Chapter 13 Christmas Is Coming
December in Pinecrest arrived at its fullness in the third week, which was the week when the community shifted from the ordinary version of itself into the Christmas version.
Holly noticed this as a change in quality rather than a specific event: the store windows doing something different with their arrangements, the people on the main street moving with a slightly different purpose, the conversations at the quilting circle turning toward Christmas preparations with the warm specificity of a community that had been doing this together for long enough to have traditions.
"The church supper on Christmas Eve," Margaret Hobart told her, at the Sunday service. "You'll come."
"I'll come," Holly said.
"Clara makes the honey cakes," Margaret said. "Three years running. The valley has developed expectations."
"I can make something," Holly said. "I bake. What does the valley need?"
"The valley needs whatever you bring," Margaret said. "But I would suggest something from the house's kitchen. The first thing you make for the community from your own house matters."
Holly thought about this. About the first thing from her own kitchen.
She thought about her mother's gingerbread, which was a specific recipe, not the generic kind but the kind with the molasses proportion that was her mother's specific proportion and that she had memorized at twelve because her mother had been the kind of person who cooked from memory and who Holly had recognized, early, as the kind of person whose knowledge needed to be written down.
She would make the gingerbread.
She told James this on the following morning, when he came at eight and found her making a list.
"Gingerbread," he said, reading over her shoulder at the ingredient list.
"My mother's recipe," she said. "I've been making it since I was twelve."
"The spice proportion," he said, reading the list. "That's a specific amount of ginger."
"It's her specific amount," Holly said. "Her gingerbread tasted like her. I've never changed the proportion."
He was quiet for a moment. She was still looking at the list and did not see his expression.
"What did she taste like?" he said.
She looked up. He said it with the quality of genuine interest, not the social question but the real one.
"Warm," she said. "And specific. She was a specific person. She knew what she thought about things and she said it, and the gingerbread tasted like that. Like someone who knew what they were doing and was not apologizing for it."
He looked at the ingredient list for a moment. "She sounds like someone worth knowing," he said.
"She was," Holly said. "She died when I was twenty-six. She was only fifty-two."
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Thank you," she said.
They were quiet for a moment with the shared weight of that kind of loss, the loss of people who were the essential ones, and the specific way that the loss of the essential ones was different from the loss of other people.
"Catherine would have liked your gingerbread," he said. "She was particular about spice proportions."
Holly looked at him. He said it simply, the way he said most things, with the even quality of a man who had learned to say the true thing about his wife without the armor of either avoidance or performance.
"Tell me about her recipe," Holly said. "If she had one."
He told her. Catherine's pie crust, which was the thing she was known for in eastern Colorado, and the specific technique that involved temperature and timing that Catherine had worked out herself and that James had watched her do many times and had attempted once after she died and had not gotten right.
He could describe the technique but he had not produced the result.
"Show me what you remember of it," Holly said.
He looked at her.
"Now," she said. "We have the ingredients. Show me what you remember and we'll work out what you're missing."
He had not, in three years and eight months, made Catherine's pie crust. He had thought about it and had not done it, for the reasons that things you had decided not to do were not done.
"All right," he said.
They spent the morning on it. He described what he remembered and Holly translated the description into action, and the first attempt was not right — he could see it, could feel that the texture was wrong — and they discussed what might be different, and the second attempt was closer, and the third was something that made him go very still when he tasted it.
"That's it," he said.
"What was different?" she said.
"The temperature of the water," he said. "She used the well water in summer, which was cold. I was using room temperature."
"You remembered that when you tasted it," Holly said.
"Yes," he said. He was looking at the pastry with an expression she had not seen before, which was the specific expression of someone who has been given back something they thought was gone.
She did not say anything about the expression. Some things were better received quietly.
* * *
In the evening she wrote in the notebook she kept for things that were not the property notes.
She had not planned to keep two notebooks.
She had planned to keep one. But the property notebook was about the land and the work, and there was another category of observation that was not about the land and the work and that had no place in the property notebook, and she had found herself writing it in the margins of letters she would never send and then had recognized this as the behavior of a person who needed a second notebook.
She wrote: He remembered the water temperature when he tasted the pastry.
He had not made it in three years and he could not remember the water temperature until the right version arrived and then he knew immediately.
This is how some knowledge works. It is not available until the context that unlocks it is present.
Catherine's pie crust required the cold water and the cold water was what called back the knowledge.
She wrote: I do not know what to do with the information I have been accumulating about this man.
The information is: he is honest, he is capable, he does things that need doing without making an announcement of the doing, he has full eyes (Nora's term, which she explained to me and which is accurate), he is not over the loss of his wife in the sense of having moved past it but he is in the right relationship with it, which is: carrying it without being crushed by it.
He gave me the honest answer when I asked for the decision version.
He made pie crust from memory this morning and went still when he tasted it.
She wrote: I came here for a homestead. I came here because the letter arrived when the position was eliminated and the savings were eleven weeks. I came here because of the feeling under the apple tree. I did not come here for a specific man. And yet.
She closed the notebook and banked the stove and went to bed, and the mountains were invisible in the dark outside the window and entirely present, and the notebook sat on the table with what she had written in it, and the morning would come and he would come at eight and there was nothing to be done about any of it except to keep paying attention, which she was going to keep doing.