The Bones family had always had, and would always have, welcome home traditions. Christina didn’t entirely know whether her mother had started them for her father or whether it had been Jacob Jr’s mother. It was just one of those things that she knew she could never ask and didn’t really want to anyway. All she knew was that the first day anyone in the family came home after a long absence they got to choose the meal and they sat down and had the first proper family dinner they had had since they had left. Of course it would never be quite the same anymore; it had always been thrown in their father’s honour before and now the dinner was for Jacob Jr and Kendra. It would be weird without her father at the head of the table, it would bring it all back to earth again. When all the boys had been away Christina could ignore the absence of her father, she didn’t have to face up to the fact that he was never going to be coming back, she could pretend that he was still out there. Now she knew that she couldn’t hang on to that pretence any more, and that frightened her.
It was precisely this that had led her to invite Jennifer Linkin to the welcome back dinner. Technically speaking this tradition called for family members only but hopefully with Jenny there it would feel less awkward. It wouldn’t be trying to imitate what they had had before so Christina wouldn’t keep looking around for her father or have to focus on the fact that he wasn’t there. Christina’s capacity to avoid things, to continue her denial, was endless. It was why she spoke to Jack about all these things; normally Christina wasn’t the sort to share this with anyone but she understood that this sort of suppression of emotions was a lot less healthy than the normal kind. She had noticed the effect it was having on her life too, the way she was becoming more introverted, the way she avoided her mother and her aunt and cousin in the hopes that they wouldn’t make her talk about it and she wouldn’t have to deal with their grief. She still had Fred and Jacob though, her revolving universe. Jacob was in the middle, of course, and she and Fred circled around him in adoration. Although these days it seemed that Fred had fallen out of his old orbit and instead taken up a new one around her, not that it was an orbit of adoration, it was one of survival.
In his last letter home Jacob had requested lasagne for the meal and Christina had spent every day since then making sure she remembered how to make it exactly as he wanted it. All the years they’d thrown this meal for their father he had never known the work that went into it, the endless tasting sessions and alterations that were made to recipes, the hours spent clearing up the house and washing and ironing everyone’s best clothes…all of it had passed him by. Jacob, on the other hand, would know what went on because he’d seen it happen. He’d seen Christina learning to iron when she was seven precisely so that she could take some of the weight of throwing the party off her mother’s hands, he’d even been part of the tidy up squad when he’d been around. Thankfully the meal he had chosen was one that they knew how to make well, it was his birthday meal and over the years Leah and Christina had worked on making it exactly the way that Jacob liked it, which meant that the lasagne currently browning in the oven should be pretty close to perfect. Not that anything was ever perfect.
Smoothing her dress down over her hips Christina wished that she’d asked CJ to come to the dinner too. She’d missed him more than she thought she would and the five seconds in the airport hadn’t been enough time to check if he was okay and happy. Shaking the thoughts out of her head she moved over to the CD player and tried to find some good music but the search came to an abrupt halt when she heard the sound of voices. It seemed like people were finally coming down.