Lucy sat up in her chair, trying to wrap her mind around what she'd heard.

  "Wait," said Lucy. "You're not coming home for Christmas? You're spending Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa?"

  "Oh, I'm sure you'll do fine without me," said her mom. "You know, I haven't seen my parents for a year now, and they're getting older, and I've got this idea for cloud portraits using Grandma and Grandpa. Oh, it'll be spectacular. Clouds age as people do, only a cloud's life is shorter. I'm imagining a photograph of a cloud above the landscape of a human face. And, Lucy, the landscapes in your grandpa's face are awe-inspiring!"

  "Mom—wait," said Lucy. "When are you coming home?" Lucy's mind reeled.

  "I'm not sure, Lucy," she heard her mom say across the line. "But I'd say things have almost run their course. So, soon."

  Soon? Did she say "soon" again? Lucy felt confused. In fact, the entire idea sounded strange. Lucy couldn't even imagine Grandpa sitting long enough for one of her mom's portraits, let alone trying to get a suitably wrinkled cloud to line up behind him. Anyway, Lucy would rather go for a desert walk with Grandpa than make him sit still for an hour. . . .

  And then Lucy thought of something.

  If her mom wasn't going to be in Turtle Rock for Christmas, maybe Lucy could be in Nevada. . . . Yeah. Lucy hadn't seen her grandparents in a while, and they always wanted her to come out and see them.

  Lucy saw just how it would be. Every morning, Grandpa would yell at Grandma for fussing in the kitchen while he made his eggs. Her grandma would put Lucy to work wrapping presents and making beaded ornaments. After Grandpa's nap, he and Lucy would play cribbage. (There'd be a running score all vacation long.) And every evening, Lucy would stand in her grandparents' kitchen and watch her mom chop vegetables for soup. Lucy would tell her mom about the arrested sledders, detention, and Wiggins Hill. It was perfect. Yes!

  "We'll talk every day on the phone," said her mom, breaking the silence on the line. "I promise."

  "Can I spend Christmas with you and Grandma and Grandpa?" Lucy blurted this out.

  There was a pause. The pause felt solid.

  "Oh, Lucy," her mom said finally. "I don't know."

  "Why not?" said Lucy. "All we need is a plane ticket. I haven't been to Nevada in forever."

  "Think of your father," her mom said. "He'll be all alone."

  "He's fine," Lucy said. "He's got his magazines." (Later, Lucy felt guilty for this betrayal of her father.)

  Her mom replied suddenly, almost interrupting Lucy: "We can't afford it, Lucy. We simply cannot afford it."

  "I'll pay you back," Lucy said, with a tinge of desperation. If Lucy couldn't go to Nevada, that meant she would have to consider the alternative, and Lucy didn't want to consider the alternative—alone, with her dad, eating in silence on Christmas Day. Christmas was for families—for the whole family, not shards of it. Lucy couldn't stay here.

  She wouldn't stay here! No! Lucy begged, she pleaded, she whined. She tried it all.

  "But what about the birds?" said Lucy finally, in a small voice.

  "What?" said her mom.

  "The birds," said Lucy, feeling suddenly angry. There were promises her mom wasn't keeping, things that were important, Christmas things. "You're supposed to help me decorate the bird tree."

  "Lucy," said her mom. "I'm sorry. That's just not going to work out this year." The words by themselves could have been construed as warm, even a "sorry" tucked into them. But Lucy knew her mom wasn't really sorry. Her tone was flat. It said something like this: You've gone too far. This is the way it will be and I don't want to hear another word about it. Do you understand?

  Lucy couldn't believe her mom would use that tone about Christmas. And in that moment, Lucy thought a bad thought: maybe her mom didn't want her to come to Nevada for Christmas.

  Lucy banished this thought immediately. Her mom was driving across country photographing clouds, and who did Lucy think was paying for this trip? They were paying for it. And Lucy's dad was a postmaster, and he couldn't be making all that much, and who knew how much her mom had saved up. This trip had to cost a lot, didn't it? Driving across country?

  The phone line was quiet. Lucy's mom seemed to be waiting for Lucy to say something, but Lucy couldn't think of anything to say. So instead, Lucy put the phone receiver on the chair in the hallway and went to get her dad, who seemed to be waiting for her in the kitchen. He got up and went to the phone.

