In the living room, the aluminum tree was still bare—decorating the tree on Christmas Eve was a family tradition—and a gas log burned brightly in the fireplace. She reacquainted herself with the old plaster bas-reliefs of grapes and vines and leaves beneath the cornice, and the heavy wooden beams across the ceiling. She smiled. She had been born in this house. Wherever she went, however far, this would be home to her. "Where are Julia and Robert?"

"Robert's been stationed in Omaha," Rita answered from the kitchen. "They can't make it this year. Be out in March, maybe."

"Oh," Patricia said, disappointed. She returned to the kitchen. "Where's Papa?"

"Watching TV."

Paul came in the kitchen door heavily loaded. Patricia took one of the boxes from him and laid it on the floor next to the refrigerator for unloading. "We were expecting an army, so we brought lots of stuff," she said.

Rita pushed through layers of food and shook her head. "It'll get eaten. We're having Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz from next door, and cousin Enrique and his new wife. So this is Paul?"

"Yup."

Rita hugged him, her arms barely meeting around his back. She took hold of both his hands and stood away, surveying. He smiled. Tall, thin Paul, with his brown hair and light skin, looking more Anglo than the others. Still, Rita smiled as they talked. Paul could hold his own.

She walked down the hall to the den where her father would be sitting in front of the television. They had never been well-off, and the TV was a twenty-five-year-old model that made a rainbow ghost whenever it received 3-D transmissions.

"Papa?" Patricia said quietly, sneaking up behind him in the half-dark.

"Patty!" Ramon Vasquez looked around the rear cushion of his chair, a big grin lifting his pepper-gray mustache. He had been partly paralyzed by a stroke three years before and even with surgery hadn't fully recovered. Patricia sat on the divan beside him.

"I've brought Paul home with me," she said. "I'm sorry Julia can't be here this time."

"Me, too. But that's air force." Ramon had been in the air force for twenty years before retiring in 1996. Except for Patricia, the family was enmeshed in the air force. Julia had met Robert at a party on March Air Force Base six years ago.

"I've got something to tell everybody, Papa."

"Oh? What's that?" Had his speech improved since they last talked face to face? It seemed so. She hoped so.

Rita called out from the kitchen. "Daughter! Come help me and Paul put away this stuff."

"What're you watching?" Patricia asked, reluctant to leave.

"News."

A commentator—and his scarcely less formidable ghost—was leading into a story about the Stone. Patricia lingered despite her mother's second call.

"As more and more personnel are sent to the Stone, citizen and scientific groups are asking for an open forum. Today, in the fourth year of a joint NATO–Eurospace investigation, the cloak wrapped around the Stone is as impenetrable as ever, and—"