Page 63 of Karma Kitty Christmas
“You brought the cat outside?” Luca asked, suddenly concerned.
“He’s in my knitting bag,” Isaac said, obviously baffled. “He kept getting back in every time I lifted him out. We got out here, and he was suddenly terrified. I tucked him under the blanket, and he was happy to be there. I don’t know. You explain it to me. Did somebody put a catnip mouse in the bottom?”
Luca thought about it. “Yeah,” he said, remembering the last time he and Allegra had thrown a new batch of the things around the house. “Eucliddid.Heput the catnip mice in the bottom of the knitting bag.”
“Luca, I hate to say anything, but I think my cat has a drug problem.”
“Hey—you brought him home half-baked and drooling. Remember that? It’s not our fault he’s been searching for the ultimate high ever since.”
Isaac’s laugh was low and sweet. “Luca,” he said, when he was done chuckling.
“Yeah?” Luca came closer, squatting next to the chair so he could be near Isaac, take in this moment under the chill November sun.
“It’s okay if you’re a little mad. Don’t be mad atyourself. You offered to help when all I saw was a big list of stuff onlyIcould do. That’s huge. Suddenly Thanksgiving’s fun again. We gotta come up with some stuff your sister can do or she’s going to feel left out.”
“Make the centerpiece,” Luca said. “Even if she’s buying one from the craft store.” He paused. “You have no idea—none—what this means to her. Decorating for Halloween. For Thanksgiving. For Christmas—youaredecorating for Christmas, right?”
Isaac grimaced. “We have really boring ornaments,” he said. “Plain silver balls, red bows, white lights. I’m tempted to tell her they all fell down and got smashed in the garage so she can go to town at craft fairs and on Etsy.”
Luca chuckled. “Maybe like the house. Move out the old stuff a little at a time. When did you want to get the tree?”
“The week after Thanksgiving,” Isaac said. “But I wanted to hit a sale at a nearby hardware store for some multicolored lights. At the very least we can have those.”
Luca’s heart, which had been shivering and a little cold since he’d run out of the kitchen, grew warm again. He pushed up and took Isaac’s mouth, pulling back to rest their foreheads together.
“Isaac, you shouldalwayshave color in your life. Let me know if I ever let you down in that department, okay?”
Isaac let out a little sigh and a hum. “Youarecolor in my life,” he said softly.
Then Euclid meowed loudly again, and Isaac shivered in spite of the blanket, and they took their show back inside.
LUCA DIDN’Tmind getting sucked into the entire holiday. He and Isaac had fun in the grocery store, bouncing ideas off each other, changing plans at the last minute. They went from a pumpkin pie to a pumpkin cheesecake with a few keyboard strokes on their phones, and bought accordingly. Luca sorely overestimated how many sweet potatoes they would need, and Isaac told him dryly they needed to buy an extra box of cornflakes and five extra pounds of butter to make that happen. So Luca did, because the way Isaac described sweet potatocasserole, that was the only reasonable answer. And both of them were quite surprised when they ended up with a whole extra turkey because of grocery store points.
“But what are we going to do with it?” Isaac asked as they pushed the incredibly overloaded cart to the car.
“Cook it the next day, then freeze everything and have turkey casserole and turkey sandwiches and turkey hash for the next three weeks!” Luca said, incredibly excited aboutallof that. “Can you imagine? For three weeks, we don’t have to answer the question, ‘What’s for dinner?’ It’salwaysgoing to be turkey!”
Isaac whimpered. “How about we stop by the soup kitchen on the way home and drop off the extra there?” he said. “And maybe a couple pounds of sweet potatoes too.”
Luca sighed. “Killjoy.”
Which made Isaac laugh, loudly and roundly, as they loaded the back of the car up—before he looked up directions to the nearest donation place that would be super excited for a whole turkey.
The night before Thanksgiving, during which Luca had spent half the day cleaning with Allegra and half the day cooking with Isaac, Allegra sat at the table and tried to put together a silk flower bouquet in autumn colors—dark orange, brown, purple, mauve, and gold.
Luca was busy peeling and cubing potatoes—both sweet and otherwise—and he barely noticed his sister’s even breathing as she stood, stretched out her back, and then leaned over the table, bracing her weight on her arms, and tried to do the same thing.
Isaac was the one who looked up from pressing garlic into the stuffing broth and said, “Allegra, that’s the third time you’ve done that in the last hour. Is there something we should know?”
Allegra stared back at them blankly, and like a freight train, Luca was hit with what she’d been told at her last doctor’s appointment.
She was close—her due date was in three weeks. But that didn’t mean the baby wouldn’t come at any time.
Labor can be anything from the classic breaking of waters to breathlessness after leaning over doing a task. Watch out for small signs. A tightness in the back, lower abdomen cramping, even a violent mood swing or moodiness—all of it could mean labor is coming.
Like a one-two punch, it hit him that Allegra had been quiet, turned inward and thoughtful all day. She hadn’t had any commentary to offer after Luca’s Todd blowup four days before. Not that Luca expected his sister to weigh in on his love life, but, well, that had never stopped her before.
She swallowed. “No?” she said. “No,” she said, a little more firmly. “No. Isaac, I refuse. You and Luca promised, right? You were going to come with me to the hospital. I—” She took a deep breath and said, “I should maybe just find another position while I finish up with this. It’s stressing my back out, is all.”