  "Josephine," she heard him say. "What's this I hear about you not coming home for Christmas?"

  Lucy felt a tiny prick of satisfaction knowing that her mom had some explaining to do.

  Soon afterward, Lucy decided that Christmas held no interest for her. She was over it. Good thing she got her shopping done, because now she could forget about Christmas. Let the snap-together tree sit in its box. She could wait Christmas out. Why pretend it was more than it was? Twenty-four measly hours of gimme-gimme gluttony—that's it. It would pass.

  Of course, trying to forget about Christmas made Lucy think about it obsessively, and not in a nice way, either. Christmas lights wasted electricity. Ax murder was what happened to Christmas trees. (Don't even ask about Christmas tree farms!) She'd see an image of Santa and think lies, lies—all lies.

  Lucy knew better than to say these thoughts out loud. Instead, she was giving Christmas, and the rest of the celebrating world, the cold shoulder.

  For two days Lucy sat in her anti-Christmas, anti-cheer funk, and at the end of it, she found herself sitting on the big red couch at the Rossignol Bakery, watching Sam and Zoë secretly discuss something up at the counter as they waited for Mrs. Rossignol to finish steaming their hot apple ciders. Lucy didn't like how they leaned in together, and then each of them looked her way. Anybody would be grumpy if friends did this, she thought.

  "Hey," she yelled over to them. "Don't forget my cinnamon stick!"

  In reply, Zoë twirled three cinnamon sticks over her head. She leaned in to listen to Sam like he was a fount of wisdom. Zoë probably liked Sam, or something. Oh, good grief, that was it! Zoë was tall, all fashionable in her Wild Thrift clothes, and Sam liked her! Lucy was doomed to spend the rest of their friendship being the third wheel in some sort of adolescent romance. Great.

  Finally, they brought the three mugs of apple cider over, and Lucy was just about to grab hers, when Zoë said "Now!"

  Suddenly, Lucy found her shoulders pressed into the back of the red couch. Sam held her left shoulder and Zoë, her right.

  Lucy felt like an insect pinned for display. "What?" she demanded, struggling under their palms.

  "Ah, yes," said Zoë, peering down at Lucy. "The patient seems unwell. I need to perform a few tests. Lucy, say the first thing you think after hearing the following words."

  Oh, give me a break, thought Lucy. She hated it when Zoë insisted on playing games like this. Sometimes Zoë was such a freak.

  Zoë continued: "Sugar cookie?"

  Lucy sighed, rolled her eyes, and said, "Cholesterol."

  "Ornament?"

  "Eyesore."

  "Christmas music?"

  "Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy some more!" Lucy sang to the tune of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen."

  "Angel?" asked Sam.

  "Tree up my butt."

  Zoë and Sam laughed and let go of her shoulders. Lucy did not see what was funny.

  Then Zoë stood up and paced back and forth, shaking her head. "You see what I mean, Samuel? There is something wrong with Lucy. She has lost her Christmas spirit."

  Lucy looked between Sam and Zoë and finally understood. "It doesn't have anything to do with you two! Okay?" Lucy yelled this—surprising even herself. "Are you satisfied?"

  Zoë backed up with her hands above her head. "Just trying to help," she said.

  A bakery customer grabbed her bag and hustled out the door.

  Lucy glanced over at Mrs. Rossignol, who looked more than a little perturbed. "Those were rosettes, Lucy," she said. "I'm sure she'll be back in half a second when she realizes that she crushed them all trying to escape you!"

  "Sorry," Lucy said. And she meant it.

  Sam looked shocked.

  Then Lucy started to cry, and between gulps, told them all about her mom and Christmas and not going to Nevada. Zoë put her arm around her shoulder and Sam sat forward to listen.

  And then Mrs. Rossignol swooped down and scooped Lucy into her arms.

  "It's dumb," Lucy kept saying. "It's stupid." She tried to push her fingers against her tear ducts to stop the tears. But they kept coming, so Lucy kept crying.

  "It's not dumb. It's not stupid," said Mrs. Rossignol. She rocked Lucy back and forth. "It matters because it's Christmas."

  Mrs. Rossignol kept rocking Lucy long after she finished crying. But getting free of a woman who wrangles pastry every day is no easy matter. Lucy wiggled this way and that, but Mrs. Rossignol kept patting her on the back, thumping her the way a baker thumps bread dough. "Have a cry," she kept saying. "It's good every once in a while."

