The Gift of the Magpie Read online

  “Mom?”

  It was Jamie. I was about to ask why he wasn’t ready to go to the play, but I realized he looked troubled about something. Not, I hoped, his parents’ surfeit of paper.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, closing my notebook.

  “It’s Christmas,” he said.

  “You say that like it’s something bad,” I said. “Like ‘homework’ or ‘spinach’ or something.”

  “Yeah. And it’s supposed to be fun, right?”

  “Among other things. It’s also supposed to be a time for thinking about the meaning of the season. And spending time with the people you love.”

  “Yeah.” He frowned. “It was kind of fun working with you and Josh and Rose Noire and Gran-gran yesterday. Helping out with Mr. Dunlop’s stuff. I wish we’d started it sooner, so we could have finished and he could have enjoyed it for a while.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Was that it? Was he upset about Harvey? Understandable. He and Josh were probably both upset, in their own ways. I was figuring out the best way to tackle the subject when he spoke again.

  “He had a lot of magazines. Only I don’t think they were his. They were all addressed to someone named Aris-something.”

  “Aristede,” I said. “That was his father’s name. And also his grandfather.”

  “I don’t think his father ever read any of those magazines,” he said. “There were dozens of them, and some of them were still in the plastic wrappers they came in. And some of the others, if you picked them up, a bunch of postcards would fall out—you know, the ones that always fall out the first time you open the magazine.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “They probably hadn’t been read.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Why would someone buy all those magazines if he wasn’t going to read them?”

  “I’m sure he intended to read them,” I said. “Remember how last summer you were going to do a little bit of your summer reading every day, and then in July we figured out that in spite of all your good intentions you hadn’t done any of it yet?”

  “And you put me on a schedule, and I got it done,” he said. “Mr. Dunlop’s father should have done something like that for himself. Only—what if he didn’t want them? What if Mr. Dunlop gave them to his father for Christmas and his father was too polite to say he didn’t want them, and then he never read them, so every week a bunch of magazines would come in the mail and remind Mr. Dunlop how he sucked at picking out presents.”

  Okay, now I definitely knew where this was going.

  “It’s possible,” I said. “Yes, I could very easily see that happening.”

  “How are we supposed to figure it out?” He sounded glum, and I knew it wasn’t over any unappreciated presents Harvey had given his father.

  “Did I ever tell you about the most unusual present I ever gave your Grandpa when I was a kid?”

  He shook his head.

  “I gave him an ashtray that I made myself.”

  “An ashtray?” He frowned in puzzlement. “Grandpa smoked?”

  “No, neither he nor Grandma ever smoked. But it was a really cool ashtray. I made it myself in school, out of clay. It was a relief map of the state of Virginia, about this big.” I held out my hands a foot apart. “And I painted it just the way we used to color in maps of the state, with the Tidewater in green, the Piedmont in yellow, and the Appalachian mountains in orange. And—now this is the cool part—the mountains were made of little cones of clay, with spaces between them that were just the right width to hold a cigarette. And the country around Richmond was kind of hollowed out a little, which wasn’t true to life, but it meant there was someplace to flick the ashes.”

  “That’s kind of.… weird, Mom.” Jamie grimaced. “And I bet you’re going to tell me that Grandpa loved it anyway because you made it.”

  “Actually, he did,” I said. “He kept it in his office, and stored paperclips in the little hollow around Richmond, and stuck pens and pencils between the Appalachians, and he’d probably still have it if your uncle Rob hadn’t knocked it off and broken it a few years later.”

  “And that was a great present.” His voice sounded flat.

  “No, it was a terrible present,” I said. “But I was only six or seven, and I didn’t know any better. It gets harder when you get older. And yeah, it’s pretty horrible to be surrounded by the Ghost of Bad Christmas Presents of the Past.”

  “Yeah.” He grinned at that. “So what do we do? ’Cause there are still a lot of people on my Christmas list that I haven’t thought of anything really good for. And I don’t want to give them stuff that’ll just sit around and be a waste.”

