Must Love Mistletoe

by Christie Ridgway

  His daughter didn’t seem to notice how flimsy it all sounded, and even gave him that soulless smile again. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.” Her hands lifted. “I guess this is Merry Christmas then.”

  “I’m sorry too, honey. I get so busy…But I make the important stuff, right? Like your college graduation.”

  In front of him, Tracy’s muscles started humming like a tuning fork. “He didn’t make her college graduation,” she whispered furiously.

  It was as if Bailey could hear her. “You, uh, didn’t come to college graduation, Dad. But you were there for high school, though. Remember? I did a reading of Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  “That’s right.” Her father slid his hands in his pants pockets. “All those words of wisdom. And I gave you mine too, remember?”

  Bailey’s face blanked. Even if that wasn’t enough to make Finn’s antennae go wild, the conversation was triggering memories right and left. He’d spoken with her on the phone the day before her high school graduation. She’d seemed tense, nervous about her role at the ceremony, but had let nothing slip about plans to leave town. To leave him.

  A few days later she was gone.

  After that visit from her father. His scalp prickled a warning.

  “I remember your wisdom real well, Dad,” she said now, her voice low.

  “It works, right? In relationships, jobs, hell, marriage. ‘Get out before things get ugly.’ I live by it.”

  Bailey nodded. Then she made a big play of looking at her watch. “Hey, Dad. If you’re going to make those margaritas…”

  He slapped his hands on his thighs, clapped them together, then turned toward the door. “Smartest daughter I have.”

  “Only daughter he has,” Tracy said through her teeth.

  Finn swallowed a painful laugh as he watched Bailey usher her father through the front door. Getting him out before things got ugly.

  But it was probably too late, Finn thought. For all of them.

  * * *

  Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

  Facts & Fun Calendar

  December 19

  Victorian-era gift giving might include a cobweb party. Each family member was assigned a color and then all were taken to a room criss-crossed with cobwebs of multicolored yarn. Persons had to follow their color to find their presents.

  * * *

  Chapter 19

  Tracy tried everything she could to control her anger. She wrapped herself up in a feather comforter, visualizing it as her buffer of nothingness, and watched five hours of television. When she found herself aiming the remote at the TV like a sword and viciously stabbing the buttons, she took herself to her bedroom and a book.

  The letters in the sentences kept rearranging themselves, creating new words. Adultery. Disloyalty. Revenge. Like the feelings boiling up inside of her, they were all too big to write on a piece of paper and fold into something small enough to fit into her mental compartmented cabinet.

  At dawn, she backed out of her driveway. The quiet street with its competing Christmas decorations didn’t lighten or appease her spirits. On her way, she passed The Perfect Christmas and saw old Charlie Baer in his Retired Citizen Service Patrol car parked out front, sipping from a cup of coffee. She was going so fast she didn’t think he had time to jot down her license number.

  The three red lights she sped through, she took to be good omens.

  Red matched her mood.

  At her destination, it was beyond easy to find him. There was the car he’d used to drive away from 631 Walnut. It was a 1972 Corvette coupe, a car he’d coveted, and that she’d given to him after saving out of her paycheck for years. He’d probably cheated on her in that car.

  She parked behind it and got out, breathing deeply through her nose. The cool air seemed to be swirling around her in a wild wind, and her heart pumped in time to match it. Despite the cold, her body felt too hot, though she was only in a pair of jeans and a thin T-shirt.

  She couldn’t keep her gaze off that car.

  The wind still twisting around her, she fumbled with the lock on the trunk of her old sedan, her hands shaking. It opened, and her gaze shifted from the Corvette to what was inside the deep well.

  A couple of greasy rags. Some plastic oil containers. The windbreaker Dan had been looking for in August before a sailing trip. Half hidden beneath that, a crowbar.

  She didn’t know why it was there.