  "I fink I'm dun cryung gnow," Lucy said as loudly as she could into the enormous aproned bosom pressed up into her face.

  Sam and Zoë burst out laughing, and Lucy couldn't stop herself from laughing, too.

  That's when Mrs. Rossignol let Lucy go.

  "Well, if all you're going to do is laugh," she said sternly, "I've got customers who need me!"

  The next night, a Friday night, Zoë called on the walkie-talkie to see if Lucy wanted to go to a movie, but Lucy told her she had "a family obligation she needed to attend to."

  "Are you sure?" Zoë's voice sounded tinny and far away on the walkie-talkie.

  "Another time," said Lucy.

  "Okay. Over and out."

  Lucy stared at the blue walkie-talkie, half hoping Zoë would buzz back and beg her to come to the movie. But instead, Lucy heard the Rossignols' garage door open and close, and then tires crunching over snow in the driveway. Lucy felt a little like crying. No, she thought, shaking off the tears. This was the beginning of a hard new life, where mothers did not come home for Christmas and do the things they were supposed to do. Lucy cared, and so she must shoulder the world's burdens alone. This very night she would begin a lifelong path of sacrificing her happiness for the good of others. Eventually she would die, shriveled up and forgotten like a raisin rolled under an edge of linoleum, but who cared? She needed to decorate the bird tree. Lucy gritted her teeth. For the birds.

  Lucy popped some popcorn and began to thread it together with a needle and thread. She sat in the kitchen, a big bowl of popcorn in front of her and WBRR, North Country Radio playing softly in the background. She heard her dad turn a magazine page in the other room—probably Stories of the Pony Express, which had just come in the mail.

  When her fingers began aching, and she had finished only one strand of popcorn, Lucy dropped her head onto the table. She couldn't stand it. She couldn't do it. Only one hour had passed—one lousy hour into her mission of self-sacrifice—and she was already wrinkling and pruning like that forgotten raisin.

  "Dad," she said weakly. "Help!" Lucy said this so quietly, she was sure he hadn't heard. She imagined the sound wobbling to the end of the table and puffing off into nothingness.

  "Did you call?" he said.

  "Yes," Lucy said weakly again. She closed her eyes. Her strength was spent, gone. She was a rattling old sack of bones.

  Then she heard the lever release on the lounger. The next thing Lucy knew, her dad was laughing. Lucy kept her eyes closed and tried not to respond, though she could feel her lips twitching into a smile.

  "Looks like it's a Christmas emergency," he said finally. "Remain calm and stay where you are. I'll get help."

  Lucy heard synthesized Christmas carols start on the stereo in the living room. And when he began to bang around in the kitchen, Lucy opened one eye to watch. On the stove, he stirred a bar of chocolate into fresh milk. Finally, he set a mug of hot chocolate in front of her. Lucy sat up, took a sip, and smiled.

  "In the nick of time," she said.

  "I thought so," he said.

  Then they both got to work.

  That night, as they sat at the kitchen table, Lucy forgot all about the cold, hard life she was planning. Lucy watched her dad struggling to thread the popcorn, tiny in his large hands, and she thought the happiness inside her just might break a bone—maybe a wishbone. Did people have wishbones? Or did only chickens get to be that lucky?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  During winter break, Lucy kept herself busy at the Rossignol Bakery. No time to think, and that's the way she liked it. Customers called on the phone to reserve mincemeat, apple, or pumpkin pies for Christmas, and place orders for holiday parties. Mrs. Rossignol enforced strict guidelines for the fragile baked goods. Sandbakkels, a kind of buttery cup that melted in a person's mouth, were too fragile to leave the bakery and were for in-store eating only. Krumkake (a thin cookie rolled into a cone), pizzelles (wafer cookies pressed with an iron), and rosettes (a batter deep-fried into crisp, delicate stars and covered with powdered sugar) were allowed to leave the bakery, but only after the buyer got a lecture about how these were sensitive baked goods (think a bad thought and they might break) and that the Rossignol Bakery couldn't replace the broken ones, even for blood relations. Buy at your own risk! Lucy was good at lecturing, so she liked that part. She'd be whistling happily by the time she'd packed up the order, rang up the sale on the big cash register, and sent the customer on their way. But Lucy didn't always get to be out front. Often she found herself helping in back, peeling apples, grating chocolate, and scooping out the insides of cooked pumpkins. She also cleaned the tables in the seating area and made sure there was enough turbinado sugar for the coffee in the condiment rack.

