All They Want for Christmas

by M. K. Stelmack

  His birthday.

  “She gave you up for a sort of open adoption, and came back here. And that might have been the end of it except that thirteen years later, into the restaurant walks this boy and his father.”

  Thirteen had not been his best year. His mother—his real mother, the one who had overcome her fear of water so she could join him in the deep end of the pool, the one who made his favorite meal of spaghetti and homemade meatballs whenever he squeaked a pass out of his science exams, the one who could take one look at him and know his heart—had died two months previously from a severe asthma attack. Jack hadn’t even known that was possible.

  “Your father,” Deidre said to Jack, “had a huge favor to ask your mother. He wanted a kind of mother figure for you. Not a replacement, just someone out there that would care about you. Your father didn’t have a lot of good options, if something should happen to him.”

  That, Jack believed. He’d met his father’s lone sibling, a brother who drank vodka like water, and heard about cousins who lived in the States somewhere.

  “Your father’s biggest selling point was you, Jack. Penny saw you sitting there eating apple pie and root beer, and she couldn’t refuse you or your father.”

  “Couldn’t refuse you on September seventeenth, either,” Bridget muttered.

  Auntie Penny had lied to the niece she’d been the closest to. What if he and Bridget had gone through with marriage? Would she have continued to pretend that Jack was nothing more than her niece’s husband?

  “Your father revised his will to make Penny your guardian in the event of his death. Of course, that didn’t happen, and he rewrote the will after you turned eighteen.”

  Jack pointed to the document in Deidre’s hands. “You’ve got proof?”

  “I’ve got the adoption papers, if that’s what you mean. This is the original birth certificate.”

  “Didn’t Jack need the birth certificate when he got his passport?” Krista said. “It would’ve said right on there.”

  Jack shook his head. “No, because my parents got me my first passport.” He read the certificate. No parents listed.

  “So...did she mention who—who the father was?”

  Deidre shook her head. “No, Jack. I’m sorry. She just said that he was someone she should never have become involved with. I got the feeling she never told him or he never owned up. At any rate, I doubt they kept in contact.”

  Which meant he’d never know.

  No. Jack knew who his father was. He’d buried him three years ago. The man Penny had slept with had never mattered in his life.

  And now Penny was gone. Dealing with tonight’s revelation was going to take a long time to wrap his brain—and heart—around.

  “That’s what she was planning to tell us at Christmas,” Bridget whispered.

  “I only found out last month when she came to visit. She spilled out the whole story to me. Including how she paid to have Jack come back here with his girls.”

  Paid at the price of the community’s trust in Bridget. There was no way that if word about the Crates fund leaked out, Bridget wouldn’t face blowback.

  “Jack!” Krista said. Her voice was all high and twittery. “You just got yourself a bunch of cousins.”

  “You three,” Bridget said, indicating him and her sisters, “are related by blood. I’m not. Just to make that clear.”

  “We get that,” Krista said. “Otherwise that whole dating thing in high school would’ve been beyond weird.”

  Was he to read anything in Bridget’s quickness to place their relationship firmly outside family boundaries? Would she ever be interested in dating again? Still, Krista was right. He suddenly had cousins.

  “Hardly fair,” he said, trying not to smile. “You two have to share me.”

  Krista leaned forward to look past Bridget to Mara. “I get custody on Easter and the July Canada Day holiday and Labor Day.”

  “So I get him for Christmas and the August long?”

  “August, yes, Christmases we alternate, and oh, I get him the May long weekend.”

  “And who gets me the rest of the year?”

  Krista shrugged. “Bridget.”

  “Didn’t I just finish saying we’re not related?”

  “Yeah, but you guys share the house and the restaurant,” Krista said. “You’re more than cousins.”

  “Partners,” Mara said from Bridget’s other side.

  “We’re not—” Bridget began but Jack liked Mara’s take.

  “Partners is accurate,” he threw out to test the waters with Bridget.

  She threw him an annoyed look. “You’re right. Unfortunately.”

  The waters were definitely frigid, but not frozen solid.

  * * *

  JACK QUIETLY STEPPED off the stairs into the living room. Bridget was a long roll under the quilt on the sofa bed. She was turned away, her black hair puddled across the pillow. Back when they were dating, her hair constantly caught on his buttons or tickled his nose, or he’d lean on it and she’d elbow him one.

  Her hair caused no end of friction between them. Except when they were kissing, and then they both loved to have his hands in the dark, soft shininess.

  “Bridget?” he whispered. With Deidre in Bridget’s room, Mara and the girls also upstairs, and Krista bunking downstairs, their talk had to be whispered.

  “Yeah.” She didn’t sound surprised or sleepy.

  “We need to discuss the house. The restaurant. The will. Everything.”

  She heaved the quilt up around her shoulders and kept her back to him. “Jack, I have work in six and a half hours. How about we do this tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow you’ll be working and I’ll be busy with the girls, and then tomorrow evening everyone is around, and then we’re back to it being tomorrow night and you feeling beat.”

  “Nothing will change until after Christmas. We’ll figure it out then.”

