A/N: Scene II is a continuation of "Scene I - Christmas Bazaar". It's still Christmas. After the day's charity event, Cassie visits her family at night for dinner. :)

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Cassie parked just next to the pavement in front of her old house. The tiny apartment she rented wasn't really far away, but she chose not to visit frequently. Truth be told, she had seen Michael more times than her own family this year.

She pushed open the car door. Yvonne had made nice with Jake and his girlfriend and they all went back to their families for Christmas. Well, Cassie was here to see her own family now.

Walking up the pavement, she noticed that the stretch of lawn in front of her home was now hard, dry concrete. The weeds and wildflowers had always aggrieved her father. He must have finally found a way to eliminate that eye sore of a lawn.

Without those dandelions, the absence of little butterflies stopping by, something lovely and beautiful here to Cassie was now lost. She sighed, turned her head away slowly from the lifeless sight and rang the doorbell.

Moments later, the door opened and she stepped into her home and her mother's welcoming arms.

"Mama," Cassie gave her a warm smile. Her father came into view.

"Much clean and tidy out front, eh? I should've got rid of those damn plants sooner," he said pompously.

Cassie's smile faded slightly. She was grateful to move to the kitchen with her mother and leave her father at the recliner in front of the television.

They went about chopping potatoes, carrots and various ingredients for dinner. As Mrs Woods prepared her husband his own plate of roasted chicken, they exchanged recent aspects of their lives.

"I'm learning to knit," her mother was saying. "I'm an old lady now ..."

"Mama, you're not old. Helen Keller trekked through Asia when she was sixty-five. You don't have to knit if you don't want to."

"But what else can I do?" she looked a little lost, as though the prospect of choosing something for someone her age was quite out of the question. Mrs Woods went back to stirring a pot of boiling soup.

Cassie found herself staring at the mild lines on her mother's hands as she worked. She thought of how she rummaged through her parents' drawers and dug out old photographs, her eyes falling upon a faded black-and-white photograph of a group of girls. The girls were laughing. Her mother was laughing so beautifully. Camella Woods was so much happier and carefree before marriage.

An hour later dinner was laid out on the table. Mr Woods grunted, muttering that the soup's texture was not consistent enough and Cassie's lack of chicken on her plate, but they soon tucked in.

"I had my checkup with Dr Benson last week," he said at one point.

"How was it?" said Cassie. As she chewed through her potatoes, she prepared herself for the new tirade of psychosomatic illnesses that even removing the ugly, eye-torturing weeds could not cure.

Sure enough, her father couldn't sleep well, despite the fact that his long-term insomniac wife could hear her husband snoring throughout the night. He couldn't breathe properly – might have been the asthma he inherited like his sister, Cassie's Aunt Suzanne. He seemed to be suffering "very bad, cloudy vision", attributed to age (Cassie privately wondered how he continued his extensive use of the television if it was that terrible.)

His physical health update ended with Dr Benson's report stating that Mr Woods was in good health.

Cassie felt that she would be having an asthma attack soon if her father continued to describe breathing discomforts in detail, so she steered the conversation towards the charity bazaar, but even then he did not come out from his reverie of medical misfortunes.

"You might get rabies, mingling around with dogs so often, in case you didn't know," Mr Woods grunted.

"Rabies isn't airborne and Papa, we vaccinate the dogs, in case you didn't know," Cassie muttered back.

Silence followed. Except for the soft clangs of cutlery on plates, the sound of conversation did not ensue. This went on until Mrs Woods introduced a new topic.

"Remember the time I called you on your birthday?"

"Mm hmm?"

"So ... are you still in contact with Michael Jackson? Did he contact you again?"

Cassie paused, humming a little as she glean over all her possible answers. Mr Woods raised his eyebrows slightly, intrigued in spite of himself. At the moment, Cassie's desire for privacy made the answers come easily.

"Hmm ... sometimes," she said lightly, "Just to have a friendly chat. Nothing much."

Mrs Woods simply nodded in interest, contented with the casual response and resumed her meal. Mr Woods, however, expressed his disapproval through a loud snort.

"All those artistic types ... What's her name again, 'ella? Nicola, was it?" Mr Woods turned to Cassie. "That cousin on your mother's side ... We heard from the other day – she ran off with a guitarist and he dumped her recently. Never down-to-earth, these people."

"Felix, Cass is a photographer," said Mrs Woods, her voice very small but reproachful. "Isn't that sort of artistic too?"

"Well, we raised her, didn't we? Of course she's different," said Mr Woods. "By the way, don't keep contacting him. Hang up the phone if he calls you frequently. We're not their type."

"What type?" Cassie didn't understand. "We had normal conversations. That's all."

"Well, let's just say some people are too rich for their own good. The further you stay out of the way, the better," her father's eyes bulged, sure of his opinion on life.

Of course her father was thinking about his former boss of thirty years and the company's board of directors. Office politics. Filthy rich, as he would describe them.

But Michael wasn't like that. It stung, but Cassie kept quiet. There was no point in carrying on the conversation. 

If there was one thing she and her father were alike, it was that they were both hard-headed, stubborn in what they believed was right. Cassie wasn't sure if that was a good thing.

* * *

"You know your father," said Mrs Woods soothingly as she rinsed the dishes. The noise from an old Christmas comedy broadcast covered their conversation; Mr Woods couldn't hear them over the television.

"Can't he change? He's seen more of life than me, yet he still goes around labeling people."

Mrs Woods wrung her hands, eventually giving a tired sigh.

"Easier said than done," she said. She turned around to a kitchen cabinet and took out a box.

"Surprise, Cass," Mrs Woods pressed the box to Cassie. The latter opened it: Italian sablés.

Looking down at the sablés she loved since she was little, Cassie felt a tinge of guilt. She thought of the carefree woman in the photograph and compared her with Camella Woods today, who mellowed and withered into an obedient housewife, who was reduced to cooking and cleaning the house, who did not know what she could do with her life except starting to take up knitting.

"Aren't you ever tired of Papa?" Cassie asked quietly.

Her mother's lips quivered for one moment, taken aback by her question. Their eyes met. Cassie could see that her mother could not bring herself to answer; it would bring up too many regrets and sadness.

Cassie placed a kiss on her mother's forehead. She did not need an answer.

"Thank you, Mama, for the sablés."

- - -

A/N: Personally, I don't stereotype knitting. Sewing and crocheting are one of my hobbies and I'm only 21. Cartoons associate knitting with old ladies, but it most certainly is not. It's about creating beautiful things with your hands. :)

The lives our parents led before they became our parents has often intrigued me. I came across an article on mothers once. The faded photographers told the stories of who they once were: rebellious party girls, travelling enthusiasts, wartime reporters ... Oh, I loved that article. ❤