  After lunch, Lucy and Zoë would go on strike, demanding a break.

  "I'm not keeping you here," Mrs. Rossignol would say, rolling her eyes for the benefit of the customers. Then they would run in and out of the downtown stores. They'd meet Sam, Lisa, Edna, and Quote and go ice-skating at the elementary-school ice rink, or cross-country skiing; or sometimes they'd climb on the mountains of snow the snowplows left behind the bakery.

  It was on one of these excursions that Lucy and Zoë ended up at The Wild Thrift. Zoë dressed Lucy up in a sequined cocktail dress, and Lucy made Zoë put on a tuxedo over army-issue long Johns.

  They stood side by side admiring their outfits in the shop mirror when Zoë said, "Don't take this the wrong way, okay?"

  Lucy froze. Never once had she ever liked what people said after that kind of statement. "Say it," said Lucy.

  "If you're going to be like that. . ."

  "Like what?" said Lucy. "You brought this up. Say it!"

  "Okay, you were bossy during the postcard campaign. Everyone had to do it your way. No one worked hard enough. I mean, come on, it's just sledding. No one's dying here."

  Lucy stared at herself in the too-big slinky dress that fell to her ankles, and realized she didn't want to explain about how she was trying to find out if she was "gifted and talented" at something, and how she had failed because the hill was still fenced, and that meant . . . But Lucy wasn't thinking about that right now.

  Zoë continued: "I don't mean to be harsh, but you get too serious sometimes. I mean, don't you ever want to be happy and not so worked up? You make life a lot harder than it has to be. You know what I mean, right?"

  Lucy stood speechless. This is what Zoë thought? Lucy wanted to shake her. Zoë knew that most people spent their whole lives numb to everything outside their immediate life. They didn't see. They didn't hear. They didn't taste, smell, touch, or feel. Miracles and disasters exploded on the right and the left, and these people went on plodding ahead, oblivious to it all. So if a few people responded with passion, wasn't that cause for celebration?

  "No!" said Lucy finally. "No, I don't!" Lucy pushed herself into the changing booth and put on her clothes. Lucy had thought Zoë was for her, through and through, one hundred percent.

  Lucy didn't talk much as they walked back to the bakery. Zoë kept stealing looks at Lucy again and again and again.

  "You are my best friend," said Zoë, after a few blocks of silence.

  "Yeah, okay," said Lucy. "I just didn't think you wanted me to change into some happy-go-lucky bimbo with no brains."

  "I don't," said Zoë.

  "You do! Admit it!"

  "Admit you judged me during the postcard campaign," said Zoë. She stopped walking. "You thought I wasn't working hard enough."

  "Okay, yeah," said Lucy. "But the worst was that you found cable needles, types of sewing machines, and your latest jeans rehab so much more fascinating."

  "What if I did? Is that so bad?"

  They walked in silence. Then Zoë said, "Okay, as long as we're being all honest, I've got another question for you: are you comparing yourself to me? I might be making this up, but sometimes I swear it feels true!"

  This one took Lucy by surprise. She started to say, "No," and then she realized it was true. She hadn't been able to get over the fact that Zoë's growth spurt had left her in the dust.

  "I guess it's clear, then," said Zoë quickly. "Neither of us is a perfect friend." She pushed open the bakery door.

  This incident blew over, they apologized to each other, and they didn't speak of it. Everything seemed normal (they laughed and talked), except that Lucy couldn't get the conversation out of her head. And neither of them ever asked the other to go to The Wild Thrift again.

  Lucy's mom kept her promise to call nightly from Nevada during winter break. It amounted to her mom talking and Lucy listening. Sometimes Lucy said a few things, too. Lucy tried to work herself into being a good person by thinking the right sort of thoughts: wasn't it true that they didn't have the money to fly Lucy to Nevada? And why shouldn't her mom be with her parents over Christmas? She had a family, too, and she missed them. But about ten, fifteen minutes into their conversations, Lucy would notice how lame their Christmas tree looked this year, or realize she hadn't had a sip of eggnog, and couldn't think of anything to say to her mom. A long pause, and then good-byes ended the conversation.