Everyone brings gifts to the living room, where Susan has started a sputtering fire. Julia lights candles on both windowsills. “I’ve brought a special wine,” Rowan announces. “It’s a 2001 amarone. Chris would be proud. Let’s find the big-ass glasses.” Cleve winces at that. From his satchel, Rowan takes out his gifts, carefully wrapped in brown paper, tied with string and sprigs of rosemary. “Just pensieri,” he says, “little thoughts.”

“Ever the fine press publisher,” Camille said. “Lucky I have another something for you, since my first gift was rejected.” She hands him a red box.

He holds up a burly heather green V-neck sweater. “For the coldest day in Berkeley,” he says.

Everyone toasts, unties ribbons, and exclaims. Julia has never seen a bone press but appears to be delighted. She passes a plate of walnut and Gorgonzola crostini. “Just a bite because Kit is throwing a huge dinner. I know the menu.”

At Matilde’s bottega, Rowan designed and made blank books—perfect travel journals—he has brought for them. He used ochre handmade paper covers, each stamped with a vintage design of sailboat, bicycle, or biplane. Julia gives him a bag of her lemon biscotti for the flight back to California tomorrow. Susan has two small pillows stuffed with herbs for him. “They help you sleep,” she explains.

Everything’s unwrapped and exclaimed over. The glasses of inky amarone catch firelight, the little tree shines with a bit of bravura, the crostini disappear. Cleve exclaims over gloves and socks: just what he needs. “Truly!” he says. “It’s a comfort to have just the right gloves and socks.” He sits down at the piano, which has yet to be touched. Oddly, he plays “Summertime,” the three almost-dead keys plunking. They gather around him and belt it out, the southern women all remembering the Janis Joplin version, the Ella version, and Rowan, whose cultural memory would be more the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” can only watch. Cleve pauses to take out three small boxes from his jacket pocket. “You girls, excuse the girls but you are to me. I don’t want you to forget where you came from. I had a feeling that might be easy from what Julia reports.” In the boxes each finds a thin silver chain with a white enameled Magnolia grandiflora pendant.

Still sensitive to the jewelry heist, Camille holds hers in the palm of her hand as the others immediately clasp theirs around their necks. “Very pretty, Daddy. Someone in Savannah made them?”

“Yes, that daughter of Alison. She’s teaching at the art college now.”

Alison, Julia’s plump and lucky next-door neighbor. Julia feels a pang of anguish that Cheryl, a good ten years younger than Lizzie, is designing delicate jewelry while Lizzie falters…But no. She looks hard at the meticulous design, the waxy petals outlined in gold filament. “Oh, brava for Cheryl. Here, Camille, let me fasten it for you.”

“You are too sweet!” Susan says. “This is so nostalgic—I have a giant magnolia in my front yard at home.” What a mess they make, she thought, with their leathery leaves falling constantly. But, oh, those few weeks of bloom when the scent blows through raised windows into the house at night and you know it’s the breath of the South. You breathe in that fragrance and think, Why live anywhere else, ever. She walks over to the window and stares out at small lights down the hills in the distance. Everyone’s at home. Everyone gathering. Not Aaron. Not barreling in with arms full of polka-dot wrapped gifts. At Christmas, his red silk bow tie, outrageous, his square college-fullback shoulders, how big and right he stands, building a fire. When the girls were little and excited. Now they’re soon boarding planes that will take them forty thousand feet in the air over the ocean to meet her in a foreign country. Where there are no family julep cups on the table. No carolers from the Methodist church. No annual open house, the cinnamon and clove scent of mulled wine, with toasted pecans and cheese straws on the coffee table, the fragrant long-leaf pine that touched the ceiling, had to touch the ceiling, the obscene piles of gifts and the windows fogged.

She regroups and turns back to the different life, Cleve now thumping out “Angels we have heard on high…”

Camille calls everyone into the kitchen. On the table sits a fancy new food processor. “Advance gift from Charlie! He couldn’t replace the jewelry but he could order this for us.”