  “We don’t have to do anything, but we should talk before then. Before Christmas craziness hits.” The girls’ first Christmas without either of their parents.

  She sighed, pulled herself up from the quilt like a seal coming to land and flopped against the back of the sofa. “Talk.”

  He perched on the hard sofa arm. “Am I to assume from the state of the finances at the restaurant that you don’t have the personal funds to clear off the money owing?”

  Bridget scrubbed her face with her hands, the sleeves of her red pajamas falling to her elbows. He wished there was more light coming from the porch bulbs. She looked amazing in red.

  “I had savings, but I used them to buy out half the restaurant two years ago. Auntie Penny used my money to keep the doors open, and there were lots of months where I didn’t take wages. Auntie Penny’s funeral expenses and the lawyers with the will have wiped out what little I had. It’s really been touch and go the past while. Not just us, but the whole of Spirit Lake.”

  Penny had mentioned in emails how one business or another in the town of twelve thousand was closing shop, but Jack hadn’t paid much attention. He’d figured that hard times in rich Alberta paled to the daily struggle to secure flour and soap in Venezuela. Now he was back in Canada, and while the struggle wasn’t life-threatening, it was real. Very real. “How much are we looking at?”

  He could hear her suck in her breath and she whispered the number.

  No way could he cover that. “What about Krista and Mara? They might have leads, they might loan you—”

  “I’m not taking a cent from them.” Her voice was hard, all sleepiness gone.

  “Not exactly the time for pride right now,” he challenged.

  “It’s not pride. Krista’s looking for work, as it is. I know for a fact it would wipe Mara out to make these payments, and then where would she be? And her eyes are enough of a worry.”

&n
bsp; “Her eyes?”

  “Retinitis pigmentosa. Inherited disorder. Her eyesight is already going downhill.” Bridget tightened the quilt around her. “She might go blind.”

  Mara. Blind. His...cousin.

  “What about Krista?”

  “She doesn’t carry the gene. And don’t worry, neither do you. As soon as Mara was diagnosed, Auntie Penny got herself tested. We wondered back then why she was bothering, but she was probably thinking of you. Mother thing.”

  Mother thing. Penny. Bustling, generous. Beloved by all. Cheated quite a few. Lied to her family. And...dead. Gone before he could meet her as his own flesh and blood.

  Bridget touched his leg, a skimming of her fingers. Their first physical contact in too long. “Tonight must’ve shaken your world. How are you doing?”

  “Processing.”

  “Yeah, I get it. She has messed with who you think you are, who you think others are.”

  She was right. He shifted off the sofa arm to sit down by Bridget’s knees on the sofa mattress. “When we were dating, I sometimes thought about how you were adopted. Turns out that we were, and Pen—she knew about it all along.”

  “She kept secrets from you, from me, from all of us. Left us all a huge mess. Left us all—” Bridget pressed her hand to her mouth and whispered, “Left us all.”

  Once, he could’ve pulled her into his arms and comforted her, and been comforted. He wanted that again, but it was enough tonight that they could have their first heart-to-heart talk since their breakup.

  “There has to be a solution for the house, the restaurant,” Bridget said, changing the topic.

  “I’m hoping to get a job.”

  “Not much call for humanitarian-relief workers.”

  “Not much interest in being one.”

  “What are you going for?”

  He had a degree in social work, so it made sense to chase down jobs in that field. But... “I’ll take whatever will put food on the table for the girls.”

  “There’s the fridge full of food at the restaurant. Freezer’s full here,” Bridget answered.

  Charity, in other words. Not the kind of charity that had bilked him out of his entire savings. No, this was the true kind, where she was offering up what she had even when she had little and it wouldn’t profit her.

  But still, it rankled that he had to accept it. Even more because it came from Bridget, someone he’d hurt all those years ago. He couldn’t stand being in her debt. And he was. For helping to take care of his daughters. For the ten grand taken from the Crates fund.

  “I’ll help at the restaurant,” he said. “I already offered to, and it makes sense.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I dunno, serving or helping Mano in the kitchen. I’m not asking you to pay me, but half the tables were empty this morning at any one time, and you were still run off your feet. Like I said, I’m the new Penny.” A thought occurred to him. “In a way, I am half Penny. And half—” He swallowed. “I don’t know who my biological dad is.”

  The quilt fell away from her as Bridget leaned forward, grazed her fingertips down his arm. “Hey. One step at a time.”

  The gentle pressure of her touch allowed him to breathe, to pull together a few shredded thoughts. “Right, then. Partners and all. To get through this rough patch.”

  “To get through Christmas,” she said.

  That was what the season had become. Something to grind their way through.

  Bridget frowned. “If you’re working, what about the girls?”

  “I enrolled them in school today. Sofia goes to kindergarten Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Friday, and Isabella will be there every day starting Monday. If they eat breakfast at the restaurant, I could take them directly there and pick them up. I’ll make it work.”

  In the pale light filtering in from the porch, he could see her old habit of gnawing on her cheek. “If you want, and they want,” Bridget said slowly, “I’m happy to help out with the girls. I—I like them,” she said almost shyly.

