Chapter 18 Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve in Pinecrest was the community in its fullest version, the version of itself that it had been building toward all of December.
Holly arrived at the church with her gingerbread in a cloth-covered basket, which she had decided was the right presentation — not the paper wrapping she'd used for the individual household packets, but the proper serving arrangement, the gingerbread arranged on the cloth with the seriousness due to a public occasion.
James was already there, because James was always either already there or arrived exactly on time, which she had determined was characteristic.
He was standing with Elias Caldwell near the door, the two of them having what appeared to be a conversation about fence posts, which in this valley was apparently a conversation that could happen anywhere at any time.
He saw her across the room and came.
She had been learning his face for five weeks now and she knew it well enough to read the versions: the working face, which was attentive and forward; the thinking face, which was slightly inward; the talking-about-Catherine face, which had a quality of careful handling, the care you gave to something that was valuable and fragile in a way that had nothing to do with its material weight.
And this face, which was the one she was still cataloguing because it was new — the face he had when he came toward her in a room.
"The gingerbread looks good," he said.
"It is good," she said. "My mother didn't make inferior gingerbread."
"No," he said. "She didn't." He looked at the basket. "I need to tell you something."
She looked at him.
"Bill ate his and asked if there was more," he said. "I told him you made it from your mother's recipe. He said: she sounds like good people. I thought you should know."
Holly felt the warmth of this — the specific warmth of being received by a community through the thing you had offered it. "Bill sounds like good people too," she said.
"He is," James said. "Quiet, but good."
Nora arrived between them with the specific efficiency of someone who had been waiting for this moment. She looked at Holly and then at James and then at Holly again.
"You're both here," she said. "Together. At the church."
"Yes," Holly said.
"Good," Nora said. She said it with the serene satisfaction of a completed prediction, and then she went toward the altar area where the pageant children were assembling, her silver-starred costume catching the candlelight.
"She knew," Holly said.
"She knows everything," James said. "I've given up being surprised by it."
They found a pew together — not arranged, simply the natural consequence of arriving together and sitting together, the way things arranged themselves when the arrangement was right.
Clara and Elias were in the second pew and Clara turned and gave Holly the specific warm look of a woman who has been waiting for this development and is glad it has arrived on schedule.
Hobart preached from Luke. The shepherds in the field.
Fear not. The light coming where the attention was ready.
Holly sat in the pew and listened and thought about attention and what she had been paying attention to since she arrived in this valley on the first of December, which was everything — the land and the people and the practical requirements and the man beside her who had been coming to her house every morning and who was now sitting beside her in the front section of the Pinecrest Community Church on Christmas Eve with the composed quality that was simply who he was.
Fear not. She had not been afraid. She had been uncertain and busy and focused, which were different from fear.
She had been practical about most things and occasionally foolish about the ones that deserved foolishness, which she thought might be what faith looked like when it was working correctly.
Nora said her lines as the angel. She said them in the direct voice of a child who meant every word. Fear not. The candlelight caught the silver stars on her hem and sent small specific lights across the wall.
James was very still beside Holly.
She had learned enough about his stillness to know what this one meant.
She found his hand in the dark of the pew and held it. He held back.
After the service, the supper in the hall. Holly's gingerbread was received with the warm specificity that small-community food was received — not politely, but genuinely, the way food was received when people knew each other and knew what they were eating and who had made it.
"Your mother's recipe," Clara said, eating a piece. "I can taste the care in it."
"That's the molasses proportion," Holly said. "She was specific about the molasses."
"Tell me," Clara said. And Holly told her, and Clara listened with the specific attention she gave to things that were worth knowing, and the gingerbread recipe passed from one kitchen to another in the way that good recipes passed, which was through the community of people who made and ate and gave, and it was Christmas Eve, and the valley was warm inside the cold night, and the mountains were invisible and entirely present, and everything was exactly right.