The Best Gift

  “Is it bad?”

  “Teeth marks. Dammit.” He looks at the puppy and waves the bag at him. “Does this look like a mink coat to you?”

  The puppy seems to grin before bounding merrily away toward the heap of wrapping paper again.

  “Drew?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know you hardly ever curse, but . . . can you watch the language from now on?”

  “Clara, he’s a dog. He has no idea what I’m saying.”

  “No, I know, but you’re going to be a daddy soon, and someday the baby will.”

  “You’re right.” He promptly drops to his knees and whispers to her stomach, “I’m sorry. I’ll never say a bad word again. Okay?” He presses his ear against her belly button as if listening for a reply. “He says okay.”

  “He? So you think it’s a boy?”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure. I can just see a little brown-eyed, brown-haired heartbreaker like his dad.”

  “Or maybe a little green-eyed, brunette femme fatale like her mom.”

  Seeing Clara suddenly swallow hard and reach for a chair back to steady herself, Drew immediately gets to his feet. “Are you okay?”

  “Since you asked . . . this femme fatale is feeling blech.”

  “Your stomach?”

  “Yup. It’s almost like when I was going through the cancer treatments. But that was a scary, sad kind of sick and tired. This is . . .”

  “What?”

  “Joyful sick and tired.”

  He smiles and tilts his forehead against hers. “Only you would come up with ‘joyful sick and tired.’”

  “That’s not all I’m going to come up with if I don’t have breakfast, now. The doctor said that keeping something in my stomach will help with the morning sickness, even if the last thing I want to do is eat.”

  “Which doctor?”

  “Handler. My ob-gyn.” She heads for the kitchen, past more windows shrouded in fog, stopping along the way to plug in the electric candles sitting on the sill of each one.

  “You went to the doctor without me?” Drew asks in dismay, on her heels like a puppy—and followed by the real puppy.

  “I had to confirm the pregnancy with a blood test.”

  “Well, that was the last time, okay? From here on in, I’m with you every step of the way.”

  “Deal. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  “Good. Because you’re stuck with me at least until death do us part.”

  “At least?” she echoes, and he can’t quite read the odd expression on her face.

  “Well, of course I’m going to haunt you when I’m gone.”

  “Don’t even kid around about that.” She looks away, then exclaims, “Whoa, no you don’t!” and reaches for the little Lab, about to scamper through the open door to the utility closet.

  “So Dr. Handler didn’t do a sonogram, did she?” Drew asks.

  “She won’t until the end of the first trimester.” Clara closes the closet door. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted one without you there. Everyone says it’s an amazing experience to actually see the baby in the womb.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “Well, just my dad and Sharon. But you know how they are about their kids.”

  Yes, he knows. His father-in-law and his third wife have two young sons and positively dote on them.

  Now, with a child of his own on the way, Drew comprehends for the first time just how difficult it must have been for his father-in-law not to live under the same roof with his little girl.

  Then again, there were plenty of times, Clara told him, when he could have been there for her—like at her first Broadway opening—and wasn’t. The man made his choices. He had to live with them.

  Too bad Clara did, too.

  Thank God that’s not going to happen to me. To us.

  He reaches out and gives his wife a hug. “Hey. I really, really, love you. You know that?”

  “I really, really do. And I’m really, really going to throw up all over you if I don’t eat something, like, now.”

  He releases her and she hurriedly grabs a box of crackers from the cupboard.

  “Here, sit down.” He pulls out a stool at the long granite-topped breakfast bar and she sits, crunching into a saltine. “I’ll fix you a big healthy breakfast. What do you want? Eggs?”

  “Eggs? Gawd, no.” She makes a face.

  “No, not worms,” he deadpans. “Eggs.”

  She mimes gagging.

  “You love eggs.”

  “Not lately, I don’t. I have this awful aversion to them right now. Please don’t say the word again, okay?”

  “Eggs?”

  “Not funny.”

  “You really don’t want me to say it?”

  “Not for the next nine months. Or until the morning sickness passes. It’s supposed to, by the end of the first trimester.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I read it in What to Expect When You’re Expecting. It’s a great book—you should read it, too.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Hidden in the bottom of my pajama drawer upstairs.”

  “So that’s where you keep stuff you don’t want me to see?”

  “Darn it. Now I’ll have to find a new place to stash all my deep, dark secrets.” She grins, still looking pretty green around the gills.

  “So in, what? Another month, you’re home free?”

  “Maybe not home free, but no more morning sickness. And no more worrying that something’s going go wrong with the pregnancy.”

  Drew touches her hand. “Hey, everything will be fine. I promise.”

  “You can’t promise that. You don’t know.”

  “Sure I do,” he assures her, just as he always has.

  Through all the long months of cancer treatment, he was by her side, promising her that she was going to be okay. That’s what you do when you love someone. You reassure them, get them through the hard times, refuse to consider anything but the best-case scenario.

  That’s his role as a husband, as far as he’s concerned. To convey strength—no matter how vulnerable he’s feeling.

  “This is our happy beginning. Let’s just enjoy every minute, okay?”