  “That’s good thinking,” I said. “Look, maybe I’d have a different answer if I hadn’t been spending so much time in Mr. Dunlop’s house, but maybe we all need to think a little more about how to give each other more intangible presents. Presents that aren’t actual physical things,” I added, since I wasn’t entirely sure he got “intangible.”

  “Like what?”

  “Remember the year your uncle Rob couldn’t think of a good birthday present, so he gave you and Josh a promise that he’d take both of you and two of your friends to Kings Dominion the first weekend it was open in the spring?”

  “That was actually kind of an awesome present.” Jamie grinned at the memory.

  “But what if you were tired of Kings Dominion?” I asked. “What if you’d been so often that just the thought of going again made you sick?”

  “That’s kind of hard to imagine.”

  “But what if?”

  He thought.

  “Well, we could go just to be polite.” He didn’t sound very convinced.

  “Yes,” I said. “Or you could ask if maybe he could take you someplace else that you weren’t tired of—like Busch Gardens or Virginia Beach or skiing some place. Either way, you wouldn’t be stuck forever with something you didn’t want—like those giant teddy bears Aunt Catriona gave you last year—and may I say again, you both did a great job of pretending to be thrilled.”

  “Is she coming for Christmas? Because if she is, we should probably get those out of the attic and put them out in our rooms.”

  “I have a better idea—why don’t we get them out of the attic and take them down to the women’s shelter and leave them there for some younger kid to play with.”

  “Good deal. But what if she asks about them?”

  “Then I will explain that you made a great sacrifice and decided the children at the shelter needed the bears more than you did.”

  He looked thoughtful.

  “That would probably work,” he said. “But we should get Dad to tell her. He’s better at telling polite whoppers like that.”

  “Yes, he is.” I had to grin. “And getting back to the present situation—if you haven’t thought of something someone would like, give them a gift certificate. Use your laptops and make really awesome gift certificates.”

  “For what?” He looked discouraged again. “Like Dad, for instance—what could I give him?”

  “How about a booklet of coupons, each good for one llama feeding or one llama pen cleaning.”

  “We do that anyway sometimes. And I think Dad likes feeding the llamas.”

  “He likes doing it most mornings. But what about when he knows he has an early meeting and has to set his alarm even earlier than usual. Or if he has a cold and would like to sleep a little late the next morning. And I doubt if he’d ever object to a pen cleaning. And that’s just one idea. Heck, you could give him a blank check. A coupon worth one hour of whatever chore he doesn’t feel like doing.”

  “Yeah.” He looked thoughtful. “I can work with that. Thanks, Mom.”

  He gave me an absentminded peck on the cheek and wandered off, clearly considering the possibilities.

  I went back to my notebook and added a few more to-do items. A reminder to check with Michael and see if he actually had expressed an interest in getting a subscription to a magazine, and if so,
which one. A reminder to find out if Grandfather still needed a new pith helmet or if he’d already replaced the one his elephant stepped on. And a note to drop a hint to Mother about how much I liked Mrs. Dinwiddie’s quilt.

  “Isn’t it about time to leave?” Cordelia stood in the doorway, not only dressed in her theatergoing finery but already putting on her coat. “Rose Noire and Caroline already went out to the car.”

  “Yikes.” I slammed the notebook closed. “You’re right.” I walked out into the hallway, rang the dinner bell, and bellowed, “Anyone who wants to go to A Christmas Carol should already be in the Twinmobile!”

  Chapter 24

  A thunderous stampeding sound followed, and the boys managed to beat me to the driveway without knocking their grandmother over. Caroline and Rose Noire were already in their seats.

  I hadn’t expected the boys to react quite so rapidly, so I decided we had time to take a slightly longer way around and show Cordelia and Caroline some of the more notable town decorations.