  Without thinking, she reached in and lifted its cold weight in her hand. Her palm folded comfortably around it. It was painted red. Like the stoplights. Like her mood. Like the color of her blood pumping with fierce anger through her body. It looked like permission.

  Heading into the whirlwind, she strode around her back bumper and approached the Corvette, where it was hitched to the motor home, probably in preparation for the all-important Mexico trip that superseded a visit with the daughter he’d betrayed as much as he’d betrayed Tracy.

  Get out before things get ugly.

  She lifted her arms over her head and brought them down on the Corvette’s back windshield.

  Glass shattered, cracks spiderwebbing from the point of impact. Like her heart had once been damaged.

  The impact shuddered up her arm to her shoulder, but she ignored the little pain and strode through the tempest to the side window. This time she swung the crowbar like a bat. Another satisfying smash.

  “Hey!”

  She ignored the voice, but saw someone emerge from the RV parked nearby. It was a woman, in flannel pajama bottoms and a long sweatshirt. She had two inches of gray roots and a pillow crease across her face. It was like looking in a mirror. Tracy, post–Dan’s defection.

  Walking around to the other side of the vehicle, she shot the woman a look. “I paid for this stupid car. He used it to leave me.” Bam! She took out the other side window.

  “Oh,” the woman said, already retreating. “I never trust a single one of them.”

  Neither had Tracy, she all at once understood. Not after what Kevin had done.

  He emerged just as she was contemplating the front window. “Tracy. My God. What the hell are you doing?”

  It was calm where she stood now, she realized. She’d made it into the eye of the storm. Yet she wasn’t calm. Her heart was pumping, the anger jumping, all the emotions that she’d been hiding, secreting, controlling for all these years were pouring into her blood. If someone took a picture of her right now, all they would capture was a flame.

  “Tracy…”

  She turned her head. Kevin had aged well, she thought idly. He was older than she. Thirty-four when he left her and Bailey, but he had no soft spots now. Lots of hair.

  Get out before things get ugly.

  But still no soul to speak of.

  The wind picked up again. Maybe it picked up on her mood, too, because it seemed to come from the east now, a California Santa Ana gust that tasted like heat and sand on her tongue.

  “Tracy…” He started to approach, halted when she lifted her crowbar again. There were others from the campground exiting their RVs, but when they saw that Kevin wasn’t coming nearer, they kept their distance too. He pushed a hand through his hair. “What’s this all about?”

  She bared her teeth at him. “You shouldn’t have disrespected me. If you didn’t like what we had, if you were unhappy, you should have said something.” Her fingers tightened on the crowbar, then her arms dropped. The front window cracked.

  “You should have followed through with the raising of your child”—her arms rose again—“because she never, ever got ugly.” Swak! Another crack ran through the glass.

  “When you decided you didn’t want me anymore, instead of sneaking around behind my back and lying to me, the woman who’d married you and borne your child, you should have had the goddamn decency to treat me with honesty and kindness. You should have treated me like a person.” And as if the weight of the world aided her last swing, the crowbar crashed down, demolishing the windshield with a final sha
tter.

  Someone in the small crowd of onlookers clapped.

  Tracy just stared at the damaged car, its glass fragmented into thousands of pieces. No more than her heart was broken into, she realized, as all the painful misery she’d stored inside it leaked out.

  Shaking his head, Kevin had just let Tracy drive away. Maybe he had just enough soul left to realize he deserved what she’d done. Now her wrist hurt, her shoulder, her chest. She focused on her physical pain instead of her emotional state, holding her right arm tight against her body and steering with her left as she took another route away from the campground. Some ice would help, and she’d get that later, but she had a stop to make first.

  Everyone knew where the Crown Palms condominium complex was located. Not only was Coronado just that small, but it had a reputation as the singles haven in town.

  She cruised the parking lot until she located Dan’s car. Pulling up behind the vehicle, she braked and climbed out of her sedan.

