw, her face clean of makeup and completely free of that tight, vigilant anxiety that used to make her check her reflection in every dark pane of glass.
Her phone was sitting on the sideboard six feet away. It had been there since Friday night, its screen dark and unbothered.
“Mara,” Julian said, laying two thick slices of pork on my plate, the roasted apples steaming in the clean air. “The Commonwealth’s Department of Historic Resources approved the final drawings for the Hanover courthouse yesterday afternoon. We break ground on the masonry stabilization the second week of March.”
“Under budget?” I asked, smiling over the rim of my cider glass.
“Three percent under,” Julian replied, his silver eyes crinkling at the corners. “Sarah Mercer informed me that the county board didn't even ask about the Mechanicsville matter. Apparently, the head of the board had an aunt who lived in Walnut Grove for forty years, and his only comment was: *‘I knew Evelyn Collins when she was on the garden committee. Mara is lucky she didn't burn the whole county down.’*”
Clara laughed, a warm, booming sound that filled the small stone room.
Nora reached across the table, took a slice of the brown soda bread, and passed the butter dish to me.
“I got an apartment,” she said softly.
I paused, setting my glass down. “Where?”
“In the Fan,” she said. “On Mulberry Street. Second floor of an old brick four-square. It has high ceilings, a tiny balcony with an iron railing, and the landlord doesn't allow trucks in the alley.”
A small, quiet smile touched the corners of her mouth.
“I signed the lease yesterday, Mara. With my own name. With my own security deposit. I didn't ask Caleb for a dime, and I didn't tell Mom where the street was.”
I looked at my sister.
For nine years, I had believed that my father’s death had left behind a debt that had to be serviced every December with my own blood, my own sanity, and eleven thousand dollars of luxury rentals that nobody enjoyed.
I had thought that being a daughter meant being a foundation: something buried in the mud, out of sight, crushed beneath the weight of everyone else’s comfort until you cracked along the grain.
The foundation was gone. The house had fallen down.
And the sky above us was completely, magnificently clear.
“To Mulberry Street,” I said, raising my cider glass into the golden rectangle of light that fell across the heart-pine.
Julian raised his glass. Clara raised hers.
Nora picked up her tumbler, her hand perfectly steady, and tapped the rim against mine with a clear, bell-like chime that hung in the warm room long after the wind had passed through the bare branches outside the glass.
May you like
“To Mulberry Street,” Nora said.
And for the first time in ten years, Christmas smelled of nothing but roasted apples, dry cedar, and the clean, sweet air of a life that belonged entirely to me.
