It seemed like only seconds later when the strident demands of the telephone woke them. Lyn answered it, her mind fuzzily clutching at a dream.

“You weren’t asleep, were you?” Maxine’s voice was tinny with distress. “It’s nearly nine o’clock.”

“It’s not. Is it?” Lyn was remembering her dream in alarming detail. She was eating mangoes, naked, in a bath with…with…with Hank.

Sticky. Sweet. Slippery. His tongue circling her nipple.

Oh dear. She’d been sleeping with her husband and daughter on Christmas morning and having erotic dreams about an ex-boyfriend. She looked at Michael, who had woken up and was contentedly scratching his stomach, his new haircut squashed flat on one side

“It is Lyn!” said Maxine. “Is everything under control? Is the turkey in the oven?”

There was something a little sad about having erotic dreams when you led such an unerotic life.

And what was she trying to prove by doing the Christmas lunch this year, right down to the bloody turkey? She wasn’t depriving her mother of stress. She was giving her more stress, cruelly removing control from a control freak. “You like it,” Cat always said. “You’ve always liked being the martyr. So go ahead. We won’t stop you.”

She could have spent the morning eating mangoes in the bath.

“It’s only family,” Lyn told her mother. “It’s only us. Nobody’s going to care if we’re not sitting at the table right on the dot.”

“Have you got a summer cold, Lyn?” asked Maxine, meaning, “Are you delirious?”

“I’m perfectly fine, Mum. I’m just saying we don’t need to stress.”

“Of course we need to ‘stress,’ as you put it. If we eat too late everybody drinks too much, you and your sisters start fighting, your grandmother falls asleep at the table, your father becomes morose, and Maddie gets overtired and eats too many lollies.”

These were all valid points. “Besides which, I’ve got something I want to tell you all at lunch,” continued Maxine. “I’m a little tense about it.”

“You’re tense about it? What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” “I’m a little tense” was a deeply personal revelation for her mother. It must be something terrible. It would be just like Maxine to announce terminal cancer over Christmas lunch.

“It’s something good—I think. I’m happy about it.”

Happy about it? That was even more worrying. Lyn pressed two fingers to her forehead. She could sense the beginnings of a vicious headache: a tribal thump in the distance.

Michael sat up in bed and flapped his arms like a chicken to indicate Maxine in a flap.

Lyn nodded.

“Talk!” demanded Maddie, reaching for the phone.

“Maddie wants to talk to you. I’ll see you at lunch,” said Lyn. “Don’t you dare come early.” She handed the phone to Maddie and then grabbed it back.

“Happy Christmas, Mum.”

“Yes, dear.”

A door slammed downstairs.

Michael raised his eyebrows. “That doesn’t bode well.”

Kara had spent Christmas Eve with her mother. She wasn’t due back till lunchtime.

A minute later Kara stuck her head in the doorway.

“Happy Christmas, honey,” said Michael and leaped up with arms outstretched. “You’re early!”

Kara looked revolted. “Dad, you’re not dressed. Anyway, I just wanted to say, I’ll be in my room. I don’t want anything to eat. I don’t have anything to say. Just…leave…me…alone. Is that too much to ask?”

Michael stuck his thumbs awkwardly into the elastic of his boxers and held them out slightly from his concave stomach. “Ah.”

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” said Michael miserably, letting his hands drop.

“I hate Christmas!” exploded Kara, and she walked off down the hallway to her bedroom.

Lyn said, “So do I.”

Michael looked at her.

“Not really.” Lyn headed for the shower. “I just don’t trust it.”

The first Christmas after Frank and Maxine separated was the first Christmas the Kettle girls were separated from each other.

It began with a brochure—a glossy, seductive brochure.

“What do you think of this, girls?” asked Frank.

He laid the brochure on the red laminated table at McDonald’s and flourished his hands back and forth just like the TV ladies on Sale of the Century.

Oh, he was hilarious, their dad.

They were six years old, full of the confidence of conquering kindergarten. At St. Margaret’s Primary they were famous, just for being triplets. At Little Lunch and Big Lunch there was always a group of maternal sixth-grade girls lined up together on a long wooden bench who had come to watch the Kettle triplets play. “Oooh, they’re so cute!” “Is that one Cat or Lyn?” “It’s Lyn!” “No, it’s Cat!” “Which one are you, sweetie?” Cat exploited them terribly, telling them stories about how poor they were, and how they had to share just one lamb chop for dinner. She collected at least fifty-cents charity money every day.

Oh yes. School had turned out to be a snap.

And now here they were in the brand-new McDonald’s store with Dad, eating sundaes, turning their spoons upside down, and lingering their tongues over creamy cold ice cream and hot sugary caramel. Their father’s dislike of sundaes was really quite extraordinary. “Just try one teeny mouthful, Daddy,” Gemma was always encouraging. “Because I know you would love it. It’s like eating a cloud. Or snow.”

Maxine didn’t let them eat McDonald’s. They didn’t tell her that Daddy let them eat all the bad-for-you food they desired. They didn’t tell her that every second weekend was like a magical mystery holiday, with surprise after surprise on the itinerary and not a rule or a vegetable in sight.

But they just bet she suspected.

“You know what this is,” said Dad, sliding the brochure over to them. “This is the fastest water slide in the whole world.”

“Really?” breathed Cat. “Truly?”

They stared at the brochure in awe. It showed a photo of a little girl hurtling out the end of an enormous funnel, carried along by a frothy rush of water. Lyn wanted to go on that water slide so badly. For an instant, she was that little girl with her heart pumping and her hands flung high in a perfect, flat blue sky.