Brendon was the first one awake on Christmas morning. He was relieved when he opened his eyes to see that it was morning. He had been waking up once an hour all night just to check, and he had almost decided that some crazy thing had happened to the sun and night was going to last forever.

Now, however, he could see the furniture in his room, dim shapes in the faint dawn light, and he got up and went downstairs in his pajamas to see if he was right about what would be waiting there. He had guessed it first when he saw the long, flat box in the back of his mother’s car. It was the kind of box things came in when they had not yet been put together. Then when Mr. Duncan had come over on Christmas Eve and Brendon had been sent up to bed early, he had been almost sure.

They hadn’t even allowed him out of his room long enough to get a drink of water.

“How is Santa ever going to come if you keep wandering around like that?” his mother asked. Elizabeth still pretended to believe in Santa Claus, and Brendon had never had the heart to tell her that he had long outgrown the fantasy.

Later in the evening, when the girls had gone to their room and couldn’t tell on him, Brendon came out into the upstairs hall to listen. His mother and Mr. Duncan were in the living room, and he could tell by their voices that they were struggling hard to put the thing together.

“I think those screws go here,” Mr. Duncan was saying, and his mother asked, “Then what do we use to attach this piece to the handlebar?”

I hope they got it right, Brendon thought as he hurried down the stairs. I don’t want to spend all Christmas morning reassembling it.

The bicycle was there in the living room, just as he had anticipated. It was a Mongoose Override Freestyle BMX. Brendon examined it carefully and sighed in relief. Everything seemed to be connected correctly except for the kickstand, and he could fix that easily.

With a grin of delight, he rushed back up the stairs to wake up the family.

He bounded into the girls’ room and bounced onto the foot of Nancy’s bed.

“Hey, wake up, you lazy dorks!” he shouted. “Santa was here!”

“Cool it,” Kirby said good-naturedly before rolling over and opening her eyes. Kirby always came awake quickly, as though she had never been sleeping at all. “Honestly, Bren!” she said as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. “It’s not even daytime yet. I bet the sun isn’t even up.”

Nancy groaned and pulled a pillow over her head.

“Give me a break!” Brendon said. “You can sleep anytime. Today is Christmas!” He reached under the covers and gave her a good hard pinch, and she screamed and came up out of the pillow. Brendon leaped off the bed just in time.

Hitting the wall switch so the overhead light would keep them from going to sleep again, he ran down the hall to his mother’s room.

“Hey, Mom!” he yelled. “Merry Christmas!”

“Is it morning already?” Elizabeth blinked the sleep from her eyes and smiled drowsily at her son. Her hair was soft and mussed across the pillow, and her face, without makeup, looked too young to belong to a mother.

“We must have sat up talking too long last night,” she said. “It feels as if I just went to bed two minutes ago.”

“Santa’s been here,” Brendon told her. “I looked down the stairway and I could see the stockings by the fireplace. They’ve all been filled!”

“Then it must be Christmas!” Elizabeth sat up in bed and looked around for her bathrobe.

On the little table beside the bed, there was a small white box. She glanced over at it, and Brendon, following her gaze, asked, “Is that for me?”

“It certainly isn’t,” his mother said firmly. She reached over and lifted the lid. The box was lined with cotton, and lying against it was a little gold heart on a chain. Elizabeth removed it from the box and raised her arms to fasten the clasp around her neck.

“Mr. Duncan gave it to me last night,” she said. “Isn’t it lovely? It’s exactly like one I used to have a long time ago.”

“It’s pretty,” Brendon said politely, but his whole mind was downstairs with the bicycle. “Let’s go down and see what Santa brought!”

It took them over an hour to open all the presents. Brendon had been so concerned with his inspection of the bicycle that he hadn’t really looked past it to the piles of other gifts that all but buried the lower branches of the tree.

“We’ve never had this big a Christmas!” Kirby said, gasping in delight over the framed reproduction of a Degas painting of a whirling ballerina who looked almost like Kirby herself. “We’ve always done fun things on Christmas—gone to a play or concert or something—but we’ve never had piles of presents.”

“We were never able to,” her mother told her. “With all the traveling around, we couldn’t carry a lot of possessions with us. Now that we’re settled, I think it’s time to buy some of the nice things that make a place homey.”

There were pictures for each of their rooms and books for the bookshelves. There were white curtains for the girls’ room and blue-and-green ones for Brendon’s. The girls got clothes, package after package of them, dresses and sweaters and T-shirts and jeans.

Each of them received a book from Mr. Duncan, and their father had sent Swiss watches for all of them, tiny, delicate, gold ones for the girls, and for Brendon a husky, waterproof, shock-resistant one that could be used as a stopwatch to time races.

Kirby got a barre to attach to the wall of her room, and Brendon a bunch of video games, and Nancy an atlas, from Kirby, and from her mother a pile of sheet music.

“That’s for you to grow into,” Elizabeth said when she opened the package of music. “As soon as you get out of the beginners’ book, that is.”

“How nice,” Nancy said politely, and Brendon couldn’t help feeling a stab of sympathy. Nancy was never going to get out of the “Three Blind Mice” book, and she knew it.

It seemed terrible to Brendon that anyone could do the things that Nancy did to a piano. She played so badly that just to listen to her was agony. The worst of it was that their mother did not seem to realize how hopeless Nancy was. She herself could sight-read, and Nancy was learning her notes, but neither of them could pick out the simplest tune unless the music was right there in front of her. Even then, when they accidentally struck wrong notes, they didn’t know the difference.

After the gifts had been opened, they ate breakfast, a big one with pancakes and syrup, and then Elizabeth got out the turkey and began to prepare the stuffing.

“If we get it into the oven now,” she said, “it can be cooking while we’re at church. I told Tom we wouldn’t be eating until late in the afternoon.”

