Bring Me Home for Christmas

come?”
    “Shopping?”
    “Yes, that. But can I come do crafts? Paige, that’s my specialty, sort of.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “Oh, man, I wish I had my stuff! You just don’t know how much stuff I have—patterns and instruction books and stencils, all kinds of supplies. You know, money’s been so tight, lots of teachers just go buy stuff for the class. I used to hit up my surfing team for donations for supplies and once word spread, I had everyone from my mom’s ladies golf group to the neighborhood firefighters buying stuff for my kids. When the elementary school where I was teaching shut down, they let me keep all the things I had donated or bought myself.”
    Paige was frowning. “Didn’t I understand that you’re not supposed to travel? It’s a good half hour, one way, to Fortuna.”
    “Do you have a console between the front seats in your car? I can sit in the back and elevate my leg by putting it on the console.”
    “You’d be sitting beside Dana, the road queen. She loves to go anywhere. She puts her jacket on every morning and says ‘We go now?’”
    Becca laughed. “Even better. Love a road queen!” She shoveled some of her omelet into her mouth. “When are you going?”
    Paige shook her head. “Finish your breakfast. The kids won’t be home till around two. We have lots of time.”
    “Oh, this will be great,” she said. Finally, she thought—something she was actually good at!

    Although Paige argued with her, Becca couldn’t help herself. She had great ideas for Thanksgiving projects for kids. She bought terra-cotta flowerpots, black felt and artificial mums for pilgrim-hat centerpieces; she found stencils for construction-paper turkeys; she knew how to make cornucopias out of paper plates and string, and decorative gourds from crumpled-up colored tissue paper. Then there was the standard turkey out of a hand-print. Actually, that was the tip of the iceberg—she had a million craft ideas. But she didn’t want to overwhelm the kids. She was absolutely in her element.
    “I see you’ve mastered pushing around a shopping cart while on crutches,” Paige said. “What a woman!”
    There were a couple of other women helping out with the crafts—Denny’s landlady, Jo Fitch, and the pastor’s wife, Ellie Kincaid. By two-fifteen, she was meeting the children in the basement of the church. Ellie’s kids, Danielle and Trevor, were nine and five. Danielle’s little friend, Megan Thickson, was only eight and hung pretty close to her; she seemed awful shy. Megan’s little brother, Jeremy, played with Trevor.
    The first order of business was an after-school snack—these kids had had a long day. Jo and Ellie served up milk and chocolate chip cookies. Mel Sheridan brought her kids, though they were too young to do anything constructive—they sat at a table with Dana and colored on a large roll of butcher paper. Of course, there was Christopher and about six other kids who regularly attended Sunday school there and played with each other around the neighborhood.
    Becca showed them how to glue precut black felt to the flowerpots, making them look like pilgrim hats. The older kids turned them out like little factories. She cut the colorful construction paper for the younger ones so they could glue the tail feathers on the paper turkeys. And she worked on constructing the horns of plenty from paper plates, then showed the older girls—Danielle and Megan—how to crumple tissue paper into the shape of gourds. Because Megan seemed so shy, Becca spent a little extra time showing her the ropes, trying to make conversation.
    “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping your leg elevated?” Jo Fitch asked her.
    “I forget, but it feels okay.”
    “Forget less,” Jo said. “You don’t want trouble.” She pushed a chair next to Becca so she could put her leg up.
    “How did you break it?” Megan asked her very softly.
    “Oh, I was careless. I jumped out of my brother’s big old truck without looking first and twisted it funny. It turns out I’m lucky. It could’ve been worse. But I did have surgery and have a couple of screws holding it together!”
    “My dad had surgery, too,” she said.
    “Oh? Is he all right now?”
    Megan shrugged and concentrated on her tissue-paper gourds. “Yeah. Except he doesn’t have his job.”
    “Oh?” Becca asked. “What was his job?”
    “Logger. He cut down the really big trees. He fell and got hurt and ran out of ability and they