Abigail had just seen Pam at Easter, and still cried when she smelled chocolate. Peggy’s funeral last November had been heart wrenching for Dennis, but also for Abigail, so very close to Christmas. The SOHO team all but smothered him and Pam that week, just so they would keep on breathing and not give up. Pam sat in Abigail’s lap during the entire service, never once paying attention to the tears. But she had taken some chocolate ice-cream sauce to the bathroom that morning, and poured the whole thing into the tub. Abigail had cried and laughed through the whole mess, trying to get PicklesPam clean again. Tiny little Pam smelled like a chocolate sundae the entire morning, and Abigail still couldn’t help the tears. Her throat was already tightening when the phone actually rang on the Taos side of the world and she sniffed hard a couple of times, wishing she had waited a bit.

  “You have a present for me?” Pam asked. She had never answered the phone like that before. Abigail grinned, pictured the little girl in one of her mommy’s nightgowns, and swallowed up in something fuzzy, standing on tiptoe to reach the ‘space room’ phone.
  “Well, duckie, I probably do have at that, you sneak. But you can’t find out till you are five. Tell the cat to tell Daddy to turn on the COM right now. The present is for him,” she was going to pause again, but Pam spoke up.
  “Abigail, were you watching the lights?”
  “No, Jellyball. It was daytime over here. We didn’t get to see anything but strange colors in the sky. You and puss got the best show in the whole world.”
  “Pickles didn’t like the lights, Abigail, she woke me up at twenty-one oh clock.”
  “Oh, I bet she thought they were special and didn’t want you to miss them, Angel. Did you get to see?”
  “For a bit, mostly I was really sleepy cause twenty-one is late, late, late,” Pam explained with a bit of a yawn.