All They Want for Christmas
BRIDGET MONTGOMERY AND her two sisters stood around the kitchen island heaped with baked dishes from what looked like half the Spirit Lake population. Auntie Penny would have packed the lot off to the community kitchen. No outside food at my restaurant or my home.
Dead. Auntie Penny. The two didn’t belong together.
“Why did everyone think we need food?” Krista said. “We hosted the reception. At the restaurant. Just the leftovers from that filled the fridge there.” She tapped her lips and eyed a cupcake stand that had somehow survived the trip home with all the iced confections in place. “Mind you, those are begging to be eaten.”
“Giving food is a deep cultural gesture of gratitude and goodwill,” Mara said. She inhaled. “Is that lentil dal I smell?”
Bridget had worked in a restaurant for the past dozen years, and all she could smell was food. She exchanged a dubious glance with Krista. Were Mara’s other senses taking over as her sight failed?
“Maybe,” Krista ventured.
Mara sidled along the island, sniffing like a scent dog. “There it is. How about we have it for supper?” She lifted a stack of three lasagnas in aluminum foil pans—three!—which Bridget swiftly took, then reached for a ceramic baking dish.
“Bingo!” Mara swung her load away, her elbow catching on the cupcake stand.
Burdened with the heavy lasagnas, Bridget could only watch as Krista launched herself across the island to snag the stand, but not before a half-dozen cupcakes toppled to the tile floor.
Reflexes honed from a dozen years of spills on a public dining floor kicked in for Bridget. “Don’t move,” she ordered Mara and then used the lasagnas to plow an opening between the coffee machine and toaster—creating another accident waiting to happen—and joined Krista at Mara’s feet to pick up cupcakes.
“I’m sorry,” Mara said. “I saw the cupcakes, but then I just...didn’t.”
“No worries,” Krista said. “Now I’ve an excuse to eat one.” She licked the icing—white with blue snowflake sprinkles. Very Christmassy. A week into November and for the first time in almost forever Bridget couldn’t summon up any Christmas spirit. Not even a single “ho-ho-ho.” And to think that back in July, she’d sung the entire “The Twelve Days of Christmas” to a disbelieving breakfast crowd. For the fun of it.
“What are you? Four?” Bridget snapped. “You’ll clean off the icing and leave the rest.”
Krista kept looking at Bridget as she picked up a second upended cupcake and gave the festive top a long, slow lick.
Bridget retaliated with a deep eye roll. Was she the only one who saw how much Mara’s eyesight had deteriorated in a year? And why was Mara going through this alone? Then again, what did any of them know about what the others were dealing with? Three sisters, three separate roofs.
Bridget dampened a dish towel under the kitchen tap and handed it to Mara. “There’s icing on your—”
“I know. I can see that far.” Mara whisked the towel from Bridget’s hand and wiped at the icing on her skirt. She must hate this fussing, must feel humiliated. Bridget fumbled for something to say.
Krista set the mauled cupcakes back on the stand, as if no one would notice her tongue tracks. She really was four. “Couldn’t we just give the food away at the restaurant?”
“Outside food is not permitted,” Bridget said, “and besides, most of this food is from Auntie Penny’s customers. I can’t serve Mel and Daphne’s lasagna back to them. No, we have to find a place for it all.”
Krista opened the fridge. It was full. She opened the freezer drawer underneath. The same. “I’m out of ideas.”
“Isn’t there a deep freezer downstairs?” Mara asked.
“Let me guess,” Krista said. “Full.”
Full of pies and cakes made of raspberries and saskatoon berries and rhubarb. As well as casseroles, soups and stews. And a cold-storage room lined with canned pickles, pickled beets and asparagus tips, jams and jellies, salsas and sauces, chutneys and marmalades. For Auntie Penny, cooking and baking had been therapy, and in the months before she’d visited Deidre, the Montgomery sisters’ mother, she’d undergone a lot of sessions.
Bridget’s gaze strayed to the kitchen window, where it was already dark outside at five thirty.
And cold. Bridget clapped her hands. “I know. I’ll get out the coolers—and I have the big storage chest on the back deck. We’ll put everything in there.”
“Are you sure it’s cold enough?” Krista said.
“This is Alberta, not Ontario. It’s November. Yes, it’ll be cold enough.”
“Won’t raccoons get in it?” Mara said.
“And you,” Bridget said, “have spent too long on Vancouver Island. Raccoons haven’t reached here yet.”
Krista split the top off a third cupcake. Really? “Basically, you’re saying that Alberta in the winter is only good for freezing food outdoors.”
“Alberta is way better than—” Bridget stopped when she saw the growing grins on her sisters’ faces. The two always knew how to get under her skin. Common genes. She was adopted. Stranger genes. Still, she had loved Krista and Mara since meeting them at age six. Was forever grateful to her sisters’ parents for getting her out of foster care.
“You have to remember,” Mara said, “that when the three of us came as kids, it was always during the summer. Yes, we were here for high school, but we moved on. You stayed. Spirit Lake is your home.”
“Not ours” was the implied add-on. Putting her sisters back on planes, each heading in a different direction, meant she’d drive back to a house full of food and no one to share it with.
She could picture Christmas Day. Eating chocolate-cupcake bottoms and lasagna straight from the aluminum pan. Texting her sisters. Watching a holiday movie where singles meet for their happily-ever-after. Checking to see if it was still too early to go to bed.
Copyright © 2020 by S. M. Stelmack