“Really?” I put down the scissors and stared. “You never told me. Or if you did, I assumed you were just being polite.”

“Your family had the kind of holiday dinners I always longed for,” he said. “The kind every other kid on base—or later, in the neighborhood—got to eat. Real old-fashioned meals, like the Pilgrims ate. I wish we could go back to that.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We fell silent again. I wasn’t sure what Michael was thinking, but I was pondering the fact that I already felt better about our mothers’ strange and over-the-top holiday menus, knowing Michael didn’t like them any more than I did.

“I have a plan,” he said finally. “To satisfy the longing we both have for an old-fashioned Christmas dinner.”

“We run away and eat with Mrs. Fenniman?”

“Better,” he said. “We cook our own.”

“And have three Christmas dinners?” I shuddered slightly. “I’m not sure that’s much of an improvement.”

“We could do ours on Christmas Eve,” he said. “Remember that little basement apartment we lived in before we found the house?”

I nodded.

“It’s vacant at the moment. And the owner of the house is a friend. He’s trying to decide whether to rent it out again or remodel it as part of his house. I’m sure I could arrange for us to borrow the apartment.”

“And do what?”

“Cook our own Christmas dinner,” he said. “Just you and me and the boys. Not a big dinner—the kitchen’s pretty tiny. But I can drop by the turkey farm and get a small bird.”

“It takes a while to cook even a small turkey,” I pointed out.

“And you’ll probably be swamped with more church-swapping chores,” he said. “So I’ll pick up the ingredients, and the boys can help me get it started, and then you can join us in the basement apartment for our own little Christmas dinner. The four of us. And then when the tryptophan in the turkey starts working on the boys, we bring them home, put them to bed, and assemble the train tracks and whatever else in a fabulous mood.”

“It’s a crazy idea,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

We took time off from our wrapping to run to the kitchen for a few cookbooks and make a list of utensils and ingredients we’d need. And by the time we’d finished that, it was well past bedtime, but we lay awake for quite a while, inventing ever more fantastic tales to tell our families about our absence on Christmas Eve, and giggling until I was afraid we’d wake the boys. It was nearly one by the time we fell asleep.

And half past three when Michael’s pager went off again.

Chapter 21