  It had been an incredible roller coaster of a day, and it looked as if the chaotic ride would continue for the foreseeable future. But those three words from Bridget spoke—okay, whispered—of a future where they might be together for reasons other than duty.

  He didn’t push it. “Sure. Sounds good.”

  * * *

  “WHAT IS SHE DOING?” Jack said as he joined Mano at the bar counter. They stared through the window at Bridget leaning a ladder against the roof, Christmas decorations on the sidewalk around her.

  “You know what she’s like, she won’t climb it,” Mano said confidently. Then he must’ve caught sight of the same grim set to Bridget’s jaw that Jack saw. “Then again...”

  “She’ll get halfway, faint and fall off,” Jack said and stripped off his apron. He walked straight outside into the minus double-digit Celsius temperatures, not risking the time to retrieve his jacket from the back.

  As it was, her foot was already on the bottom rung, and she had lights in hand. He took hold of the ladder and said, “I can go up.”

  She gave her head a shake. It looked more like a shiver. “I’ll do it.”

  “You’re already scared. You’ll fall off or get up there and then fall off. Or get too scared to move and we’ll have to call the fire department to get you down.”

  “I need to deal,” Bridget whispered, as if speaking too loud might bring the ladder crashing down. “I’ve been scared of heights since—since forever. We can’t afford to hire someone else to do it.”

  “I said I would do it. And I will. I’ve only been on the job four days.”

  She shifted her eyes to stare at his arm. “You don’t have a jacket. Or a toque. You’ll freeze up there.”

  “I will go get my jacket and toque and gloves and scarf and boots and earmuffs and long underwear and whatever else you deem necessary, if you promise to stay off the ladder.”

  She gave a sharp nod and then stood there, still with a death grip on a rung. He covered her gloved fingers with his bare ones. “Bridget. Take my hand. Please.”

  She slowly let go and he slipped his fingers between hers, then lifted away her hand, turning her so that her foot dropped naturally from the ladder. Bridget instantly broke from her trance and wiggled her hand from his. “I’m fine. Go on.”

  “You got her to back off,” Mano said when Jack cut through the front to the back closet.

  “For now.”

  Mano grunted. “That’s the best you can hope for.”

  Jack was hoping for more, a whole lot more. Starting with a reset on their breakup, something he’d never intended. All those years ago, a phone conversation had caused the cracks in their long-distance relationship to widen into craters that they’d fallen into. He longed to have a different kind of conversation with her, like the midnight one on her bed.

  For now, he’d put up her Christmas lights.

  And two hours later, what an operation that was turning out to be. He crouched at the edge of the roof. “I’ve helped stage world conferences that required less lighting.”

  She stood on the sidewalk with yet another box of lights for him to haul up. “Nobody made you go up there.”

  “Nobody’s making me stay up here, either.”

  “True.” She squinted at him. “But then you’d be backing out of a promise.”

  Again. Backing out again.

  He gazed out over the snow-covered lake. All the miles he and Bridget had skated on its cleared-off surface. The winter before he’d left, the wind and cold had performed a once-in-a-thirty-year event. The entire lake frozen crystal clear. They’d skated then, under the light of the moon...

  “Whatcha doing, coz?”

  Krista and Mara were walking up the street, carrying insulated mugs. They’d both taken to the whole cousin thing, and the
more they said it, the more he liked hearing it.

  “Freezing vital parts so we can have a higher power bill next month.”

  “It’ll be the best-looking business in town,” Mara said. “You’ll see when you’re done.”

  Bridget gasped and set down her box. “I should show him a picture. Then he’ll know how great it’s supposed to look.”

  She gave Krista the job of climbing the few rungs up the ladder with the photo pulled up on her phone. It was beautiful, and very, very complicated. “It looks like the witch’s candy house in ‘Hansel and Gretel.’”

  Bridget gave a squawk. “It’s adorable, it’s eye-catching, it’s mouthwatering.”

  “It’s a royal pain in the—”

  “The girls will love it.”

  Jack sat back on his heels. They would. And he’d keep his promise to Bridget. “Fine. And if either of you care to help your cousin, that would be appreciated.”

  “Sure, but we’re here to view our—” Mara glanced at Bridget “—properties?”

  Bridget pulled a key ring from her pocket. “As good a word as any.”

  Jack kept his mouth shut. The sale of those properties would have solved a lot of money problems, but Krista and Mara were family. He could relate to Bridget’s dilemma. Check. He was related to the dilemma.

  Bridget was gnawing on her cheek. She was worried for him. At least, that was what he decided to believe.

  “Go,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BRIDGET FIRST TOOK Krista and Mara to the better of the two bays.

  “It needs a new window,” Bridget said of the boarded-up front.

  “And a paint job,” Mara observed. One wall was covered in a mural of a disproportioned metalhead musician.

  “Why is he holding daisies?” Krista asked.

  “There were a lot of questions about this place.” Loud, wall-shaking music. Twitchy, frowning customers. Needles that may or may not have had to do with tattooing. And still Auntie Penny had given the tenants the benefit of the doubt. When Marlene had complained that the stink of pot was in Penny’s signature pancakes, she finally evicted them.