Merle, lying huddled in the warmth of the straw in the manger scene, waits patiently outside the church as the family emerges. Daryl whistles, the dog yelps, and soon he's fast on the family's heels.
When they all get to the cabin, the scent of seasoned boar, carrots, and potatoes – which Carol finished cooking before church and has left warming in the dutch oven, wafts through the door as Hershey bursts inside the cabin. Henry follows his adopted brother, and then Daryl thunders in after Merle, shouting, "Leave that bitch alone!" as Daisy and the puppies yelp.
Carol's about to follow them all when she hears a voice behind her: "Smells good, Carol." She closes the cabin door most of the way and turns to see John looking up from the foot of the stairs. He holds up a bottle of wine. "I brought you and Daryl a Christmas present. I found it in a solitary little cabin while I was out tracking this afternoon. Found a lurcher, too, but I don't reckon he needed it."
Lurcher. John and his family joined the Hilltop shortly after the War with the Saviors but before the War with the Whisperers. He's been here as long as Carol, so sometimes she forgets most of the people here started out somewhere else, each with their own vocabulary. For most, walker has become the norm, but for others – those early, different terms still stick. She's heard flesh-eater, monster, wendingo, and brain-licker. Even Daryl, on rare occasion, will throw in a geek, and whenever he does, it makes her think of that first camp in the quarry.
John pats the front pocket of his jacket. "And I brought a little treat for Daisy. If you'll just let me come in and give it to her, I'll be out of your hair in a jiffy."
Carol doesn't think John has come merely to drop off a couple of gifts. Henry mentioned that John's son Jacob is spending Christmas Eve with a new Oceanside girlfriend, and Julie is no doubt spending it with her lover. "Would you like to join us for dinner?"
John feigns surprise at the invitation and tips his worn Stetson with one finger. "Well, I mean, if it wouldn't be any trouble, ma'am…but I wouldn't want to impose."
She smiles indulgently. "You wouldn't be imposing. Come on in."
John follows her up the stairs, strides into the cabin a few steps, freezes in place, and then backtracks to remove his boots with a muttered, "Sorry, ma'am." Carol wonders if Julie never asked him to take them off and if he would have done so if she had, if maybe Julie could have gotten out of John more of the things she wanted if she'd been more aggressive about simply asking for them.
"John's joining us for dinner," Carol announces.
Hershey is on the floor petting the puppies, and Daryl is backing out of the boy's bedroom where he is currently confining Merle to keep him from stressing out Daisy. "Hey, man," Daryl says as the door clicks shut. "You find them bobcats?"
"No, but I found this." John holds up the wine bottle by the neck. "Well aged, I'm sure. Let's pray it hasn't turned."
"Can I have a glass?" Hershey asks.
"No," Carol tells him.
"But you can have a sip of mine," Henry says.
"Oh, you assume you're getting one?" Carol teases.
"The drinking age is eighteen," Henry replies with a smirk. "Even though you tried to veto that because I'd just turned eighteen when the Council enacted it."
"I tried to veto it," she says, "because I didn't think the Council had any business enacting such a rule. Parents should decide whether or not to serve their kids. But the Council saw setting an age as necessary for allotting rations, and I suppose they had a point."
"Did you pick one of those pups for yourself yet, Henry?" John asks. "Jacob wants the solid black one."
"And Huck's mine!" shouts Hershey, bending over to hug the squirming, splotchy runt.
"Ease up," Daryl warns him.
"I get one?" Henry asks.
"Of course," John tells him. "You're one of our best hunters. Every good hunter needs his own hunting dog."
Beaming at the praise, Henry looks over the litter and points to the biggest one. "That one?"
"He's yours," John declares. "Name him."
"I think I'll do what Daryl did," Henry muses. "And name him after my brother. I'll call him Benji."
Henry grabs the extra chair from the rolltop desk as Carol squeezes in another place setting. John offers his treat to Daisy, who seems happy to see her owner. Meanwhile, Hershey tries to peek into his stocking, and Daryl tells him, "Santa ain't come yet."
"I don't believe in Santa anymore," Hershey replies.
"No?" asks Daryl, looking a little crestfallen.
"But, I mean, I still believe he'll bring me presents!" Hershey hastens.
"The boy is no dummy," John observes.
When they're settled around the table eating, Carol asks, "Are you staying the night, Henry?"
"Uh…No," he answers slowly, as though it did not occur to him he'd be asked to stay the night and that he would have to turn her down.
"But don't you want to see Hershey open presents in the morning?" Carol asks, trying to control the disappointment her voice. "And your stocking might have a thing or two in it."
Henry glances at the mantle. "My stocking's up?"
"Henry'll stay the night," Daryl says in tone that is not open to discussion.