  Like the Nightmare Before Christmas house, whose eccentric owner decorated lavishly for Halloween and then made minor concessions to the subsequent holidays as an excuse to leave his spooky decor in place. In the few weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, all the pumpkins and skeletons wore pilgrim hats and appeared to have sinister designs on the life-sized ceramic turkey that had taken its place among them. Now, with Christmas approaching, the house’s roof sported a glossy black sleigh and eight skeletal reindeer, and all the pumpkins and skeletons wore Santa hats. The owner had also added black bows and ribbons to all the headstones in his faux graveyard, and decorated the fir trees flanking his front door with tiny bats and witches’ hats.

  And then there was Crèche Lady, who’d taken a ceramics class at the college a few years ago and then bought an enormous kiln so she could make her own life-sized nativity scene. The first year it had been a slightly minimalist nativity—a solitary shepherd and his single sheep gazing at Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus, who were clearly still awaiting the arrival of the Magi. The second year she’d added two more shepherds, a dozen sheep, and a hovering angel. The wise men on their camels had appeared the third year. This year there had been much speculation on whether she’d declared the project finished or if she’d continue expanding it—and if so, how.

  “Look. She’s not just doing a nativity this year,” Cordelia said. “She’s added some other biblical scenes.”

  To the left of the nativity, in a separate tableau, three standing wise men, holding the reins of their camels, appeared to be wrangling with a figure seated on a throne and wearing a golden crown. King Herod and Magi, presumably. To the right, Joseph appeared to be striding briskly toward the shrubbery at the edge of the yard, leading a donkey on which Mary and Baby Jesus were riding, while what appeared to be a trio of spear-carrying Roman centurions peered in the wrong direction. And the angel hovering over the stable now had company, in the form of two smaller angels holding hymn books and singing.

  “I like this,” I said. “She could be just getting started. She’s got the scope to keep doing this for years.”

  We also passed close enough to the town square that they could peer down the streets to see the Ferris wheel, the merry-go-round, and the delightful chaos of the Christmas Carnival that surrounded the official Caerphilly Christmas tree in the town square.

  “We’ll take you there while you’re here, Gran-gran,” Jamie told Cordelia.

  “The Ferris wheel is pretty scary,” Josh advised. “But you’d like the merry-go-round.”

  From the look on her face, I suspected Cordelia planned to show them that she wasn’t a bit scared of any old Ferris wheel. They’d see.

  As we approached the drama building, Jamie and Josh lapsed into one of their perennial debates over the proper rendition of a line from tonight’s performance—Tiny Tim’s famous “God bless us, every one!” Since the boys had appeared in the full cast performance of A Christmas Carol several years ago, each alternating between Tiny Tim and Scrooge as a boy, they both had strong opinions on the optimal way of reading it.

  “God bless us EV-ry-one,” Josh exclaimed.

  “No, you have to hit the last syllable, too,” Jamie countered. “God bless us EV-ry ONE!”

  They bickered amicably about it the rest of the way. Each was convinced that Michael would read the line his way, so at least this was a dispute that would soon be resolved.

  I dropped Caroline, Rose Noire, and the boys off on the front steps of the drama building. Cordelia preferred to ride with me around the back, where I would be taking advantage of Michael’s faculty parking privileges.

  “So you won’t have to walk alone in the dark, dear,” she said.

  I suspected it wasn’t really a question of my safety. The drama building wasn’t located in a bad section of town—in fact Caerphilly didn’t really have anything you could call a bad section of town, apart from a few blocks near the bus station that made timid souls ever so slightly nervous at the dark of the moon. She was probably trying to avoid having to look at the large, elegant brass sign on the front of the building, proclaiming it “THE DR. J. MONTGOMERY BLAKE DRAMATIC ARTS BUILDING.” It worked both ways—Grandfather always scowled when he saw the plaque thanking her for funding the town’s much improved baseball fields.

