Shakespeare's Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page A

divorced twice by now.
    My mother came into the living room from the den. She was pale, but then she always is, like me. Varena likes to tan, and my father does inevitably; he’d rather be out working in the yard than almost anything.
    “Oh, sugar!” my mother said and folded me to her. My mother is shorter than me, bone-thin, and her hair is such a faded blond it’s almost white. Her eyes are blue like every member of our family’s, but their color seems to have faded in the past five or six years. She’s never had to wear glasses, her hearing is excellent, and she beat breast cancer ten years ago. She doesn’t wear clothes that are at all trendy or fashionable, but she never looks frumpy, either.
    The months, the years, seemed to dissolve. It felt like I’d seen them yesterday.
    “Where’s Dad?” I asked.
    “He’s gone down to the church to get another table,” Varena explained, trying not to smile too broadly. My mother suppressed the curve of her own lips.
    “Is he rolling in this wedding stuff?”
    “You know it,” Varena said. “He just loves it. He’s been waiting for this for years.”
    “This’ll be the wedding of the decade in Bartley,” I said.
    “Well,” Varena began, as we all started down the hall to my old room, “if Mrs. Kingery can get here, it may be.” Her voice sounded a little whiny, a bit flat, as though this worry or complaint were so longstanding she’d worn out the emotion behind it.
    “Dill’s mother may not come?” I asked, incredulous. “So, she’s really old and sick . . . or what?”
    My mother sighed. “We can’t quite decide what the problem is,” she explained. She stared off into the distance for a moment, as if the clue to Varena’s future mother-in-law’s behavior was written on the lawn outside the window.
    Varena had taken my hanging bag and opened the closet to hook the hangers over the rod. I put my suitcase on the triple dresser that had been my pride and joy at age sixteen. Varena looked back at me over her shoulder.
    “I think,” she said, “that maybe Mrs. Kingery was just so crazy about Dill’s first wife that she hates to see her replaced. You know, with Anna being their child, and all.”
    “Seems to me like she’d be glad that Anna’s going to have such a good stepmother,” I said, though in truth, I’d never thought what kind of stepmother Varena would make.
    “That would be the sensible attitude.” My mother sighed. “I just don’t know, and you can’t ask point-blank.”
    I could. But I knew they wouldn’t want me to.
    “She’ll have to come to the rehearsal, right?”
    My mother and sister looked anxiously at each other.
    “We think she will,” Varena said. “But Dill can’t seem to tell me what that woman will do.”
    Dill (Dillard) Kingery’s mother was still in Dill’s hometown, which I thought was Pine Bluff.
    “How long have you been dating Dill?” I asked.
    “Seven years,” Varena said, smiling brightly. This, too, was obviously a question that had been asked many times since Varena and Dill had announced their engagement.
    “Dill is older than you?”
    “Yeah, he’s even older than you,” my sister said.
    Some things never change.
    We heard my father’s yell from the front door. “One a you come help me with this damn thing?” he bellowed.
    I got there first.
    My father, who is stocky and short and bald as an eight ball, had hauled the long table out of the bed of his pickup to the front door and definitely needed help getting it up the steps.
    “Hey, pigeon,” he said, his smile radiant.
    I figured that would fade soon enough, so I hugged him while I could. Then I lifted the front of the table, which he’d propped against the iron railing that bordered the steps up to the front door.
    “You sure that’s not too heavy for you?” Dad fussed. He had always had the delusion that the attack I’d endured somehow had made me weak internally, that I was now frail in some invisible manner. The fact