Christmas, Present Read Online Free PDF

towel-drying her hair, the same nurse reappeared with an embroidered bed jacket, evergreens and snowmen.
    “Did this belong to a person who died?” Laura asked kindly. “Not that I would mind.”
    “No, it was a gift for one of the nurses,” the young woman told Laura. “She wants you to have it. She’s

    having bunion surgery and will have to spend a month in bed. We all chipped in. But she would rather you have it.”
    “Well, no, I shouldn’t take it. But, okay, please thank her,” Laura said. “It sure is pretty. My daughters will like me to be pretty.”
    “We . . . don’t . . . we’re so sorry,” said the young nurse, who looked no older than Ellliott’s sister, Sarah, perhaps twenty-five.
    “I know. It’s terrible. And at Christmas, too. I feel bad for you.”
    “We’ll try to help in every way, Missus . . .” “Laura.”
    “Laura, okay, do you need anything?”
    “Ummm, I’d love a cup of coffee. I have to think,” Laura said, more to give the nurse a mission than from any desire. Coffee, she thought. If there is life after death, I will miss coffee. And Italian lemonade. My signature, so practiced on my college spiral notebooks, Laura MacDermott Banner. Also, ironing. Laura loved the plain usefulness, the simple gratification of making a wrinkled thing fresh and crisp. I will miss swimming

    in the cold Atlantic. Asparagus. Rory’s hair when she comes out sweating after her workout. Auburn spikes, like a punk rocker.
    Rory was tough as nails.
    At eight, Rory was almost finished, but still young enough to heal without a grudge against the world.
    Annie, well, Annie would be angry, for ever so long. At thirteen, she had the duty to be angry no matter what, even if events offered her no insult. She would need serious help. She would give Elliott a hard ride, particularly if he ever remarried. Little Amelia. Amelia, born of Elliott’s grief at the prospect of losing his mother, Amy, a woman more dear to Laura than her own mother—the real Grandma, who came to stay for weekends and shooed them out to dinner and movies, who cleaned the blinds and made Laura take naps while she was nursing the new baby—Amelia was not yet three.
    She would fare best of all. Particularly if Ell remar-
    ried.
    Laura had no memory of her own father.
    Laura looked at the telephone. The doctor, so hand-

    some and dear, like an archangel, had told her to call anyone she wanted, anywhere, on the house. She would call her sisters soon, before Elliott returned. She pictured him puzzling over cards, searching racks for the right thing, frazzled and distracted, raking at his dark hair.
    Should she call the boy who framed the pictures of the girls Laura saved from their plays and sporting events, taking lavish care, with innovative mattes and artful woods? Who had once asked Laura to come to see his own pictures, to meet him at his loft in darkest Lynn, not far from Ell’s warehouse? And she had gone, and he had sketched her, lying on his red futon after she had allowed him to undress her and fondle her to an aching crisis, but not to penetrate her, giving as the excuse their lack of protection. How he had told her he loved her, how he had adored her skin, calling it bisque, old-worldly, as if never touched by sun. And Laura had thanked him, in turn, for his worshipful gentleness, kissed his hands and his chest with its sin- gle tendril of gold hair. She had accepted this after- noon as a gift for a woman just turned forty, newly spayed, just like their dog, Athena, in and out, one

    bright afternoon, a Band-Aid on her tummy the only testimony to her lapsed wish for the three more chil- dren they never would be able to afford. At closed con- fession the following week, knowing by his voice the priest was the youngest of the three, she described her immeasurable lust, which had not dissipated. And she remembered his mild voice, no surprise in it, telling her that they were human and therefore liable to sin, giving her no