When Pilar had said no, he’d threatened to take her back to court, so she’d agreed, after which he’d informed her that "Christmas Day" meant her delivering Miguel on Christmas Eve so he could wake up and open his presents at Joe’s.
"He can open your presents to him before you come," he’d said, knowing full well Miguel still believed in Santa Claus. So after supper she was delivering both Miguel and his presents to Joe’s in Escondido, where she would not get to see Miguel open them.
"I can’t go to Daddy’s," Miguel had said when she’d explained the arrangements, "Santa’s gonna bring my presents here."
"No, he won’t," she’d said. "I sent Santa a letter and told him you’d be at your daddy’s on Christmas Eve, and he’s going to take your presents there."
"You sent it to the North Pole?" he’d demanded.
"To the North Pole. I took it to the post office this morning," and he’d seemed contented with that answer. Till now.
"Santa’s going to come," she said, cuddling him to her. "He’s coming to Daddy’s, remember?"
"No, he’s not," Miguel sniffled.
Damn Joe. I shouldn’t have given in, she thought, but every time they went back to court, Joe and his snake of a lawyer managed to wangle new concessions out of the judge, even though until the divorce was final, Joe had never paid any attention to Miguel at all. And she just couldn’t afford any more court costs right now.
"Are you worried about Daddy living in Escondido?" she asked Miguel. "Because Santa’s magic. He can travel all over California in one night. He can travel all over the world in one night."
Miguel, snuggled against her, shook his head violently. "No, he can’t!"
"Why not?"
"Because it isn’t snowing! I want it to snow. Santa can’t come in his sleigh if it doesn’t."
Paula’s flight landed in Springfield at 7:48 a.m. Central Standard Time, twenty minutes late. Jim met her at the airport. "Stacey’s having her hair done," he said. "I was afraid I wouldn’t get here in time. It was a good thing your flight was a few minutes late."
"There was snow in Denver," Paula said, trying not to look at him. He was as cute as ever, with the same knee-weakening smile.
"It just started to snow here," he said.
How does she do it? Paula thought. You had to admire Stacey. Whatever she wanted, she got. I wouldn’t have had to mess with carrying this stuff on, Paula thought, handing Jim the hanging bag with her dress in it. There’s no way my luggage would have gotten lost. Stacey wanted it here.
"The roads are already starting to get slick," Jim was saying. "I hope my parents get here okay. They’re driving down from Chicago."
They will, Paula thought. Stacey wants them to.
Jim got Paula’s bags off the carousel and then said, "Hang on, I promised Stacey I’d tell her as soon as you got here." He flipped open his cell phone and put it to his ear. "Stacey? She’s here. Yeah, I will. Okay, I’ll pick them up on our way. Yeah. Okay."
He flipped the phone shut. "She wants us to pick up the evergreen garlands on our way," he said, "and then I have to come back and get Kindra and David. We need to check on their flights before we leave."
He led the way upstairs to ticketing so they could look at the arrival board. Outside the terminal windows snow was falling–large, perfect, lacy flakes.
"Kindra’s on the two-nineteen from Houston," Jim said, scanning the board, "and David’s on the eleven-forty from Newark. Oh, good, they’re both on time."
Of course they are, Paula thought, looking at the board. The snow in Denver must be getting worse. All the Denver flights had "delayed" next to them, and so did a bunch of others: Cheyenne and Portland and Richmond. As she watched, Boston and then Chicago changed from "on time" to "delayed" and Rapid City went from "delayed" to "cancelled." She looked at Kindra’s and David’s flights again. They were still on time.
Ski areas in Aspen, Lake Placid, Squaw Valley, Stowe, Lake Tahoe, and Jackson Hole woke to several inches of fresh powder. The snow was greeted with relief by the people who had paid ninety dollars for their lift tickets, with irritation by the ski resort owners, who didn’t see why it couldn’t have come two weeks earlier when people were making their Christmas reservations, and with whoops of delight by snowboarders Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps. They promptly set out from Breckenridge without maps, matches, helmets, avalanche beacons, avalanche probes, or telling anyone where they were going, for an off-limits backcountry area with "totally extreme slopes."
At 7:05, Miguel came in and jumped on Pilar again, this time on her bladder, shouting, "It’s snowing! Now Santa can come! Now Santa can come!"
"Snowing?" she said blearily. In L.A.? "Snowing? Where?"
"On TV. Can I make myself some cereal?"
"No," she said, remembering the last time. She reached for her robe. "You go watch TV some more and Mommy’ll make pancakes."
When she brought the pancakes and syrup in, Miguel was sitting, absorbed, in front of the TV, watching a man in a green parka standing in the snow in front of an ambulance with flashing lights, saying, "–third weather-related fatality in Dodge City so far this morning–"
"Let’s find some cartoons to watch," Pilar said, clicking the remote.
"–outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where snow and icy conditions have caused a multi-car accident–"
She clicked the remote again.
"–to Columbia, South Carolina, where a surprise snowstorm has shut off power to–"
Click.
"–problem seems to be a low-pressure area covering Canada and the northern two-thirds of the United States, bringing snow to the entire Midwest and Mid-Atlantic States and–"
Click.
"–snowing here in Bozeman–"
"I told you it was snowing," Miguel said happily, eating his pancakes, "just like I wanted it to. After breakfast can we make a snowman?"
"Honey, it isn’t snowing here in California," Pilar said. "That’s the national weather, it’s not here. That reporter’s in Montana, not California."
Miguel grabbed the remote and clicked to a reporter standing in the snow in front of a giant redwood tree. "The snow started about four this morning here in Monterey, California. As you can see," she said, indicating her raincoat and umbrella, "it caught everybody by surprise."
"She’s in California," Miguel said.
"She’s in northern California," Pilar said, "which gets a lot colder than it does here in L.A. L.A.’s too warm for it to snow."
"No, it’s not," Miguel said and pointed out the window, where big white flakes were drifting down onto the palm trees across the street.
At 9:40 Central Standard Time the cell phone Nathan Andrews thought he’d turned off rang in the middle of a grant money meeting that was already going badly. Scheduling the meeting in Omaha on the day before Christmas had seemed like a good idea at the time–businessmen had hardly any appointments that day and the spirit of the season was supposed to make them more willing to open their pocketbooks–but instead they were merely distracted, anxious to do their last-minute Lexus shopping or get the Christmas office party started or whatever it was businessmen did, and worried about the snow that had started during rush hour this morning.
Plus, they were morons. "So you’re saying you want a grant to study global warming, but then you talk about wanting to measure snow levels," one of them had said. "What does snow have to do with global warming?"
Nathan had tried to explain again how warming could lead to increased amounts of moisture in the atmosphere and thus increased precipitation in the form of rain and snow, and how that increased snowfall could lead to increased albedo and surface cooling.