Christmas Mourning

“Maybe.” His eyes sparkled with mischief.

“What’ll you say when he asks what you want him to bring you?” I asked suspiciously.

“Mary Pat and me, we’re gonna ask him for cell phones.”

“Good luck with that,” Dwight told him. “He’ll bring you a cell phone about the same time he brings you a Lamborghini.”

“What’s a Lamborghini?” Cal asked.

“Something else you’re never gonna get,” Dwight said, tousling his hair.

He went back to the stove for a second helping of stew and Cal leaned in close to whisper, “So can we? Please?”

When he’d asked me earlier, I had said that we’d see, thinking it was really too early.

“Presents are for Christmas morning,” decreed the starchy conformist preacher who lives in the back of my head.

“But Dwight will enjoy playing with it more before Christmas than after,” argued the rule-breaking pragmatist who shares their housekeeping duties.

“Pleeeeze?” said Cal.

“Okay,” I relented. “After supper.”

By the time Dwight finished eating, Cal had carried his own plate and mine out to the dishwasher.

Dwight raised an eyebrow at so much unsolicited helpfulness. “What’s happening? We expecting company or something?”

“Not that I know of,” I said innocently.

“You finished, Dad?” Cal asked, reaching for his plate.

“Looks like I am whether I want to be or not,” he said with a puzzled smile.

There was a metallic clash from the kitchen as tableware hit the dishwasher basket, then Cal darted back past us and into the living room. “Come sit here, Dad,” he said, patting a place on the couch.

I cleared everything off the coffee table while Cal ran down the hall to retrieve the huge flat box he and I had stashed under his bed last weekend.

“Hey, what’s this?” Dwight said when the brightly wrapped gift with its big red bow was placed on the low table before him. “Santa Claus come already?”

“Yeah,” Cal said, nearly bursting with anticipation. “Open it! Open it!”

Happily for Cal and me, Dwight’s not one of those methodical types who has to untie every ribbon or undo every strip of tape. He found a loose edge and ripped the paper away with both hands. I’m sure that he was prepared to fake pleasure no matter what it was, but his prepared smile turned to genuine delight as the picture on the box registered. It’s not that Dwight had a deprived, poverty-stricken childhood by any means, but his father never made much money, and after his death, during the years that Miss Emily was finishing college and getting her master’s degree, her budget had been too tight to stretch to the train set he had yearned for.

How long he would have sat there just grinning at the box is something I’ll never know, because Cal was already trying to pull the lid off and show him all the wonders within. “The headlight really works, Dad, and the engine puffs smoke and we got extra tracks so it’ll go all the way around the tree. We could’ve gotten a passenger train, but we thought you’d like a freight train better. She and I went in on it together. Do you like it? Were you surprised?”

“I like it lots, buddy,” he said and swept the boy up in a huge bear hug.

Two minutes later, he and Cal were on the floor, fitting the tracks together to encircle the tree.

Several packages had accumulated beneath the drooping branches, but when I went to move them out of the way, Dwight grabbed a small flat one about the size of a paperback book that hadn’t been there earlier.

“No shaking till Christmas morning,” he warned me. “Especially not this one.”

He and Cal shared a conspiratorial grin.

“Hey, no fair!” I protested. “I let y’all shake mine.”

“Yeah, right,” said Cal, who last year had rattled every present with his or Dwight’s name on it till I thought he’d wear the bells and holly off the wrapping paper. “That’s ’cause you cheat and put in rocks and marbles and BBs.”

“All’s fair in love and Christmas presents,” I told him and went out to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and check to see if the laundry was dry yet.

There was a knock at the door and Haywood stuck his head in before I could answer it.

Haywood’s one of the “big twins” from Daddy’s first marriage, and even though they’re not identical, he and Herman are both tall and wide. (The younger set, Zach and Adam, are identical and are referred to as the “little twins” even though they’re both a full inch taller.) Haywood’s never been one to stand on ceremony and I’d have to lock the doors to keep him from walking in on us as the mood takes him.

“Hey, shug. Y’all busy?” Without waiting for an answer, he set his porkpie hat on the counter and handed me a well-wrapped package that must have weighed three or four pounds. “Aunt Zell sent y’all a fruitcake. Um, boy, that coffee sure smells fitten to drink!” He unzipped his heavy jacket. “Bet a slice of this cake would go real good with it.”

I laughed. “So how many slices of Aunt Zell’s cakes have you already had today?”

He grinned. “Not a crumb today.” The grin grew sheepish. “ ’Course now, I got to say that the two slices I had