Candles for Christmas

Through the window I saw Jacob cross the street and rush up the stairs. It was raining with such a biblical fury that there was a hard wall of water between us, and yet I could still make out a troubled look on his face.

Before I could react Jacob kicked open the door and entered. He looked nearly drowned. He leaned towards me, and I thought he was going to whisper something in my ear, but instead he pulled me to him and held me tightly in his arms. I felt oddly dazzled by the spontaneity of his gesture. The water off his coat soaked through my blouse, and once he had kissed me and pulled away, I looked like someone had directed the full force of a garden hose at my chest.

"I'm sorry," Jacob said. "I've ruined you."

"I dry very quickly."

My mother emerged from the kitchen carrying a vodka in orange juice, her preferred evening drink.

"Barbara!" Jacob said to my mother. "Be a pal and fix me one of those."

"Susan, are you having a drink?" My soaking-wet handsome husband seemed to be a bundle of life this evening.

"I wasn't planning on it."

"But you would," he said. "Things happen you don't plan on."

"Are you all right?"

"Never better," he said, but his voice didn't convince me. "Barbara, we want two of what you are having."

So my mother returned to the cabinet where the vodka was kept and began mixing the drinks. She had moved in with us at our Hudson Street, New York residence only an year back, after the death of my father. Living all alone in a seven-room house at seventy, proved a bit too lonely for her. She sold the sprawling house in San Francisco at a throwaway price, but money had never meant much to Barbara.

Jacob hung up his coat on the porch, where it could drip without consequence, and I put the chicken on the table. Steve, our thirteen-year old son shuffled into the kitchen.

"Chicken are shot full of hormones," he declared with the all-encompassing teenage authority.

"Everything is a health hazard if you look at it that way." Jacob put a piece of chicken on Steve's plate. "You never really know what's good for you or what's bad for you. You never know what's going to get you until it's too late."