Chapter 3

Jeanne was at least as mortified as I was that my aunt apparently had no idea who I was.

"Aunt Ruth," she murmured, "it's Trick."

"Trick?" Aunt Ruth asked.

"Patrick?" Jeanne tried again. "My, uh, brother?"

"Oh my gosh," Aunt Ruth snatched back her hand like she might not even be sure whether I deserved a handshake. "Oh, Patrick, I'm so sorry."

She put her hands on my cheeks and looked into my face.

"I'm so embarrassed," she said. "Of course it's Patrick. And I saw you just last year. I just didn't realize how much you'd grown."

"I'm sorry I haven't come over more," I mumbled.

"Well, I certainly hope we see you more now," she said. "Now give me a big hug."

I leaned down — Aunt Ruth was only about five-foot-five — and got almost as enthusiastic a hug as my sister had.

"Well, come on," she let go and turned around, linking one arm in mine and one in Jeanne's. "Everyone's going to be so excited to see you both."

We stepped into a simple foyer, made fancy by the roping that hung on the staircase, decorated here and there with elegant red globes. There were voices coming from the right.

"Eeeehhhh," I recognized the voice of my Uncle Bill imitating a buzzer. "Next, please."

"I thought it was perfect," Aunt Helen protested.

"Perfectly flat," her husband, Uncle Ted, chimed in.

"It's not too late to ruin the gravy," Aunt Helen warned him.

"Perfectly wonderful," Uncle Ted corrected himself. "But now it's my turn. Maestro? Excuse me, maestress? Maestrix?"

The tinkle of Aunt Ruth's piano drowned him out and filled the house, and Uncle Ted's baritone followed close behind.

"O ni-ight dee-viiiiiine. O-o niiiiiight, when Christ was booooorn. O niiiiight, dee-VIIIIINE — "

"No, it's hideous," another woman protested as the piano went silent. "Make it stop! Make it stop!"

"Philistines!" Uncle Ted roared through the laughter.

By that point, Aunt Ruth had put our coats in the hall closet and escorted us into the living room, where a group of five adults was gathered around the piano, all five of them laughing helplessly. The living room was even more splendidly festive than the hallway. There were candles in all the windows, and a block-shaped pine-scented candle burning inside a wreath on the coffee table. The angel atop the Christmas tree was almost touching the nine-foot ceiling, while the tree itself held globes of silver, red, and gold; and ornaments of every shape and description, ranging from an elegant glass crèche to a homemade lime-colored clay wreath inscribed "Love, Jeanne" that had been given a place of prominence right in the middle. And tinsel. This was my mother's family. Strands of tinsel were draped on all the branches, making the whole tree shimmer in the reflected light of hundreds of tiny white bulbs.

I looked over to see a tear running down Jeanne's cheek, which she quickly brushed away before the singers realized we were among them.

"Uh-oh, cops," Uncle Ted grinned as he finally caught sight of us. "Cool it everyone."

"Jeanne!" Aunt Helen raised a glass of punch from the piano in a toast to my sister.

"And Patrick," Aunt Ruth added quickly, eager to save everyone else from making the faux pas of not recognizing their nephew.

"Patrick!" Aunt Helen's eyes twinkled. She pushed herself off the piano — she'd probably consumed a little more than a moderate amount of the punch, her own special Christmas recipe that I'd never been allowed to try — and walked over to me. "Give us a kiss."

She winked at Jeanne and stuck her cheek out at me. Helen was Mom's younger sister, probably still a year or two shy of forty, and she'd always been the adventurous one. And the flirtatious one. It was usually Ruth who got the cheek kisses; Helen always liked a nice firm smack on the lips, a source of unending embarrassment to the 14-year-old me who she'd fooled into giving her one that last time she visited us. Or the last time I remembered her visiting us, at least.

Like the others, she was dressed in what I thought of as church clothes — skirts and sweaters for the women; pressed slacks, button-down shirts for the men. I felt very out of place in my jeans and flannel shirt. Jeanne, I was only noticing now, had changed out of her jeans into a pair of black slacks and a very pretty plum-colored blouse.

I delivered the commanded kiss at the same instant that she turned her head. Our lips met briefly, and I hastily pulled back.

"He's gotten taller, hasn't he?" Aunt Helen asked Jeanne with a merry giggle.

"A little," Jeanne smiled back at her. "More support for his swelled head."

Everybody had a good laugh at my expense, and Jeanne collected a hug and a kiss from her other aunt as well. Uncles Ted and Bill came over with handshakes for me and kisses for Jeanne, and then Aunt Ruth turned to her other guests, a handsome couple in their late twenties or early thirties.

"Jeff and Sheila Jenkins," she said, "I'd like you to meet my niece and nephew, Jeanne and Patrick Sterling."

Jeff rose to offer his hand, while Sheila stayed seated at the piano bench, from which she offered us a half-hearted wave. She looked a little nauseous, to tell the truth, and Uncle Ted hustled back to her side to ask if she was all right.

"A little too much punch, maybe," she said weakly. "Could I just have a glass of water?"

My aunts raced toward the kitchen for some water as the men gathered solicitously around the stricken woman. She was incredibly attractive; her church clothes included a sweater that seemed to have expelled all of the air that might have fit between it and her skin.

"I thought you said she moved," Jeanne stepped toward me and hissed into my ear.

I suddenly wasn't feeling that good myself, and the next glass of water was for me. After a time, though, both Sheila and I recovered. She seemed intent on ignoring me for the rest of the afternoon, or at least ignoring whatever relationship we had had. For my part, I was as blissfully ignorant as everyone else in the room of the details of that relationship. Only Jeanne apparently knew that there had been one, and she treated Shelia with an initial coolness that I'd never seen in her before.

After a while, even that thawed. Jeanne could no more ignore the spirit of Christmas than she could stop breathing, and soon she was standing behind Sheila, her hand on Sheila's shoulder, taking her own turn at the show-stopping chorus of "O Holy Night." After I had a turn, standing well in back of Sheila, Jeanne was awarded first prize, and allowed to select any ornament she wanted from the tree.

"How 'bout that wreath?" Uncle Bill joked, pointing at Jeanne's youthful gift.

"You touch that wreath, Bill Parkinson," Aunt Ruth's eyes flashed, "and you'll lose something very dear to you."

"Very dear to you," he suggested with a flick of his eyebrows.

"I can get another one," Aunt Ruth quickly retorted.

"I could make a better one," Jeanne offered.

The room exploded into laughter.

"A better wreath, I meant," Jeanne turned a brilliant crimson. "It's a little, uh, lumpy."

"You touch that wreath, Jeanne Sterling," Aunt Ruth turned on her, "and you'll get no pie for dessert."

"She gets no pie and I get disfigured?" Bill asked.

"I know which punishments work on which offenders," Aunt Ruth smirked. "Now which one would you like, dear?"

Jeanne had to examine each and every ornament on the tree, and finally plucked a hand-painted wooden Santa Claus off a branch in the back.

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A Stitch in Time

Marsh Alien

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