  They’d bought his Volvo three years ago because it was loaded with safety features and they had a new driver. Though the air bags had never once deployed, Harry had managed to dent the front fender, scrape the back one, and snap off the radio antenna four times. Compared to the experience of their friends, they’d considered themselves lucky.

  Tracy ran her fingers over the cold white metal…and then she moved on, forcing her leaden feet along the meandering, pebbled paths that led through the lush garden setting of the complex’s three-story buildings. It was still quite early, still quiet, but as she passed the orgy-sized hot tub and the Olympic pool, she noticed a man and a woman already swimming laps. Another woman, wrapped in a sunny yellow beach robe, was adjusting a lounge chair to catch the first rays of the sun. Under her arm was a glossy fashion magazine.

  A spurt of resentment nudged aside the throbbing pain from Tracy’s arm. Oh, wouldn’t that be nice? A morning swimming or sunning, with nothing more pressing than daydreaming about a runway wardrobe. A morning without trying to accomplish some of the chores a five-bedroom, four-bathroom house piled up before heading off to open the downtown store. A morning without having to cajole a zombie-eyed teenager out of bed, out of his room, out the front door with his backpack, his homework, his sports bag.

  Did he have enough gas to get to school?

  Lunch money?

  Anything close to qualifying as “breakfast” in his stomach?

  With a sneer, Tracy watched the other woman stretch out on the lounger. Yeah, wouldn’t that be the life? she thought.

  And then realized it could be her life.

  The store was running along fine without her. The zombie teenager was a college student living on his own. Most of the five bedrooms and four bathrooms at 631 Walnut went unused. Unneeded.

  Like herself?

  Brushing away the paralyzing thought, she turned from the pool and scanned the nearby doors. Dan had given her his condominium number when he’d first moved out. She’d never thought of needing to know it.

  She’d never forgotten it either.

  Determining it to be in the next building, she set forward on heavy legs, nodding as she encountered other people along the path. Ignoring their curious glances.

  What, didn’t she make the height requirement for all the fun rides here in DivorceLand?

  Up ahead, a door on the ground floor opened. A man slipped out, the back of his hair in a pillow-mussed disarray. She watched as he spoke to the lush-bodied, dark-haired woman who stood on the other side of the threshold, holding a short apricot-colored robe closed at the throat.

  It looked as if these two had just taken their turn on the Sex-o-Coaster.

  The man, wearing long, silky basketball shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops, turned to leave.

  Tracy gasped.

  Dan’s head whipped her way. Their gazes met.

  What had the woman at the campground said?

  I never trust a single one of them.

  He shoved a hand through his already messy hair. Bedhead hair. “Trace.” He hurried toward her and she found herself frozen, staring at his tan, muscular legs, seeing him swimming laps in that pool. Visualizing him pulling himself up and over the side to lie wet and gorgeous on the lounger beside that woman and her magazine.

  Or that woman in her apricot robe.

  “What are you doing here?” Dan said. “Has something happened? Is someone hurt?”

  She shifted her gaze to his face. Concerned eyes. “What?”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “I was fixing Brenda’s shower. It wasn’t draining. Were you looking for me at my place? Tracy?”

  When she didn’t answer, he touched her right arm.

  She gasped again, in pain this time, and rocketed back.

  “What’s happened?” His gaze traveled down to her hand. “And why the hell are you carting around a crowbar?”

  Her fingers tightened on the heavy metal. Why was she carrying it? Why had she brought it with her? She’d walked past the Volvo without that burning compulsion she’d felt to damage her Kevin’s Corvette. But surely she didn’t have it to hurt Dan, though thinking of him riding the rails with that…that bitch by the door made her want to do something violent.

  “Trace?” Dan stepped closer. His fingertips brushed her cheek in a gesture so tender that tears stung her eyes. “What’s going on? What’s with the crowbar? You can tell me.”

