Snowfalls, Fires and Family - 4. Chapter 4

Checking the fireplace and making sure that the flue was cleaned out, the ash pit empty, and the fireplace all around was ready for any fires that they would need. Knowing their luck, they would end up losing some electricity during their time and he wanted to be ready for it. Despite the tenseness between them, he didn’t want his family to freeze.

Markus came down soon after he had gone up, and they sat down at the table, dishing out food onto paper plates and drinking sodas.

“I need to find the tree and decorations still,” Tabby mused as she ate some of her beef and broccoli. Tristian grunted and nodded.

“She used to store it in the attic to the left right of the main area didn’t she?” he asked, Tabby nodding. “I’ll head up there and poke around after lunch then,” he promised.

“Thank you,” Tabby said. Markus shifted and ate an eggroll, chewing as he stared at them with a look of thoughtfulness.

“I’ll help you. Last memory was that mom liked the big trees and bought a good fake one,” he said. Tristian nodded in thanks, mouth full of food. The conversation continued along the line of what they would use for decorations, deciding to use the china that came with the house for the feasts. Tristian decided to take said china back to his apartment in Seattle to keep it safe.

They also decided to keep the decorations strictly to the living room instead of decorating the house since they were likely to spend a lot of time in the house before they left. Even Tristian would be heading back home after the New Year to get ready for school again and would be able to pack everything away.

Markus asked about the Wi-Fi and got the password, logging in on his phone while Anna did the same. Tristian simply wrote it down and stuck it on the cork board in the kitchen for the rest of their siblings when they got home.

They would know to go there for any information as they had done as kids.

The two brothers headed up to the attic, going up the ladder in the walk-in closet of the master and through the rather large floor door. It didn’t take the two brothers very long to find the Christmas boxes and to shift through everything. They found the holiday china wrapped up in bubble wrap and newspaper, Tristian carrying the box down carefully before heading back up into the attic.

While he had done that, Markus had found the tree and moved it to sit next to the entry before continuing to dig through the totes. They quickly found the box marked ‘ornaments’ and another two boxes with ‘lights for tree’ and ‘living room deco’.

“Well, mom was always smart in packing things away and marking them,” Markus huffed, Tristian snickering. With the needed boxes found, Tristian went down the ladder and took the boxes that Markus handed down to him, Tabby and Anna coming to take the tree from them and leaving them to haul the rest of the boxes down on their own.

With all of that down, they pulled open the boxes that held the decorations for the living room first, digging through it. Garland for the mantel was untangled and rewrapped with lights. Lights that would go around the walls on hidden hooks that had been painted to match the wall color were untangled and checked for dead fuses. Markus and Tristian talked about what Tristian would cook with Brian while Anne plotted what kind of pie she wanted to make. Markus said that he would do the cutting and peeling as needed.

It was sounding on her end that she was going to head to the store herself to get a few extra things since they didn’t have enough apples.

Between the three of them, they got all of the decorations separated, laid out, and the tree put together, standing it in a corner after shoving the furniture around. Looking at each other, they chuckled at the amount of dust, left over tinsel from years past, and how badly they were mussed from their work.

Tabby smiled in the doorway and shook her head, glad that the siblings were starting to fix the gap that had become a small canyon while they were growing up away from each other. Tristian had always been told that he should never lie to adults,and during his first day of kindergarten, he had answered his teacher truthfully about why he was limping.

That his mother had a ‘bad day’ and had ‘pushed him down’ had been the start of them finding out that their mother was mentally unstable. She had never told anyone, but Tabby and Kyle had both known having grown up with her as her younger siblings. They had thought she had stayed on her medicine through the years.

From there, the kids had been taken, handed over to various family members, and she had gone into a mental institution again for a short time. What none of the kids had been told was that she had been very close to snapping and doing something she would have regretted. Her diaries had been filled with conflicting thoughts of murder and love.

The family who had taken the siblings in had decided not to tell them unless they were asked, but she was going to tell them about what had happened after Christmas. The letter to her in the will had asked her to do it for her sister.

Shoving the thoughts aside, she walked in as the three pulled off the tinsel from each other, carrying mugs of hot chocolate with whipped cream on top. “Okay you three, how about you guys go get take showers, get dressed in some fresh clothes, and come back with your clothes. I’ll toss them in the wash and while the three of you take your showers, I’ll order some pizza from that one place we all like.”

“Mama Muril’s is still open?” Markus asked, Tabby smiling and nodding. “Deep dish pepperoni?” he asked.

“And a flat Hawaiian,” she drawled. Markus cheered, sounding painfully young, and took his cup along with his siblings before the three of them headed up the stairs. They all knew that part of the renovations that their mother had done had included an electronic water heater and would be able to take showers without needing to wait for the water to heat. Shaking her head, Tabby headed into the kitchen and picked up the landline to order the pizza. She knew that tomorrow Karla and Brian would be arriving.

She was betting Karla broke down or broke out in screaming matches. Either way she wasn’t looking forward to it.