The Black Sheep’s Baby

“My,” said Lucy from her perch on the recliner, “don’t you look nice.”

Devon’s smile, as she murmured her thanks for the compliment, was wry. Her clothes-black silk pants and an ivory cashmere sweater-and hairstyle-a sleek and elegant twist-would have been entirely suitable for dinner in a hotel dining room, maybe a solitary nightcap in the lounge afterward. Here, in a farmhouse parlor in the middle of a snowy winter afternoon, she was well aware that she was ridiculously overdressed. Mike and Eric were both wearing nondescript jeans and sweatshirts, and Lucy looked decades younger than her age in matching green sweats with a Kliban Cat Santa on the front.

Well, so what? Devon thought. Too bad. After her marathon primp-session, she’d debated whether to put on something borrowed again. Considering the debacle she’d made of the day so far, she’d opted instead for the boost of confidence her own clothes might give her. So what if she looked like a city girl, and completely out of her element? That’s what she was, dammit.

“You must be starving. Help yourself to some cookies and cocoa.” Lucy casually pointed with her head to a tray on the coffee table. “We sort of missed lunch-got so busy decorating, I guess we all lost track of time-so we’re filling up on snacks to tide us over till dinnertime.” Her grin wasn’t even remotely repentant. “There’s some popcorn around here, too, someplace. Mike, where did you-oh, there it is.” Mike had reached behind him to retrieve a giant Tupperware bowl from the desktop. He handed it over to Lucy, who stretched to add it to the hospitable jumble on the coffee table. “Don’t be shy, dig in.”

What else could Devon do? Her own fault she’d missed out on breakfast, of course, but she was starving, and it had been a very long time since that piece of toast and cup of coffee in the dark early morning. One cookie wasn’t going to ruin her!

Seating herself on the edge of the couch, Devon picked up a napkin and selected a single cookie from the half- empty plate. The rich, spicy aroma made her lightheaded. She bit into the cookie and it was so delicious she actually closed her eyes. It was all she could do not to croon.

“Molasses Crinkles were always Eric’s favorite,” said Lucy with a pleased and reminiscent smile.

Mike chuckled. “Don’t even think about stopping at one.”

Devon had already taken another cookie. She envisioned her thighs blowing up like off-road tires.

“Have some cocoa,” Lucy urged. “It’s the old-fashioned, made-from-scratch kind, not instant.” She gave a contented sigh and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I think hot cocoa just goes with a snow day and a roaring fire.”

Devon felt the same way about white wine, preferably a nice Napa Valley chardonnay, but she didn’t say so. Probably not so much as a bottle of wine in this entire house, she thought, as, in complete surrender to the inevitable, she poured herself a cup of steaming cocoa from the thermal carafe on the tray.

She was taking a cautious sip when her eyes collided with Eric’s across the rim of the cup. She gulped instead, and felt a delicious warmth spreading all through her insides-similar in effect to a slug of good brandy.

Brandy…yes. That’s what his eyes are like. Brandy.

Had he been watching her all that time, she wondered, with his mocking smile and whiskey eyes? Her heart skipped and jumped beneath her ribs, but she defiantly refused to let herself look away. She blew gently on her cocoa and stared back at him through the fog of rising steam.

“Speaking of snow days,” Lucy announced to the room at large, “the noontime weather report says the storm is supposed to be over by tomorrow. Should be ending late tonight.”

“Thank God,” Devon muttered, tearing her gaze away from Eric’s with a determined shake of her head. He and his father went back to untangling the strings of lights and bickering about whether to begin installing them at the top of the tree or the bottom.

Mike contemplated the end of the string he was holding. “Doesn’t this white one have to go at the top? For the star?”

“Okay,” Eric countered in a disgusted tone, “if you do that, what’re you gonna do with the plug? It’s got to hang all the way down the back of the tree. Shoot, you’re gonna need an extension cord just to reach the socket.”