  We arrived in the lobby to find the usual preshow festivities in place. People were wandering about oohing and ahhing at the decor—done by Mother, of course. Before long she’d have cornered every Christmas decorating project in town. The highlight was the twenty-foot tree in the soaring glass-walled lobby. It was festooned with gold ornaments in the shapes of dancers dancing, lords leaping, and all the rest of the “Twelve Days” crew, and instead of a star it was topped with a large gold representation of the comedy and tragedy masks.

  Students in Dickensian costume were selling cider, mulled wine, and gingerbread in one corner of the lobby, and a costumed string quartet serenaded us with carols from another. And at the far side, I spotted people crowding around something.

  When I got closer I realized that the main attraction was a collection of Clarence’s newly groomed dogs: a slender, languid dog who wasn’t quite a saluki but clearly had the attitude; several large, friendly dogs that showed signs of Labrador or golden retriever ancestry; a nice assortment of small, lively dogs. Delaney was hovering nearby, snapping candid shots of the dogs and theatergoers interacting. A tuxedo-clad Rob was on his knees, facilitating an introduction between two little girls in velvet party dresses and an excitable terrier of some sort.

  I almost didn’t recognize Clarence Rutledge without either his denim and leather biker’s gear or his white veterinarian’s coat. He wore a blue sports coat over new-looking black jeans, and his emerald-green tie featured pictures of dachshunds in Santa hats. He was chatting with a young couple, presumably about the happy-looking dog they were all three taking turns petting.

  “Ah! Meg!” My friend Ekaterina Vorobyaninova, general manager of the five-star Caerphilly Inn, greeted me, as she often did, with air kisses to both cheeks, in the European fashion. “You will know. You always know everything.”

  She pointed to where Clarence’s glamorized dogs were lolling on velvet pillows or wagging their tails eagerly while being petted by members of the crowd. Clearly Clarence had done a good job of picking dogs that wouldn’t freak out at the crowds. In fact, all of these dogs had to be either complete hams or total exhibitionists.

  “Some of these dogs are quite attractive.” Ekaterina, whom I knew to be a staunch cat person, sounded quite surprised. “Where do they come from?”

  “All over,” I said. “Some of them were picked up as strays or surrendered here in Caerphilly, but many of them come from shelters all over the place—Virginia mostly, but also West Virginia and North Carolina. Wherever there are shelters struggling with overcrowding. Especially kill shelters. Clarence will travel for hours to rescue animals from a kill shelter.”

  “No, I mean who brought them
here tonight to be adopted—it is Clarence, then?”

  “Yes.” I pointed down the hall to where Clarence was standing. Why was Ekaterina so interested in the dogs? I didn’t think her two aristocratic Russian blues would appreciate a canine sibling.

  “We could do this at the Inn.” She flung her arms open in an expansive gesture. “Guests are always petting my cats and saying how much they miss their own cats. And only the other day I asked a guest who was returning from a run if he’d had a good workout, and he said the only thing he missed was having his dog to run beside him. We could try having a few dogs at the Inn, and allow guests to take them out for walks or pet them or whatever else people do with dogs. And some of them would fall in love with the dogs and want to take them home, and even when that didn’t happen, both the dogs and the people would be happier.”

  “Sounds great to me,” I said. “Talk to Clarence.”

  “Thank you.” She strode off briskly. I hope Clarence liked her idea of fostering dogs at the Inn. Because if he didn’t, he was in for a battle.

  I found a corner where I could stand, sip my cider, and watch the dogs. A few people noticed where I was and came over to say hi. Michael’s students. Michael’s colleagues. Assorted family members. The occasional high-muck-a-muck from the college. I wasn’t feeling antisocial. I liked being here, surrounded by people who were clearly full of holiday spirit.

  I was just tired of having to be coherent.

  “Hey, Meg!”

  I looked up, already bracing in case it was another college dignitary whose name I would have to remember, and was relieved to see Clarence Rutledge ambling my way.

  “You look festive,”

  “Thanks.” He glanced down at his Santa-dachshund tie with a look of satisfaction.