Page 9 of Supernova

“Frank…” Ed whispers hoarsely. He looks afraid to reach out for her, but with only the slightest hesitation, he does.

Frankie swallows hard, looking at him there in his white t-shirt and boxers. She tears her eyes away from his body and drags them back up to his eyes. “Come here,” she whispers, holding out a hand for him to hold. She's going to do this, even though it's hard for her to still her mind and focus on the moment when they're together. She'll do this for Ed. For them. “Take me to bed.”

FOUR

jo

No one answersFrankie’s door. Jo had tried calling, but she figured she might have more luck just coming by and knocking to see if her friend felt like joining her on a walk. Jo knocks again and steps back from the front door, looking at the darkened windows and eyeing the empty driveway. It seems like no one is home.

It’s only a couple of days before Christmas, so perhaps Frankie is out doing last minute shopping, or maybe she and Ed had dinner plans with friends or something. Jo folds her arms across her narrow waist and gives it another minute. Still nothing.

With resignation, she turns and walks down to the street. She might as well walk anyway, given that Bill and the kids are occupied with watchingThe Judy Garland Christmas Showwhile she’s supposed to be strolling with Frankie. At first Jo hadn’t felt sure that evening walks would fit into her lifestyle, but with the move to Florida back in the spring, it had seemed like the perfect time to change the way they did some things around the Booker household.

First had come the walks with Frankie, and then Jo had taken a position volunteering at Stardust General Hospital.Being out and about and doing things that are just for her has been invigorating for Jo, and lately she’s been thinking of what else she might do to enrich her life. It's been a somewhat slow realization for her, but as she's settled into her new life in Florida, she's discovered that the way she lives her life trickles down and has an impact on her children. But of course it does! She'd just never understood how much. Each time she slips on her shoes and leaves for the hospital, she knows her two daughters are watching her and seeing that their mother is not only giving her time to others, but doing something that fills her own cup. Jo is certainly not the first woman to realize this, but this is the first time in her life that she feels herself setting an example for her children rather than just raising them from day to day.

She walks now, looking at the houses all lit up with holiday lights and sparkling tinsel-covered trees in the front windows. It’s her first year spending Christmas anywhere but Minnesota, and the juxtaposition of holiday decorations with a clear seventy degree evening is so incongruous that it feels to Jo like she’s in a different world. In a way, it's helpful that it feels so different--it makes it easier to imagine her Christmases of the past as being from another part of her life, and this new, tropical Christmas feels more like a fresh start. It's taken her the better part of the year to get to this place where she can appreciate the things she's experiencing in Stardust Beach, but Jo smiles as she walks, pleased to find that she really does feel more at home than she had when they'd first arrived.

Christmas for Jo has always been snow and family and roaring fires, and now it’s suddenly light sweaters, fresh-squeezed orange juice sipped poolside, and little plastic Santas dressed in sunglasses and swim trunks posed in front yards. As she’s comparing the two different places in her mind, a man in a convertible drives by with Christmas music blaring from hisradio. He lifts a hand at Jo and she waves back as she steps onto the sidewalk.

It’s hard not to think back to holidays past, and as Jo passes a house with a row of electric candles sitting on the sill of the front window, she remembers the way her grandmother had always welcomed them on Christmas Eve by placing three lit candles in the front window of her farmhouse.

Suddenly, as she remembers the way she felt driving up the long, winding road to her grandparents' farm, Jo is not out walking through a brand-new neighborhood on a balmy evening. The sky above is not the color of a bruised plum, and the grass that rolls from the sidewalks up to the front doors of the houses is not lush and green. She imagines instead that she’s actually at her grandparents’ house, with the thick blanket of snow on the roof like a layer of white icing on a cake. Smoke curls from the chimney and up into the gray evening sky in her mind’s eye, and instead of a man in a thin button-down shirt stacking wrapped packages into the trunk of his yellow Impala in a driveway, she sees her grandfather in a heavy coat, boots, and a hat with heavy woolen flaps that cover his ears as he stacks freshly chopped wood with his chapped hands.

“Josephine!” her grandfather would have called out, a smile forming beneath a gray-white mustache. Oh, how she’d loved her grandfather!

