wonder she can’t keep track. Before she could go wandering down that interesting track, I said, “So Mrs. Barefoot was in your Sunday school class?”
“Yes, and it really hurt her when Sarah let Malcolm adopt Charlie and give him the Johnson name. She said Malcolm had Jeff’s wife and Jeff’s baby, and he was living the life Jeff was supposed to live.” Isabel heaved a great sigh. “And now he’s lost both of the kids.”
“Huh?”
“Well, that’s what it sounds like. I heard that him and Charlie don’t get along so good and Charlie changed his name back to Barefoot last spring. Whoops! There goes the dinger on my oven, honey. Now what was it you called about?”
CHAPTER 4
After hanging up from talking to Isabel, I let Bandit out of his crate and opened the back door so the little dog could go outside, then I cut through the living area, circled past our ceiling- high Christmas tree, and headed into the bedroom, where I changed out of my dark green wool suit with its sassy cropped jacket and formfitting slacks into jeans and a warm red Hurricanes sweatshirt.
The tree made me smile every time I looked at it.
Like every other farm family around, my brothers used to go out with Daddy and cut a bushy cedar from the few still left on the farm. By the time I came along, nicely shaped ones had dwindled into virtual extinction, so that Mother would send the boys to town to buy a fir or spruce grown on tree farms up in the mountains. Between bought trees and artificial ones, cedars have made a nice comeback along our hedgerows and back pastures, but Dwight likes to re-create the pines he cobbled together after his dad died when cedars were few and money was too tight to waste on buying a tree.
A freshly cut young pine is as scrawny and pitiful-looking as Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, but Dwight thickens it up with extra branches until it’s as full and bushy as any other.
Last year, the week had been crowded with parties and festive dinners to celebrate our wedding. Dwight’s ex-wife had allowed him to have Cal over the holidays for the first time since the divorce, and we had gladly dispensed with a honeymoon so that Dwight wouldn’t have to miss a moment of the visit. Watching his face while he watched Cal tear into his presents was worth any number of moonlight cruises.
Then Jonna died and Cal came to live with us. Some memories of her death are blessedly beginning to fade for him, but not the memory of last year’s celebration down here on the farm. He started bugging Dwight to go cut a tree right after Thanksgiving, the minute that twinkling lights first began appearing on rooftops and doorways and the warm glow of decorated trees radiated from windows through the winter darkness.
Dwight’s sister-in-law Kate keeps Cal after school during the week, and once their tree was up, the pressure was really on for ours. Rob’s an attorney with a large law firm in Cameron Village and he does not share his brother’s nostalgia for those pinch-penny times. The first Christmas after he and Kate were married, he bought an expensive fully wired artificial fir tree and they fastened all the ornaments on so securely that it takes less than a half hour to bring the tree in from one of the outbuildings, carefully remove its protective dustcloth, and plug it in.
Instant Christmas on the fifteenth of December.
No muss. No fuss.
“No real pine smell either,” Dwight mutters.
I switched on the tree lights, added water to the stand, and breathed in the woodsy fragrance. Kate burns pine-scented candles, but Dwight’s right. It’s not the same.
It’s like the difference between our fireplace and their remote-controlled gas logs, I thought, as I opened the damper, folded back the glass doors, and struck a match to paper and kindling. The bright flames danced up and caught the dry oak logs cut from last year’s windfalls around the farm.
I heard Bandit scratch at the door, but by the time I opened it, Dwight’s truck rolled up and the dog had changed his mind about coming in right then. Instead, he danced around the passenger side till Cal got out and petted him.
“Guess what?” Cal called to me, pulling a sheet of paper from a side pocket of his bookbag. “I only missed one on my spelling test!”
“Don’t tell me you messed up on ‘disease’?”
He laughed and shook his head. “No. ‘Despite.’ ”
He showed me his paper and I had to laugh, too. He usually does his homework over at Kate’s, but last night I had worked with him on his word list because he kept wanting to spell “disease” d-
I took his bookbag and he went to help his dad load the cart with an evening’s supply of logs.
Not that we were going to be here throwing logs on the fire all evening. Tonight was the last home game for the Carolina Hurricanes till after Christmas and we had tickets, which meant junk food at the RBC Center in Raleigh instead of a nutritionally sound supper.
Ice hockey is a relatively recent import in the South. I grew up on basketball and baseball, with an occasional high school football game thrown in whenever some of my brothers were playing. I had heard about hockey, but the televised games never grabbed me. I couldn’t relate to ice skating, and the puck zipped around the ice too quickly for me to follow, but winters were colder up in the foothills of the Virginia mountains and Cal loved the game. When he came to live with us last winter, I remembered that a former client worked for the Canes. Karen was able to come up with a pair of decent seats for the second half of the season and I thought that the drive back and forth to Raleigh would let Dwight help Cal get a handle on all the changes in his life.
Then came the night that Dwight was called out on a murder case just as they were about to walk out the door. Cal tried so hard not to show his disappointment that I said I’d take him if he would get me up to speed on the rules by the time we got to the game.
It was an amazing evening—the blaring horns and the eye-blinding lights that chased themselves around the rims of the upper levels whenever the Canes scored, the enthusiasm of the crowd, the sheer grace of the skaters,
