One More for Christmas

Samantha could have sworn Gayle made a gulping sound.

“Mommy? Mommy?”

“This is my mommy, and that is my daddy.” Helpfully Tab gestured toward Michael, who hadn’t moved from the doorway. He appeared to have turned to stone. Unimpressed by the lack of engagement from the adults around her, Tab turned back to Gayle. “My name is Tabitha Melody Gray, and I’m four and three-quarters. And I don’t know your name or who you are.”

There was a taut, agonizing silence and then Gayle finally spoke.

“My name is Gayle. And I think,” she said faintly, “that I must be your grandmother.”

Ella

“All this time we’ve been together, and your mother didn’t

know?” Michael spoke in an undertone, but that didn’t conceal the steely note in his voice.

“Why did you say Scotland?” Samantha was pacing like a predator caged in a zoo.

“Mommy—” Tab tugged at her coat “—can I have this dollhouse for Christmas?”

They’d escaped from the cold into a toy store on Fifth Avenue, and Ella was fighting a temptation to crawl into the oversize dollhouse along with her daughter and never emerge. But there was no hiding from this. She needed to apologize to her sister and have the conversation with Michael. The conversation that was five years overdue.

But she didn’t need her daughter to hear any of it.

Maternal responsibility took over.

She gave Tab a bright smile. The ability to produce a smile when life was collapsing seemed to have been born along with the baby. “Is there a kitchen inside that house? Go and see if there’s a kitchen.”

Tab didn’t budge. “I don’t want a kitchen I want a library.”

“Then go and see if there’s a library.”

“I want you to come, too.”

“I’ll be there just as soon as I’ve talked to Daddy and Aunty Sam.”

“I want to talk to them, too.”

“But we’re talking about Christmas.” Ella gave her daughter a conspiratorial look and ushered her over to the dollhouse where Tab was immediately distracted by the delights of the miniature home.

Satisfied that her daughter’s attention was elsewhere, Ella turned back to her husband.

Michael was looking at her with confusion. ?

??She didn’t even know you were married?”

Ella rubbed a hand over her churning stomach. “The wedding was our day. Our special day. If she’d come, she would have ruined it, the way she has always ruined and diminished every choice I’ve made that wasn’t hers.”

It was up to her to help Michael understand, but how?

She couldn’t tell him that she’d been anxious Gayle would somehow have found a way to stop her wedding, the way she’d managed to use the weapon of disapproval to destroy so many of Ella’s passions in the past.

Why are you wasting your time knitting? Get a well-paying job and buy a sweater instead.

“But still, you let me think—” Michael rubbed his fingers across his forehead. “I thought she had chosen not to be in our lives. I thought she had refused to come to the wedding—I didn’t know you hadn’t invited her.”

“The last time I saw her she was relieved I finally had a job. She was afraid I was going to give it up, the way I’d given up other things.” Ella moved a little farther from the dollhouse and lowered her voice. “Do you have any idea how she would have reacted if I’d also told her I was pregnant and getting married?”

Michael straightened. “I would have taken responsibility.”