  She could tell him, she realized, as the emotion that had broken free of her locked heart at the campground rose from her leaden feet and heavy legs to fill her chest. He had been fixing that woman’s shower drain. It was the kind of thing Dan would do. Cheating on her was not.

  “Trace?” His voice sounded bewildered and just the tiniest bit scared.

  As she’d been when he’d left her. Or the shell that had been she. When Harry had gone to college she’d felt as empty as his bedroom, with only that stony nut of her heart rattling around inside her bones for company. That’s how small and hard it had become, over all the years of protecting herself from getting hurt again.

  But instead of opening up to Dan she’d closed further in, and lost him in her blindness to his hopes, dreams, and dissatisfactions.

  She held the crowbar out to him. “It’s evidence,” she said. Did he understand it was all who she was? The best, the worst, the pain, the joy, the criminal, the saint? “It’s evidence that I have a heart after all. That there’s life still in me. That I want to spend the rest of it with you.”

  That she could bounce.

  * * *

  Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

  Facts & Fun Calendar

  December 20

  The first outdoor electrically lighted Christmas tree on the West Coast was at the Hotel del Coronado in December 1904.

  * * *

  Chapter 20

  Finn’s cell phone rang at four in the morning. He fumbled to find it on his bedside table, then flipped it open. The GND.

  “Is something the matter?” His voice was surly, but damn, he was surly. Not only had he been sleeping when thirty minutes ago he’d thought it was impossible, waking up only reminded him of the hell of a mess the Girl Next Door had gotten him into. At that absolute worst time of his life, he realized he was still in love with her. “What do you want?”

  “I’m being very naughty. Want to come join me?”

  “What?” He held the phone away from his ear to stare at it. There was a slap-happy—not sultry—note to her voice that told him the kind of naughty she meant wasn’t the kind of naughty he wouldn’t be able to resist. “No.”

  “Don’t be such a stick in the mud.”

  “I’m not.” But the accusation jabbed a sore spot. Among his other worries, he’d been wondering about his stubborn reluctance to consider altering his career path since losing his eye. Was refusing to resign from the Secret Service a stick-in-the-mud move? The job could never be what it once was for him.

  “Come on, Finn.” Her voice beguiled. “Look out your window
.”

  Gritting his teeth at his own weakness, he swung his legs off the bed. Striding to the glass overlooking the street, he slipped on his eye patch. Outside, the block was dark, all the residents and the long lines of visitors to the many Christmas displays snugly tucked in their beds with their sugarplum dreams. Where he should be.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  “I’ll wave. See me now?”

  There she was, dressed in pants and a parka, on the lawn across the street. He squinted. “What the hell are you doing?” It looked as if she was replacing the reindeer in a sleigh display with plastic elves from a different decorative setup a few doors away. With the elves at the end of the reins it was a weird, somewhat kinky, effect, until he saw she’d replaced Santa with Rudolph as well.

  Or maybe that made it even kinkier.

  “GND—”

  “You once called me little Miss Perfect and I have to prove to you I’m not.”

  He sighed, even as he pulled on a pair of jeans and slipped his feet into running shoes. “You’re proving you’re nuts.”

  “Christmas does that to me.”

  When he peered out the window again, he couldn’t see her. “Where are you now?”

  “Do you know that the Smiths at the end of the block have a life-sized Elvis dressed like Santa on their front porch? Now that’s wrong. Just plain wrong.”

  He let himself out of Gram’s house without making any noise. Yesterday he’d thought the best way to deal with his renewed addiction to Bailey was to go cold turkey, yet already he was succumbing to temptation. Another man might have let her gallivant around in the dark, breaking laws of man and nature and holiday, but not Finn, even though he figured he’d regret it.

  At the Smiths’, he found her on the sidewalk, dragging a buxom Mrs. Claus toward the trashy Elvis.

  “He looks lonely,” she whispered, and he could feel hyped-up energy radiating off her. “And it turns out she’s a fan. She thinks he’s much hotter than Mr. C.”