“Well, of course they do, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon.” My mother’s voice sounded teary.

“Beth, can you slow down a bit?” my father said.

“Not really, Dad. I mean, it’s like you said, I am growing up, and—”

“I meant your driving,” my father explained. “Can you slow down? The roads are a little slick.” Beth was driving, and being in the passenger seat was not a comfortable place for my father.

“Yes, Father,” my sister answered, in that formal tone she always used when she was sure he was wrong but she was prepared to humor him.

She slowed the car down. I was grateful. I knew she was a very responsible driver—a responsible everything—but I was never as easy going with her behind the wheel as when my father was driving. And the roads really were a bit icy—what else would you expect for December in New York?

“Besides,” my mother said, “Beth’s not the one who should be feeling guilty. I’m the one who’s going to be lying in the sun and leaving my baby stuck up here in the snow and cold.”

“I like the winter, Mom.”

“But you love Phuket,” my mother said. “You’re always saying that Thailand is your favorite place in the world.”

“Not anymore,” I said.

They all looked at me quizzically—including my sister in the rearview mirror.

“Now her favorite is any place where her Tadpole is.”

My father snorted a little and then choked back the laugh. “Tadpole” was the nickname I’d hung on Beth’s boyfriend, Tad. She didn’t like it, which of course made my father and me like it even more. They’d been together almost six months now, and it was beginning to look like a serious sort of thing.

“You all know that Tad has nothing to do with my decision to stay home. He’s not even going to be around the whole the time.”

“He’s not?” my mother asked.

“No. His family is heading up to Vermont to ski. They go skiing every Christmas the same way we go to Thailand.”

“I didn’t know that,” my mother moaned.

“I didn’t tell you because I was sure, if you thought I was going to be alone for even a day, you’d want to cancel your trip and you’d end up ruining everybody’s Christmas.”

“So this way it’s just your Christmas that’s ruined?” my mother said.

“It won’t be ruined,” Beth said. “Tad’s parents even invited me to come along with them.”

“And you turned them down?” my father asked.

“I would have liked to go, but I couldn’t.”

“Why not?” my mother asked.

“For the same reason I can’t go with you. They’re not getting back until the twenty-eighth, and by then I have to be in Minnesota.”

We all knew what that meant. Beth’s swim team was heading out on the road for a swim meet on December 27. My sister was in first-year university on a swimming scholarship.

“That is so stupid,” I said to her. “Couldn’t your coach find a swim meet in Alaska? How did he manage to find a meet in one of the few places in the entire United States that’s even colder than New York?”