For Toby—the old Toby—it was always easy. Geodes and crystals. Books about birds and insects and planets. For Cam, there had been a year when Eleanor tracked down an African drum, and another year when, broke as they were that season, she got him an antique pocket watch.
That was the year Cam gave her the wooden hat. From a distance, it looked like a regular cowboy hat, but when you got close you realized it was made from a single maple burl, though he had worked the wood so finely, with such care, that it was very thin and amazingly light. Cam had never been one for big romantic gestures, but he’d burned an inscription into the inside of the hat.My cowgirl.
In the years since the divorce, they’d alternated holidays, but this particular time—even though it was Eleanor’s year, but knowing they would want to share the holiday with Elijah—she’d let the children stay with Coco and Cam.
Their Christmases hadn’t always ended up so magical, of course. Not just thebûche de Noëlyear, but others, Eleanor spent so much time—also thought, also money—trying to make everything perfect that by the time the actual day came, she was exhausted. More than once, she had gone to Crazyland then. After it was over, and they’d taken the tree down, a terrible sadness came over her. It was about that vast space she never seemed able to breach, between the dream of a happy family Christmas and the reality of what happened when she tried to pull one off.
Then came the divorce, the every-other-year holiday meals that left her with the perpetual sense of coming up short. It wasn’t justCam’s absence they felt now, though that was enough. As difficult as the visits had been with his parents, now that they no longer came for Christmas, Eleanor missed them. More accurately, she missed the feeling of being part of a big family, or even a medium-size one, with all kinds of personalities (even the irritating ones) gathered around the table, reminiscing about long-ago holidays—overcooked turkeys, ugly holiday sweaters. At other people’s houses—the houses of the people with big families—there would be presents wrapped in ten different kinds of paper, three kinds of pies, charades and caroling by the fire, ending the evening with popcorn and a video ofIt’s a Wonderful Life. Eleanor knew, from Darla, that just having a big family was no guarantee of a happy holiday. Still, she couldn’t let go of the feeling that she was letting her children down for her inability to provide for them a family like the ones in the greeting cards she was so good at creating.
At the Brookline condo, Eleanor tried, once, inviting other people over to join her and the children—a ragtag bunch of casual acquaintances who didn’t have another place to go—but the evening had felt a little sad, with everyone making uneasy small talk and exchanging candles and soap. Partway through the meal that year—whose guest list had included a teacher from Toby’s school, on a one-year visa from the Czech Republic, and a neighbor from their condominium development, and a woman she’d met in line at the DMV, Ursula got up to call her father. He must have put Elijah on the phone, because then the three children all gathered around, laughing and saying the kinds of things a person says to a thirteen-month-old.
“I wish we could see our baby brother,” Ursula said when she returned to the table. The woman from the DMV line had asked Ursula if she had any hobbies. The teacher from Toby’s school, who’d drunk a surprising amount of punch, knocked over the gravy onto Eleanor’s lace tablecloth. The condo neighbor was telling them his theory that the world would be coming to an end at midnight, December 31, 1999.
After that, Eleanor decided not to try making Christmas at her house anymore. Even on the years when she was legally allowedto have the children with her, she let them go to Cam and Coco’s. That’s where they wanted to be.
The year the children moved back to the farm with their father, Patty invited Eleanor to come to New York City for a holiday dinner at her apartment in SoHo with her new husband and their baby. (Philippe was long gone. This was Greg, a stock trader.)
Patty’s father had died the previous summer, but her mother, Alice, would be there. “Mom still asks about you all the time,” Patty said. “And we might even rate a visit from my brother, the congressman, though between the twins and everything going on in Washington, he’s spread pretty thin.”
Matt Hallinan had been getting a lot of press lately, Eleanor knew. She’d seen an article that spoke of him as “a rising star in the new Republican Party.”
Eleanor wrote back to thank her old friend for the invitation. But she’d have to pass.
74.
The Three Amigos
Back in October, she’d bought a copy of an alternative newspaper published in Vermont with personal ads on the back page, accompanied by a 900 number you could call to leave a message if someone whose ad you read seemed interesting. (Or maybe, simply, if nothing in the ad contained any immediate deal breakers. The bar was low.)
There were no photographs attached in these ads, and most of the time they contained only basic information. People who ran them paid by the word, which kept most of them short, though now and then she’d come upon a very long ad that must have cost its author a lot of money. All Eleanor could learn from virtually every ad she read was that the man who’d placed it was easygoing, considerate, romantic, and liked to play golf.
Sometime in early December, she had seen one that looked different from the others.
Russell looked to be a few years older than Eleanor—early forties, probably. He was divorced, with two sons, eight and ten years old, who lived with him full-time. Whatever it was that might have explained the disappearance of his children’s mother was more than a man could explain in a personal ad, but Eleanor gathered that he was on his own with his children now. In the one and only sentence he’d provided about himself, he said he liked hiking and bird-watching. “I think I’m a nice person,” he wrote. He’d been an Eagle Scout. He still lived by that code, or tried to.
One of the things about a personal ad, particularly one as simple and brief as this one, was the way it allowed whoever it was reading it to fill in all those things that were left out with a picture of how she’d like the person to be.
Sometimes, just having a fantasy got a person through a few days. She recorded a response to his ad (LovingSingleDad), with a suggestion that he send her a note telling her more about himself. Two days later a letter arrived. Maybe she detected a hint of desperation in his eagerness to meet up, but who was Eleanor to find fault with a person for occasional feelings of despair?
Christmas was coming. She was going to be alone for the holiday for the second year in a row. She figured they could make a date. She’d get to put on a nice dress for once, and maybe high heels.
She gave him her phone number.
Eleanor had always believed you could tell more about a person from his voice than from his photograph. Russell’s voice was low and soft, and he chose his words well, as not everyone did, even in the ads they published, let alone in conversation.
“Would you consider having a date?” he said. It was a little difficult for him, leaving his boys. But maybe she’d be up for coming over?
“You’re probably doing something on Christmas,” he said.
She wasn’t, actually.
He didn’t ask how it could be that she had no family to spend the holiday with, though some people—hearing this—might have concluded that Eleanor was a loser. He just asked if she’d like to come for Christmas dinner with him and his boys. It was a crazy idea, spending Christmas with a man she’d never met, and his two children.
She said okay.
He lived in a very small town in western Massachusetts, an hour and a half from Boston, not so different from where Eleanor had lived on her old farm. The directions Russell gave her were extremely thorough. Included in these directions, recited over the phone while she wrote it all down, was every landmark a person might look for at every turn in the road, as if he worried that one wrong turn might doom any possibility of a future for the two of them.
He wanted to know if she was allergic to any foods. He was not much of a baker, he said, but his grandmother had a great recipe for corn bread that he made every year. He wanted to know whether she liked marshmallows on her sweet potatoes or preferred themplain. His sons liked the marshmallow kind, but he was thinking of making a second, smaller pan without the topping.
