Michael, Evan’s eight-year-old brother, hightailed it around the front of the truck and ducked down in the shelter of the wheel well, breathing heavy.
“How you doing, bud?” I asked, straightening as Evan released me.
Michael’s eyes were wide. “She just threw a snowball filled with dog poop at Auntie Jane.”
I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. It wasn’t funny. Really, it wasn’t.
“She called it a poopsicle,” Michael said.
Stacey made a choking sound from nearby.
I couldn’t look at her or I’d lose it.
“You are inso much trouble, young lady!” Jane yelled.
I heard stomping and chanced a look through the windshield of the truck to see her marching up the front walk. Willow, laughing uproariously, was slung over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. As I watched, she stretched out her small arms and started pinching her mother’s butt. Hard.
Jane yelped and almost dropped her. “Ow, stop that.”
They disappeared inside the house, and I finally looked over at Stacey. We doubled over laughing.
Between us and the boys, we got my truckful of presents safely unloaded. I said a brief hello to Grandma Jones, who was in the living room helping Jane calm Willow down. Charlie was laid out on the couch nearby, sleeping through our niece’s tantrum in a way that only combat vets and college students could.
My parents’ house was large, to accommodate for our sprawling family, the downstairs even more open than my cabin. I could see clear to the kitchen. Dad and Jacob, both doctors, both wearing sweaters over button-down shirts, both with thick-framed glasses perched on their noses, sat in the breakfast nook, deep in conversation. I couldn’t hear them, but from the looks on their faces, they were either talking politics or debating a recent article published in one of the medical journals they both subscribed to. I made a mental note to speak with them about brain injuries later.
Sofia, Jacob’s wife, was Italian. Every holiday season, she transformed from clinical psychologist into master-chef. She and Grandma Pritchard had taken command of the kitchen. The center island was dusted with flour, and the two women chatted and laughed together as they rolled out dough for pie shells and bread.
I was tempted to join them, but as I started to take my coat off, Jane gave me a look that froze me in my tracks. She clearly hadn’t forgotten the candy cane incident, and her death glare made it obvious that she hadn’t forgiven me for it either.
I zipped my coat back up and beat a hasty retreat outside, where Stacey, Evan, Michael, and I got down to the serious business of building snowmen. We kept at it until the sun started to slant in the sky and my aunt and uncle arrived, their car laden down with still more presents and baked goods.
Pat and Jim never had children, so they spoiled us as only doting relatives could. Both were now retired, Pat having been a lawyer, and Jim the owner of a small contracting firm. They did well during their careers. Our summers growing up were spent crawling over the ruins of ancient Greece, meandering up the Scottish coast, or, when we got older, hiking parts of the Pacific Trail alongside them. This summer vacation, they were taking Charlie and Anabel to Norway for two weeks. The lucky little brats.
Pat turned to me once we were all inside. “I meant to tell you the last time we talked that I saw one of your calendars in an article in Marie Clare.”
I paused for a second in the middle of taking off my jacket. “Do you remember what month they featured it in?”
“September. It was the calendar with the endangered species theme. They made a point to mention that a large portion of the proceeds go to the World Wildlife Fund.”
I shrugged out of my coat and hung it up, thinking back. This explained the early uptick in calendar sales. Every so often, I’d have a huge spike in online traffic for one line of products or another, and could spend weeks trying to track down where it came from, all to no avail.
“Thank you for telling me,” I said. “I’ll have to add it to the ‘featured in’ section of the website.”
“You’re welcome, sweetie,” Pat said, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek. Her hazel eyes crinkled at the corners when she pulled away.
For someone who never wanted children, she was one of the most maternal, caring women I’d ever met. It confounded many of the other women in my family for years, until it finally clicked that just because someone was good with children, it didn’t mean that they had to have some of their own.
Pat hadn’t wanted to sacrifice her career, or her love of travel, or her alone time, or her nightly glass of wine, and she never made any apologies for that. It was wonderful growing up with her as an aunt, because where so much of our society pushed women into motherhood and guilted and harassed those who lacked the desire to have children, here was this happy, successful, regret-free childless woman in my life to counter all of that gendered pressure and show me that I had options.
“Auntie Pat, did you see the decoration I made for the tree?” Evan asked her.
She crouched down to his level. “I didn’t, honey. Do you want to show me?”
Evan nodded, took her hand in his much smaller one, and led her away.
Ack. The cuteness was so strong with that child.
I looked away just in time to see Charlie roll over on the couch and blink his eyes open. He was growing his hair out, and it was shaggy enough that he had some serious bedhead going on. In the summer, his skin tanned to a deep brown, but now, in the dead of winter, it was several shades lighter. The bags under his eyes were an uncomplimentary puce. I’d never seen him with bags under his eyes,and the sight set off all of my protective older sister instincts. Our gazes met, and I weaved my way over to him.