  “Okay,” she promises in return, and the shadows in her eyes are gone . . . for now, anyway.

  Chapter Three

  The big, airy kitchen is Clara’s favorite room in the house.

  About the same square footage as her entire Manhattan apartment, it’s decorated for the season with festive boughs of greenery and, of course, electric candles in all the windows.

  After all those years of city living, there are no close-set neighboring houses to crowd them. Beyond the wide pane of glass above the stainless steel sink and cherry cabinets hangs a hummingbird feeder Doris sent them as a housewarming gift.

  Every time Clara looks at it, she thinks longingly of her old friend back east. She and Doris keep in touch with occasional phone calls, but it isn’t the same. Doris is increasingly hard of hearing, and anyway, the time zone difference makes it difficult, given Doris’s early-to-bed, early-to-rise habit. It’s usually evening whenever Clara thinks of calling her, and she knows Doris will have been long asleep by then back in New York.

  Oh, well. They did exchange Christmas cards, and Clara sent Doris a much-appreciated gift: an entire carton of licorice snaps.

  Doris wrote in her own card that she has a gift for Clara, too—but it’s a surprise, and it won’t arrive until after the holidays. “It should turn up on your doorstep sometime just after New Year’s,” she wrote, “so keep an eye out.”

  “You know,” Clara tells Drew now, still looking at the hummingbird feeder, “someday, we might actually see a hummingbird out there.”

  “Maybe,” he agrees, glancing at the window. “But even if we don’t, the view is still pretty great.”

  That it is. Beyond the wall of glass lies a magnificent vista: the sea, and towering evergreens, and the sky?
??on rare clear days, anyway.

  Clara fully expected to find the chilly, foggy, unpredictable northern California weather distasteful, but to her surprise, she’s actually enjoyed it . . . so far, anyway.

  She does miss her family—including Doris—and her friends and a good old-fashioned East Coast white Christmas. Not that it always snowed over the holidays in New York. In fact, most years, it didn’t.

  True, the little shops that line the main street of picturesque San Florentina can’t hold a candle to the store windows on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The light-strung pines on the town square are nothing compared to the majestic one at Rockefeller Center. And the local church choir’s holiday concert is no match for the Radio City Rockettes.

  Okay, so maybe she is a little homesick today.

  But you are home. Here, with Drew.

  She watches Drew reach for the orange prescription bottle she insists he keep out on the windowsill above the sink, where he’s sure to see it and remember to take it every day. In theory, anyway.

  “It’s just cholesterol medication,” he reminds her, whenever she scolds him for managing to forget. “It’s not life or death.”

  That’s debatable. High cholesterol runs in Drew’s family. His grandfather dropped dead of a heart attack in his forties, and his father, in increasingly fragile health, has suffered two.

  “That’s not going to happen to me,” Drew promised Clara. “Look at me. Don’t I look healthy?”

  Sure he does. No one would ever suspect anything could be physically wrong with a man who oozes vitality.

  Just as no one would ever guess that she’s a cancer survivor.

  You just never know.

  Seeing her watching him remove a pill from the bottle, he asks, “What?”

  “Aren’t you due for a refill on that prescription?”

  He peers into the bottle. “Nope. Plenty left.”

  “If you were taking it every day, you’d be out by now.”

  “I take it almost every day, and I feel fine. I felt fine before the doctor put me on it, and I feel fine whenever I forget to take it. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “But you and I both know that most disease is hereditary,” she cautions him.

  No kidding. Her own maternal grandmother had died young of breast cancer—a fact that was never far from Clara’s mind when she herself was undergoing treatment.

  “Mental illness is also hereditary, and you don’t think I’m going to start riding around town on an imaginary motorcycle like my crazy aunt Stella, do you?”

  She has to laugh at that, having met his great-aunt Stella, a harmless flake who frequently inhabits his parents’ guest room and goes through life making vrrrm, vrrrm noises and wearing a biker helmet.

  Drew swallows a pill and returns the bottle to its spot on the sill, then rummages through the cupboards.

  The puppy wriggles in Clara’s arms. “Okay, okay, down you go.”

  “And stay out of trouble,” Drew warns, then asks Clara, “How does French toast sound?”

  “Great.”

  “You do know there are eggs in French toast.”

  “Just don’t talk about it, please.”

  Drew—a man who knows his way around a kitchen—pulls the big rectangular cast-iron griddle from a cupboard and sets it on the range. Whistling “Deck the Halls,” he plops a generous slab of butter on it and turns up the flame.

  “It’s kind of strange, don’t you think?” Clara asks, chin in hand, watching him.

  “What is?”

  “Spending Christmas Day alone together, just the two of us, without our families.”

  “It’s kind of awesome is what it is. I had enough of my family last night to last me for a while.”

  They spent Christmas Eve at Drew’s parents’ annual open house.

  Clara adores her in-laws. Drew’s background is the polar opposite of her own, the kind of life she sometimes dreamed of as a New York City kid and the only child of divorced parents.