“You told Mr. Duncan that?” Nancy looked up from the new book she had been leafing through. “You mean, he’s coming for dinner? On Christmas?”

“He seemed glad to be invited,” Elizabeth said. “Christmas is a lonely time for people without families.”

“That’s just it,” Nancy said. “It’s a family time. He isn’t one of us. Dad’s alone this Christmas. You don’t seem to be worrying about him.”

The glowing, happy look went out of Elizabeth’s face, but her voice was slight and steady.

“Your father will never be alone if he doesn’t want to be,” she said. “He has friends all over the world who would be delighted to have him join them. If he had wanted to come here for Christmas, he could have, you know. You are still and always will be his children, and he can visit whenever he wants to.”

“I think we ought to have Mr. Duncan,” said Brendon, who always liked company. “He gave us those books, and he gave Mom that gold thing on a chain. I bet that was pretty expensive.”

“He gave you a present?” Kirby said. “I didn’t know that, Mom. What is it? Can we see it?”

“Of course.” Elizabeth drew out the little gold locket. She held it out on the flat of her hand so they could all look at it. “Isn’t that pretty?”

“It’s lovely,” Kirby said. “It’s just like you, Mom, so dainty and feminine.”

Nancy got up from her chair and came over to examine the necklace.

“It’s a heart,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“I don’t think that’s an appropriate present to give somebody’s mother,” Nancy said.

“Oh, honey!” Elizabeth turned to her in astonishment. “Tom Duncan’s an old, old friend! He knows I used to have a little locket like this when I was a teenager. It’s gotten lost over the years—I don’t know where—it was probably left behind in a hotel room someplace. I’ve always regretted losing it, and so he’s replaced it for me.”

“Did he give you that first locket?” Nancy asked.

“On my sixteenth birthday.”

“Was he your boyfriend?”

“Oh, Nancy, really!” Elizabeth made a little gesture of exasperation. “That was years and years ago. I wasn’t much older than you and Kirby. I’ve had a marriage and children—an entire half-lifetime—since then. Tom is now just a dear friend from my childhood.”

“Then why does he—?”

The telephone rang. Nancy stopped in the middle of a sentence. A light broke through the scowl on her face.

“That—” She could hardly bring out the words. “That’s—Dad!”

“Is it really?!” Kirby was closest to the doorway and she flew into the living room. An instant later her voice rang out loud and happy. “Oh, Dad! Merry Christmas!”

“That’s not fair!” Nancy cried. “I told you who it was!”

“Let me talk to him!” Brendon shouted.

They surrounded Kirby, who was chirping madly into the receiver. She was delivering a long, involved account of the Nutcracker and her ballet lessons and the extra instruction she was getting from Madame Vilar.

When she had finished she handed the receiver to her mother.

“Hello, Richard,” Elizabeth said. “Where are you? Oh, good—that’s nice. I was sure you’d be with someone.” She paused and then said, “We’re fine. Just fine. Yes, everybody’s healthy. Have a happy Christmas. We will, thank you. Here’s Nancy.”

The way Nancy grabbed the receiver Brendon knew that he might as well sit down, because it would be a long while before his own turn came.

When the phone was his at last, he took the receiver slowly, suddenly unaccountably nervous.

“Hello,” he said.

A little tinny, as if he were speaking in a tunnel, his father’s voice spoke to him.

“Hello there, big guy!”

Across the miles and months of time between them, Richard Garrett came rushing to him, great and warm and filled with the excitement of living.

“How are you, son?” he asked. “How do you like it in Florida?”

“It’s okay,” Brendon said. “Where are you? What are you doing? Are you still in a war zone?”

“I’m in Rome,” his father said. “But it’s just for the holiday. I’ll be out again tomorrow. There’s a lot of political stuff going on, Bren. I won’t try to go into it now. Did you get the watches?”

“We sure did,” Brendon said. “Mine is great. We’ve got presents for you, too, but we didn’t know where to send them.”

“You hang on to them for me,” his father told him. “We’ll have a second Christmas the next time I’m in the States.”

“When are you coming?” Brendon asked eagerly. “Soon?”

“Probably not till this summer. Maybe we can take a vacation together somewhere. Would you like that?”

“Definitely,” Brendon said. “If we don’t take the girls along, we can explore the Everglades.”

He didn’t tell him about the boat. The boat would be a surprise.

“Let me have the phone back, Bren,” Kirby said, snatching at it. “I forgot to tell him about the Cecchetti exams.”

“See you this summer!” Brendon managed to say before the receiver was yanked from his hand.

He turned to his mother, who was standing quietly in the middle of the room, looking oddly alone there.

“He’ll take us on a vacation,” he told her. “In June or July or sometime.”

“That will be nice,” Elizabeth said. “It’s hot then in Florida. It should be a good time for you to get away.”

“You can come with us,” Nancy said. “I know he means all of us. You’ll need a vacation too, Mom.” She went over to Elizabeth and took her hand. “Is he really just an old friend? Mr. Duncan, I mean? He’s just like any other friend? Just someone to talk to?”

“Of course,” her mother said. “I already told you that, Nance. What does this have to do with anything?”

“Then would you do something for me, Mom?” Nancy’s voice was shaking. “Stop seeing him! Stop having him over here! Give that locket back to him! You can take all my Christmas presents back if you’ll just give me that, please, Mom!”

“But honey,” Elizabeth said helplessly, “what would that accomplish? I need my old friends now. I have to start making a life for myself, and friends are a part of it.”

“Just till summer?” Nancy begged. “Just till Dad comes? Come on, Mom, please?” Her jaw was trembling and her blue eyes were filled with tears.

Elizabeth sighed and put her arms around her daughter.

“All right,” she said. “If it matters to you that much, sweetheart. All right.”