In her memory, young Jo ran to him, wrapping arms around his waist and pressing her face to the front of his coat, which smelled of pipe tobacco and woodsmoke. “Is Grandma inside?”

Her grandfather looked down at her with a twinkle in his eye. “Unless Santa Claus came and swept her off her feet. You know, she’s always wanted to see the North Pole.”

Jo let go of him and went running towards the front door, next to the window with its lit candles. “Grandma!” she called out, kicking off her snowy shoes just inside the front door. Ahuge, orange, crackling fire leapt in the grate, and next to it, a big fir tree with lights and decorations beckoned. Beneath the bows of the tree were wrapped gifts: one for each child.

“Oh, Jojo,” Grandma said, looking at Jo from behind her round spectacles. “Merry Christmas, angel.”

Jo gleamed brightly under the loving gaze of her grandmother, and she’d sat right down at the kitchen table, her stockinged feet barely touching the ground as Grandma went back to rolling out dough for a pie. On their farm in rural Minnesota, Jo’s grandparents cooked, canned, and baked everything they ate, and while Jo’s parents would—on occasion—take her and her two sisters to a restaurant for hamburgers and Cokes, her grandparents came from a time and place where that was nearly unthinkable. Food came from the garden, the barn, the oven. Fun was made by exploring outside, by reading books, or by using one’s imagination.

“Josephine, darling,” her grandmother said, shoulders hunched slightly as she worked the rolling pin on the flour-covered counter. “Have I ever told you the story of the woman who lives not far from here? Her husband died—poor woman, poor sweet soul—and she lost her house. The bank just came and took it.” Grandma shook her head, glancing at Jo with sad eyes. “Anyway, she had no place to live, so do you know what she did? Penelope Pinkerton, her name was. Anyhow, Penelope went ahead and made herself a whole new family. She adopted a groundhog, fell in love with a horse, took a hen as her new best friend, and decided that they’d all live in a tree.”

Jo stopped the swinging of her legs and listened to her grandmother, rapt. When Grandma had started talking, Jo’d been uncertain about whether or not she was talking about a real neighbor, or if she was about to start a new story. But now that old Penelope Pinkerton had taken a horse for a husband, Jo was quite sure: this was story time.

“And what was the hen’s name?” Jo asked, playing along.

“Henrietta, of course,” Grandma said, tossing Jo a look like she’d been silly to imagine the hen’s name could possibly be anything else. “Anyhow, this was no tree house that Penelope wanted to build—make no mistake, she respected and revered a strongly engineered treehouse, but there was no way she could get her husband up onto a platform high above the ground, because, well?—“

“Because he was a horse!” Jo added, rolling her eyes as she got into the story.

“Precisely. So this treehouse was more the kind that fills the trunk of a tree, my darling.” Grandma folded the dough with her hands, kneading and putting her weight behind it. “I was invited for tea once, and when you opened the little round door, you walked into a room that was so cozy, so filled with light and love, that you couldn’t imagine whyeveryonedidn’t live in the trunk of a tree.”

“Was there a fireplace?” Jo asked, squinting as she tried to imagine this house.

“Of course, love.” Grandma placed the dough into a pie pan, pinching the edges as she moved the plate in a circle on the counter. “A fireplace, a couch filled with the biggest pile of fallen leaves you could imagine, and a kitchen table with chairs made of pinecones.”

“Ooooh,” Jo said, reaching across the table and taking a sugar cookie from a plate. “Can we go to Penelope’s house? I want to see it.”

Grandma turned and glanced out the window that looked onto the field behind their house. “I suspect dropping in on Penelope and Umberto on Christmas Eve might be impolite,” she said. “Umberto is the husband,” Grandma said, already anticipating Jo’s next question. “And he isquitethe host. He’llgive anyone who visits a ride on his back and show them around the property. Very nice horse, he is.”

Jo, who was ten and already aware that women did not marry horses, or turn the trunks of trees into houses with furniture made of pinecones, loved to let her imagination follow whatever story Grandma invented. It was one of their favorite shared pastimes.

“Maybe if I come back in the springtime,” Jo said, reaching for a second cookie, which Grandma stopped with the slightest lift of one eyebrow, “we can go to the treehouse together. You know, when the snow melts and it’s easier to get there.”

---