He thought that when she returned they’d fall back into their routine, but her time at Margaret’s had put her a good week behind. While she was away, she’d made lists. She was grateful he’d decorated, though she noticed right off—before he opened the back door—that they needed wreaths. She hoped the Altar Guild still had some poinsettias left. She hadn’t even started her real shopping. She didn’t have anything for Sam or Lisa, and everything needed to be shipped. “I don’t see how I’m going to get it all done in two weeks.”
Technically she had eighteen days, but he didn’t say that. The holidays always set her off, and after Thanksgiving, he knew the feeling.
“Let me know what I can do,” he said, an offer she deflected with a put-upon look, as if he were joking.
Her first big job was sending out Christmas cards, the shot of the whole family on the lawn at Chautauqua. Fortified by a cup of tea and some Handel, she set up shop at the dining room table, going through last year’s pile, editing her address book as she went. How many times had he offered to type the master list into his computer so all she’d have to do was hit a key to print the envelopes, but she insisted on doing them by hand. Her penmanship was a source of pride, though with her arthritis she had to stop every so often and knead her fingers. It was a project, one she threatened to make his or stop altogether, yet every year she battled her way through the stack.
As if in sympathy, he spent the morning at his desk, organizing his tax receipts, listening to her mutter under her breath. He was muttering himself, adding up a long column of medical expenses, when she asked him a question he didn’t quite catch.
“Hang on,” he called, and came out. Rufus lay under the table, half in the sun. “How’s it going?”
“Didn’t the Beardsleys move? I swear they moved.”
“Did we get a card from them last year?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s their old address. Do we know a Gregory?” She pointed to a red envelope addressed in a curling, girlish script. “They’re not from church. I checked the directory.”
“No idea.”
“How about this Knapp?”
“That’s Fred.” Henry had known him more than forty years, yet Emily never remembered his name.
She centered a new envelope in front of her and took up her pen again. He leaned in to steal a kiss. “Okay. Go away.”
He left her alone, letting her get into a rhythm. When the clock struck one, she stopped for lunch.
Her back hurt, she complained, and her eyes. “I started too late. Usually I’m done with them by now.”
“You’ll be fine. Most of them are local. They’ll only take a day or two to get there.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I can’t do anything until I’m done with them. It’s already the ninth. I still have to buy everyone presents and wrap them and box them up and ship them ten different places.”
“I can help ship them.”
“No, you can’t, because I haven’t bought them yet. I can’t buy them until I’m done with these stupid cards.”
“Fair enough.”
“That’s not helpful,” she said. “You know what you can do, you can go buy me a hundred stamps. That would be helpful.”
“Any particular kind?”
“I don’t care. You make a decision for once.”
In the car, he argued that he made decisions all the time. He understood that she was overwhelmed, but that was no excuse. He’d offered to help. He wasn’t sure what else he could do.
The line was slow at the post office, his fellow customers balancing precarious armloads of packages, as if to prove her point. There were three positions but only one open. “Anyone just dropping off?” a clerk from the back in a Pirates hat asked, and several people behind Henry piled their boxes on the counter and took off. When it was finally his turn, his choice was between a simple green wreath or a gilded Renaissance Madonna and child Emily would like in a museum but might find too Catholic for their Christmas card. The wreaths were boring. To be safe, he bought a hundred and twenty of them.
She thanked him and apologized, not getting up from the table. “I just need to get these done, then I’ll be fine.”
“I understand,” he said, but of course once she finished them she was in a panic at not being able to find Sarah the perfect gift, and about how they were running out of time to ship everything, and what she was going to make for Christmas dinner now that it was just the two of them. It was normal, and foolish of him to expect anything different. While she was away, he’d forgotten how powerfully she broadcast her feelings, filling the house like a kind of nerve gas. Now, as the days passed, he grew used to it again, its absence—that brief period of calm—harder and harder to recall. She could be cutting and abrupt, unthinking, and yet, for all her faults, working beside her in the kitchen, or after dinner, watching her go over her lists, or in bed, listening to her sleep, he was glad to have her home.