Bart goes to art museums now, Kelley thinks. He runs ten miles in combat boots without complaining, and he does it faster than anyone else in his unit. He scales walls, he can do a one-handed push-up, he’s learning how to box, and he knows how to shoot a variety of weapons. He speaks a little German and he wants to learn Arabic. He is using basic geometry, a subject he barely passed his sophomore year. If I had known it was going to come in handy, I would have paid closer attention! he wrote.

All of this, Kelley knows, is horrifying to Mitzi. Her baby is shooting guns! And, probably, eating hamburger! Kelley knows that Bart doesn’t tell Mitzi half of what he tells Kelley, and that Kelley is to keep certain things on the down low, between them, as father and son, as men.

Such as: Bart will be working with Afghan national security to take down insurgent strongholds and prevent a Taliban takeover when U.S. troops withdraw.

Mitzi’s acting out over Bart’s deployment makes a certain kind of sense. But she’s been boinking George for twelve years! While George was staying with them! In other words, the love affair was happening under Kelley’s own roof, under Kelley’s nose! On Christmas Eve! On Christmas Day! It has been going on every Christmas since Bart was seven or eight years old—just like in the movie Same Time, Next Year, with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn, a movie Kelley actually enjoyed when he saw it a million years ago with the original Margaret.

Margaret told Kelley not to marry Mitzi; she thought Mitzi was silly and too young. I don’t know what you’re thinking, Kelley. She’s going to want children, and you can’t even care for the ones we have now. Kelley heard Margaret loud and clear, but he surprised her—and himself—by not only marrying Mitzi but by quitting the rat race, leaving Manhattan, taking custody of the children, and moving them to Nantucket. And buying the inn, which was Mitzi’s dream.

Although, to be fair, it had been a dream for both of them. It started out, perhaps, as a grandiose gesture of love. Mitzi had stayed at the Winter Street Inn for a dozen years before she met Kelley, and she had watched it fall into decline and decrepitude. When Kelley bought the inn for her, as a wedding present, really, the idea had been that they would embark on a new life together. This inn, built in 1873, originally belonging to the town’s grocer, needed a lot of work to make it a destination of “high-end comfort”—the sumptuous marble bathrooms, the thick Turkish towels, the four-poster king-size beds made from solid cherry, the pillow-top mattresses, the original paintings by Nantucket artists. Not to mention central air-conditioning, an inn-wide stereo system, plasma TVs and iPod docking stations, and L’Occitane toiletries. Restoring the inn had been expensive and stressful.

So… it hadn’t always been the two of them holding hands, skipping along in golden sunshine, but it had been good. They renovated and restored, they advertised and marketed, they married and procreated. Kelley liked being an innkeeper. He liked his great stone hearth and his deep leather club chairs and the stairs that creaked because their treads were almost a hundred and fifty years old. He liked packing up box lunches that his guests could take to the beach. He liked tuning up the fleet of eight vintage Schwinns for their guests to ride into town. He enjoyed meeting new people and providing them with a respite from their normal lives. And he loved being a hands-on father to Bart—and, a bit belatedly, to his older kids.

Buying the inn and being with Mitzi and raising his family on Nantucket Island had brought Kelley real happiness, the kind of happiness he had been so certain he would never find again.

But now, Mitzi is leaving.

Kelley sinks onto their bed. The room smells like Christmas. At night, when they get ready for bed, Mitzi lights her favorite Fraser fir candle. A few weeks ago—the Saturday night of Stroll weekend—Kelley and Mitzi made love by the low flicker of this candle.

He didn’t know anything was wrong.

George the Santa Claus.

“Is it me?” he asks. “Did I do something?”

Mitzi doesn’t respond, and Kelley experiences a moment of weakness in which he thinks of asking George and Mitzi to stay through Christmas. The inn needs its Santa Claus, and Kelley needs his business partner. How is he going to throw the party tomorrow night? And what about Christmas dinner?

But no. No. Twelve years. Under his own roof! How could he not have known?

Mitzi gives him a rueful smile. “It’s not you, Kelley,” she says. “It’s me.”

“What about the rest of your stuff?” he asks. “What about all your… your Christmas stuff?”

She gives him a quizzical look.

“Your ornaments, your nutcrackers… your carolers, for God’s sake!”

“Oh,” she says. “I’ll leave those for the rest of you to enjoy.” And with this, she walks out of their bedroom, shutting the door quietly behind her.

PATRICK

Jennifer and the boys get into a taxi headed to Logan Airport, and Patrick watches them from the second-floor picture window, peering around the thirteen-foot Christmas tree, which took Jen and her assistant, Penelope, five hours to decorate with three thousand ornaments and 650 white lights.

Jen did not take the news well. There were forty minutes of screaming into a pillow, forty minutes of muffled sobbing on the phone to her mother (Patrick desperately trying to hear how much she was giving away), and then thirty minutes in a scalding-hot shower before Jen emerged with the news that she was taking the boys to San Francisco for Christmas, even though it’s their year to go to Nantucket.

Patrick is mute. He deserves at least this. He tries not to think about the cost of four last-minute plane tickets to the West Coast on the twenty-third of December, or about the bill for the hot water. Such things have never bothered him before because he makes a tremendous amount of money running the private-equity division of Everlast Investments. But now, Patrick has a sick, sick feeling that the well is about to dry up.

He was careful about how he worded things with Jen, although his appearing at the house at eleven o’clock in the morning pretty much said it all. To make matters worse, she thought for an instant that he had taken off from work early so he could go Christmas shopping, or so they could go for a couple’s massage before the Everlast Christmas party that evening.

He said, We’re not going to the Christmas party.

He then explained that he has been placed on a “leave of absence” until after the first of the year, and that his boss, Gary Grimstead, who is a great guy, asked him not to come to the Everlast Investments holiday party.