  Her in-laws are indisputably madly in love after forty-odd years of marriage and continue to reside in the large Pacific Heights home where Drew grew up. His three sisters are all happily wed with seven kids among them, and the older two who live out of town are visiting over the holidays. His sister Doreen and the rest of his extended family, including his ninety-five-year-old grandma, all live in the Bay area.

  Every Becker get-together is brimming with laughter and music and food, populated by countless relatives and friends of all ages.

  “We said we wanted a nice, relaxing Christmas Day after all that chaos, remember?” Drew pushes the butter around the griddle with a spatula.

  “I know.”

  “You don’t sound convinced now. What’s wrong? Missing your family?”

  Clara’s parents and their respective spouses are on the opposite side of the country. And she and Drew haven’t lived in San Florentina long enough to have made close friends here yet. Still . . .

  He turns down the flame, abandons the spatula, and comes over to put his arms around her. “Just think . . . this is the last Christmas when it’ll be just the two of us. Next year, Santa will come.”

  “The baby will only be six months old.”

  “You don’t think he’ll still believe in Santa?”

  She laughs at that.

  He kisses her forehead. “Sure he will. I do.”

  “Speaking of the baby . . . I was thinking about the nursery.”

  “What nursery?”

  “The one we’re going to set up in the corner room across the hall from ours. I’ve been looking at paint samples and—”

  “Paint samples? Already? We’ve got plenty of time to—”

  “No, I know, but I want everything to be ready when the baby comes. I was thinking we could do the walls in a pale yellow with white accents, and the furniture could be white, too—kind of antique-looking but not real antiques because old cribs can be dangerous, you know?”

  “I don’t, but I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Just, whatever you do, don’t mention to my father and Sharon that we’re setting up the nursery before the baby comes, because they’re superstitious about that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, they think it can summon the evil eye or something.”

  “God forbid we summon the evil eye,” Drew says lightly. “Listen, I know the clock is ticking but I’m still trying to absorb all of this baby stuff, so do you think we can put off decorating the nursery until tomorrow, at least?”

  “Party pooper.”

  “Who, me?” He returns to the stove. “So do you still want to go to a movie this afternoon?”

  “What about him?” Clara indicates the puppy, now suspiciously sniffing around the doormat.

  “He’ll be fine. He came with a crate. It’s next door at the Tuckers’, along with all his other stuff.”

  “We’re going to lock him in a crate?”

  “Not a crate crate. A dog crate.”

  “I know, but . . . that seems mean.”

  “Clara, that’s what people do when they have to leave puppies alone in the house. Or downstairs at night.”

  “We’re going to lock him in a crate every night?”

  “Not in a bad way.” Drew sees her expression and sighs. “Where do you want him to sleep? In our bed with us?”

  “No, of course not. But maybe on the rug or something.”

  Drew is shaking his head before she even finishes her sentence. “I don’t think we should even get into the habit of letting him come upstairs.”

  “Why not?”

  “We have a baby on the way.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And . . . you know.” Drew gives her a look. “He . . . eats things.”

  Clara bursts out laughing.

  “Oh, sure, you think it’s funny now. But this dog is a loose cannon. We can’t have him wandering around the house.”

  “Whatever. He’ll live down here. But
I’m going to make him a cozy bed. I don’t want him to feel like he’s in prison every night.”

  Cracking eggs into a bowl, Drew drops a shell onto the floor and stoops to pick it up. “That’s fine, but just—hey! No! No!”

  The puppy scampers away with the eggshell in his mouth. Amused, Clara watches Drew chase after him and attempt to pry his teeth apart.

  “What the h—” he catches himself, “what the dickens do you think you’re doing, you crazy dog?”

  “Drew . . . Dickens!”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Drew protests from the floor as he wrestles with the puppy. “I can’t tease you about haunting you when I’m dead, I can’t curse, I can’t say ‘eggs,’ and now I can’t even say—”

  “No, I meant that’s it! That’s a great name for him. Dickens. It even starts with a D—he’ll fit in perfectly with your side of the family.”

  “I thought you said you wanted something Christmasy.”

  “Who wrote A Christmas Carol?”

  Drew grins. “Perfect. Dickens it is. Did you hear that, pal? Your name is Dickens.”

  The puppy wags its tail.

  “He likes it,” Clara decides. “Come here, Dickens.”

  He obediently trots over to her. As she reaches down to pet him, he grabs her slipper from her foot and dashes into a corner with it.

  With an exasperated sigh, Drew starts after him.

  “It’s okay, let him go. You just got me that beautiful new pair for Christmas.”

  “Well, you’d better hide them before he decides to have them for lunch.”

  Dickens drops the slipper abruptly and looks up, head cocked, as if listening.

  “What is it, boy?” Drew asks.

  The dog looks at the door and barks sharply.

  “You want out?”

  “Maybe he’s offended that we’re talking about him and he wants to make a break for it,” Clara tells Drew.

  The dog barks again, then paces, stops, and whines at them.

  “Aw, what’s wrong, puppy?” Clara asks.

  “He probably has to go out. I’ll take him.” Drew crosses to the back door and opens it, grabbing his jacket from a hook. “Let’s go.”