Henry opens his mouth as if to protest, closes it, pauses a moment, and then finally speaks: "I guess I'll go back and get a few things after dinner, then," he says. "Although I was kind of looking forward to the dorm room all to myself tonight."
"You'll have your old bedroom all to yourself, too," Carol tells him.
"Why would you have the dorm room to yourself?" John asks. "Where's my boy?"
Henry's eyes widen slightly, and he abruptly fills his mouth with a gulp of wine as an excuse not to answer.
"Ah," John says. "Staying with his new girlfriend tonight?"
Henry doesn't answer.
"Rachel? Is that her name? How old is she?"
"She's nineteen," Henry answers. "Like me."
John looks relieved. "Oh, thank God. I can't tell sixteen from twenty any more. Nice girl?"
"Uh…" Henry sets his wine glass down. "Jacob likes her."
John looks at him warily.
"She's a little…commanding," Henry explains.
"Ah, well, that might not be a bad thing. He could use some direction. Besides, I imagine Jacob doesn't much care at this point. He's almost twenty-one and still hasn't popped –"
Carol shoots John a scolding look and then glances at Hershey. John falls silent.
"Popped what?" Hershey asks.
"Popped into a relationship," John tells him.
"You gonna eat the rest of those?" Daryl asks, gesturing at John's potatoes with his fork.
John draws his plate protectively close to himself. "Of course I'm going to eat them." He eyes Daryl guardedly as he stabs a potato onto his fork. "Excellently seasoned, Carol. Some of the best potatoes I've had since Julie's pot…" He trails off abruptly, pops the potato roughly in his mouth, and chews.
Carol raises her wine glass to him. "The wine is good, too. It hasn't turned."
"Not better than Kingdom wine, though," Henry says.
"Better because we didn't have to trade for it," Carol tells him. "It was a gift. Thank you, John."
"The least I could do." He turns his attention to Daryl. "When you're done exchanging presents tomorrow, let's meet up and finish following those bobcat tracks."
Daryl hastily swallows the last bite on his plate, the first one done with his dinner, as usual. "Ain't huntin' tomorrow. Promised Carol I'd stay home all day for Christmas. Take a day off."
"The tracks might be gone if it snows again."
"Ain't gonna snow again."
"And you know that how?" John asks.
"Don't smell like it."
"Ah well, I would not dare to question your olfactory intuition. Nevertheless…I suppose I'll go out and do some tracking tomorrow just in case." He sighs. "It's not like I have anything better to do."
Carol's not sure if John's fishing for an invitation to Christmas morning, but she doesn't extend one. That's their personal family time, and she thinks John's inclusion in their Christmas Eve dinner is sufficient. "Maybe you can get your son to track them with you."
"Maybe," John says. "But I suspect he may be sleeping in."
After dinner, John's clearly not ready to leave. He invites Daryl out to the back porch for a smoke, offering him three hand-rolled cigarettes as a Christmas present. "Didn't get you nothin'," Daryl says as they step out the back door.
Henry and Hershey help Carol to clean up, though Hershey doesn't do much more than clear the table before running to the fireplace to play with Daisy and the puppies. "Careful!" Carol warns him. "Remember how little they are!"
"I know!"
"Pet with two fingers," she insists.
When Henry returns to his dorm to pack an overnight bag, Herhsey asks to be tucked in.
"Your bedtime's not for an hour," Carol tells him.
"I know, but I want Christmas to come sooner!"
Carol chuckles and takes him to his room, where Merle is curled on the end of the bed, buried beneath a blanket he's wrestled into a nest. "Oh, I'm sorry, Merle. It's a bit cold in here, isn't it?"
Carol starts the fire, reads to Hershey, and then leaves him to his attempted sleep. When she's out, she finds Henry returned and dropping a backpack in his old bedroom. "Think I'm going to join the other men on the back porch," he tells her.
The other men. Carol tries not to smile at his desperation to be considered fully a part of the tribe of grown-ups. "Well, don't smoke," she insists.
"Don't worry. I tried it once, and I can't stand it."
"When did you try it?" she asks.
"Uh…"
"I suppose Jacob gave one to you?"
"Yeah. Uhm…Jacob."
When Henry goes out the kitchen door to the back porch, Carol heads straight for the corner of her closet where she hid the presents. She'll take this opportunity to fill her boys' stockings.
[*]
Henry leans with his elbows on the rail. "Can I have a drag?"
Daryl hands the cigarette over to him and says what he always says: "Don't tell yer mama."
Henry sucks in and blows the smoke out over the rail. Then he coughs and hands it back.
John chuckles.
"That's how far he gets," Daryl mutters. "One puff. Every damn time."
"Well, try though I might," Henry says, "your footsteps are tough to walk in. I don't think I could tumble down a hill and fall on an arrow and yank it out of my own side either."