“You’re going to have an extension cord, no matter what.”

“Of course,” said Lucy, looking thoughtful, “there’s no telling how long it’ll take them to get all the roads plowed…”

“What about you, Devon?” Eric was watching her again, with that curious and unnerving intensity she’d seen in his eyes before. “How do you do it-bottom up, or top down?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said dismissively, veiling her eyes with her lashes as she sipped cocoa. “I don’t usually have a tree, since I’m generally at my parents’ house for Christmas.”

“No tree?” Lucy sounded horrified.

“Okay,” said Eric, “so how do they do it?”

“How should I know?” Devon snapped. Why did she feel as though she were in the witness box, being cross- examined by a hostile prosecutor?

“You were there, weren’t you? When you were a kid? Don’t you remember-”

“No,” said Devon, seething with inexplicable anger, “I don’t.” It was too warm in that room, stifling, rather than cozy. Under her cashmere sweater, her skin felt damp and itchy.

“What I think is,” said Mike, “we should get an artificial tree.” That was met with a loud duet of protests that effectively broke the tension. He put up both hands, laden with lights, as though to shield himself from a shower of thrown objects. “No-wait-hear me out. That way we’d only have to put the lights on once, see? Then we just leave them on when we take the tree down.”

But nobody was taking him seriously, not even Devon. It was as impossible for her to imagine a fake tree in that farmhouse parlor as it would have been to envision herself serving cookies and hot cocoa to guests in her Los Angeles apartment.

And just like that she felt a wave of homesickness for her own apartment, for the serenity of its uncluttered furniture and neutral colors…its cool, quiet elegance, and sweeping city-view.

“I remember,” Lucy said with an air of amazement, “when we still used real candles on the tree.”

“Come on, Ma.”

“No-it’s true. It was when I was a little girl-I’ll bet Rhett would remember. Earl might have been too small. We had these little metal candleholders that you clipped onto the ends of the branches. Then there were special little candles that fit into the holders.”

“Wasn’t that dangerous?” Devon asked, conscious of the century-old wood-frame house around her.

“They were only lit once,” Lucy explained. Her face was wistful, and her features blurred and softened with it so that she seemed almost to become that little girl she remembered. “That was Christmas Eve. They turned the lights out, Mama’d get her guitar, and everybody’d sing ‘Silent Night.’”

“Except you, I hope.” Leaving the light-stringing to his dad, Eric had moved close enough to his mother to give her an affectionate bump with his elbow. He threw Devon a grin and explained, “Mom can’t carry a tune to save her life.”

“Pop couldn’t, either,” Lucy ruefully confirmed. “Who do you think I got it from? And passed it on to Rose Ellen, poor thing. Thank goodness you got Mama’s voice, Eric-like Rhett and Earl. My brothers,” she explained for Devon’s benefit. “They used to sing with our mother-for church and weddings…community get-togethers, mostly.” She looked up at her son and gave him a light swat with the back of her hand. “And I did too sing. Nobody cares that you can’t carry a tune when you’re a child.”

“That’s true.” Eric sat on the arm of the couch and hitched himself half-around so he could reach for a handful of popcorn. “What about you, Devon?” He lifted an eyebrow, regarding her over one shoulder as his arm came within an eyelash of brushing hers. “You sing?”

Vaguely embarrassed by the question, she opened her mouth to answer it. And inexplicably couldn’t. She wanted to look away from him and found that she couldn’t do that either.

“That’s the kind of reaction you get from most adults when you ask that question,” Mike said kindly when Devon, at last, gave a helpless shrug. He paused to consider the arrangement of light strings on the tree. “I did a column about that once, years ago-it was after I’d gone to visit Ellie’s kindergarten classroom. Ask a bunch of five- year-olds if they can sing, and every hand goes up. Ask an adult and ninety percent will shrug and look embarrassed. It’s kind of too bad, really.”

Devon cleared her throat. “I never said I couldn’t sing.”