"Well now, this sounds like a story," John says.
"'S when I was lookin' for Sophia. Told ya 'bout that."
"But you apparently omitted some rather exciting details." John sucks in and blows smoke out behind himself. He furrows his brow. "Henry was with y'all back then? I thought you were a Kingdom boy originally."
"I was," Henry replies. "Before Carol and Daryl adopted me. But Carol told me about it. She was trying to talk me out of doing something stupid."
"Something stupid like tumbling down a hill and landing on your own arrow?" John asks.
"Hey, ain't like I just lost my footin'," Daryl insists. "Dumb ass horse got spooked and threw me."
"No," Henry replies. "Something like hunting alone. Which Daryl does all the time, but I'm not supposed to."
"Well, if you can't pull an arrow out of your own chest, perhaps you shouldn't," John tells him.
"Wasn't m' chest," Daryl mutters.
"Chest sounds better," John says. "That's how you should tell it."
"And then," Henry adds, "when he was stumbling back to camp, he got shot by some woman who thought he was a walker."
John stomps the steel heel of his boot on the planks of the porch in excitement. "And you didn't tell me this story?"
"Wasn't the best day of my life," Daryl mutters.
"I pulled a knife out my stomach once," John says. "But that was before I lost those thirty pounds, so it was mostly stuck in fat."
"You used to be fat?" Henry asks skeptically.
"Sympathy weight. I put it on when Julie was pregnant with the triplets."
Daryl snorts.
"So…" Henry asks, "you got knifed before the Collapse?"
"Believe it or not," John tells him, "people attacked and robbed and killed each other even before all this. I was trying to break up a barroom fight. I should have been home with my pregnant wife instead of out with the guys. And I probably should have left the knife in until the paramedics got there, because I made a bit more of a mess of it than they would have."
"Well, I've got stories," Henry says.
"You've lived over half your life in an apocalypse," John tells him. "Of course you've got stories. The question is, are they anywhere near as interesting as this story Daryl has yet to tell me?"
"Well…no," Henry admits.
"Are they even as interesting as that one time Daryl and his cousin were drag racing on I-75 –"
"- Shh!" Daryl hisses.
"- with those two cheerleaders –"
"- Shh!"
"- in the cars they borrowed from their grandpa's mechanics shop?"
"Shh!" Daryl hisses again.
"Oh, Henry doesn't know that story?" John asks innocently.
"I want to know that story!" Henry insists.
Daryl glances over his shoulder at the cabin window.
"She's busy doing the stockings," Henry assures him.
Daryl takes a quick pull on his cigarette. "Well, 's fifteen," he begins, "didn't have m' license yet, n'…."
[*]
The fire flickers low and gently in the hearth. Daryl's quiet whisper reaches Carol's ears: "Ya 'sleep yet?"
He's lying spooned against her, because she asked for ten minutes of cuddling. They got to bed late, because John didn't leave until almost eleven, at which point Henry promptly disappeared into his own room. Now, Carol feels like she's caught a second wind. "I don't know if I can sleep."
"Ya don't go to sleep, and Santa ain't gonna stuff yer stockin'."
Carol chuckles, turns toward him, and puts a hand on his cheek. "I really think I'd prefer Santa stuff my stocking while I'm awake."
"Stahp."
She trails her fingers down over his t-shirt to the tie on his sweat pants, the end of which she twirls around one finger. "Yeah? You want me to stop?"
"Well…no. Not if yer doin' that. Just meant stop the corny jokin'."
"You love it."
"Don't love it. Don't even like it."
She kisses his chin and nips her way to his ear. "You love it."
He smiles. "If'n I agree I love it, you gonna stick that hand down my pants?"
"Maybe."
"Love it. Love all yer damn corny sex jokes."
She tugs the string on his sweat pants loose.
"Best damn jokes in the world," he continues, and she begins to slide her hand inside, her fingertips grazing over his belly. "Should be doin' comedy on a stage in a club somewhere."
She grasps his stirring erection, and he closes his eyes and hisses as she strokes it to fullness, all the while trailing kisses across his jawline. Daryl moans, flips her suddenly on her back, and begins tugging down her flannel pajama bottoms and underwear. "Gonna stuff yer stockin' real good, darlin'."
Carol's laugh is drowned by Daryl's mouth pressing hard against hers and his tongue plunging inside. Pretty soon, laughter is the farthest thing from her mind.
It's not the gentle Christmas sex of two nights ago, but it's just as satisfying in its own rite - quick and hungry and playful and just a tiny bit rough. After both are spent, she pretends to fall asleep and doesn't budge when she senses the bed shift, hears him dressing, and then feels the cool air draft through the bedroom door as he quietly opens and closes it.