Our First Christmas

by Lisa Jackson

  They would be wrong. I was never running from it. I loved it.

  I was running from him.

  “You what?”

  “We sold the house, Laurel.” My mother smiled, fists up in victory.

  “And the land.” My aunt Emma smiled, then high-fived my mother across the rolled sugar cookie dough. “The feminists are free.”

  I leaned back in my chair at our eighty-five-year-old wood table, in our cozy kitchen, in the home that my great-granddad and great-grandma built by hand, and did not smile. I felt the blood leaving my face. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, sweetheart, I’m not,” my mother, Ellie, said.

  “No joke,” Aunt Emma said. “We’ve established our financial independence until we’re one-hundred-year-old Montana women.”

  “But . . . but . . . I don’t understand.” My voice squeaked.

  “We sold because we needed the money,” my mother said, wielding a red cookie cutter.

  “You needed the money?” I felt sick. I ran my hands through my hair. It’s brown, with red highlights. My mother says the red is from the temperamental Irish in me, via her family. She and my aunt have the same thick hair, only theirs is shot through with white. “What do you mean?”

  “We mean that our apron business makes us some money, but not what we need,” Aunt Emma said, tossing dough from hand to hand.

  My mother and aunt were wearing matching aprons with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the front. Rudolph’s eyes were crossed and he looked like he’d drunk too much spiked eggnog. It was one of their best sellers. Obviously it wasn’t selling enough.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have given you the money for anything you needed or wanted. Anything.”

  “The day I take money from my beloved, hard-rocking daughter is the day I want to be dropped from a plane without a parachute.”

  “You are not our parachute, golden eyes,” Aunt Emma echoed.

  “But—” I was going to cry, I knew it.

  I stared at the Christmas cookies, red and green sprinkles covering four-leaf clovers. We always decorate St. Patrick’s Day clovers to honor our Irish ancestors. “You’re not sick, are you?” I felt faint.

  “Heavens to Betsy, no,” my mother said. “We want to travel around the world. Before it’s too late.”

  “We’re going to become traveling ladybugs,” Aunt Emma said. “First stop: Ireland. The homeland.”

  “Ladybugs!” My mother flapped her wings. She had flour on her chin. “Society told us we had to be a certain way when we were younger. We had to be ladylike. We never bought in to that hogwash nonsense, and we’re not buying in to it now, so we’re going to call ourselves ladybugs and travel into our old age. We want adventures.”

  “And, darling,” my aunt said, laying down a row of Red Hots, “we need to think of the future. Sewing aprons is fine for now, but what if we get sick in twenty years and can’t sew? We both have a touch of arthritis in our hands. We need a nest egg for security.”

  “So you sold the house and all twenty acres?” I could hardly speak. “When are you moving?”

  “We’re not,” my mother said, twirling a clover cookie cutter on her finger “We’re going to become world wanderers, but here’s the gift. When we get home from globe skipping, we’re staying right here.”

  “Here,” Aunt Emma said. “Until we’re both”—she pointed up to the blue Montana sky—“up there.”

  “If we make it,” my mother said. “We may get naughty on our world travels. As strong women, we will do as we please.”

  “Naughty, naughty,” my aunt said, and they both laughed. “We might end up”—she pointed to the floor—“down there.”

  Oh, they thought they were funny.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, trying to find my way through this crooked conversation. “You’ve sold the house and the land, but you’re not moving.”

  “Right-o, dearie-o,” my aunt said. “It’s going to be his land, but we’re going to stay in our home.”

  “What? Who owns it?”

  My aunt and my mother lost their cheer instantly, and my stomach took a nosedive out my toes. My mother put an arm around one shoulder, my aunt put an arm around the other, their drunken reindeers ogling me.

  Oh no. I knew who it was. I so knew. I swayed. I closed my eyes.

  “We went to him, honey,” my mother said. “He did not come to us.”

  “We brought him a Christmas cake in the shape of a Thanksgiving turkey because we are grateful.”

  “It took us all day to bake and ice in red and green,” my mother said. “The feathers were tricky. He made us an incredibly generous offer. More than what it’s worth.”

  “We couldn’t turn it down. We know you don’t want the house, Laurel.”

  “I do want the house. I always have.”

  My mother’s and aunt’s faces betrayed their shock. “But your work . . . you live in Los Angeles . . . we thought you were never coming back to Montana . . . you said many times you would never live here again.”

  That was because of him. “I could have bought the house from you. I would have liked to. You could have stayed forever.”

  My mother opened her mouth, but she couldn’t speak. My aunt said, her voice wobbling, “Dear girl. I am so sorry.”

  “Sweetheart,” my mother said, her eyes filling.

  I took a deep, shuddery breath. “Who owns it?”

  “Josh, honey,” my mother said, holding my hand tight, her face crushed. “Josh owns it.”

  That night, tucked up in my pink childhood bedroom, fighting back grief, I thought about our home.

  Carrick and Mabel Stewart built our light green farmhouse when they arrived here in Kalulell from Ireland in 1925 as a young couple. It’s rambling, two stories, with a huge rock hearth to combat chilling Montana winters. The dining room is now our sewing room, filled with fabrics, sewing machines, tables, and jars of buttons, rickrack, and lace for my mother and aunt’s apron business.

  Our home has the original trim, a curling banister, wide front porch, dormer windows, and wood floors. We remodeled the kitchen again three years ago, adding a nook and French doors, but kept its traditional style to respect our past

  We recycled old lathe board, used it for cabinet doors, and painted them blue. We used bricks from a crumbled garden wall my grandma built to cover the entire wall behind the woodstove. We used my great-grandma’s white kitchen hutch for linens and my grandma’s light blue apothecary chest with multiple drawers for the silverware.

  We hung up my grandma’s kitchen utensils to honor her, along with black-and-white photos of all the grandparents. My great-grandparents’ daughter, Dorothy, was born here, as were my mother and aunt. My late grandparents gave the home to my mother when I was born, with a half ownership for my aunt, who was still married to her husband at the time.

  My aunt Emma’s husband died when he fell off their roof when I was ten. She said she didn’t miss him because he constantly criticized her. When she moved back in with my mother she had to refind her voice, she told me, as it had been smothered, and she vowed to never let it happen again. “I became a feminist then. Being a feminist means you believe in equal rights and opportunities. That’s it. I wanted an equal right to live a peaceful life. That’s why I won’t marry again.”

  I thought with the apron money, and a fully paid for house, that they did fine.

  Clearly, I was wrong, as our home was no longer ours. Another wave of grief hit me like a wrecking ball. For a second in my pink bedroom, I couldn’t breathe.

  I knew every stream, meadow, rock, and tree on our twenty acres. We have five horses and two furry mutts named Thomas and James and a difficult, old gray cat named Zelda who scares the poor dogs to pieces.

  This is our home.

  Correction: It was our home.

  I would get it back.

  Oh, my poor beat-up heart. The blond giant was more knee-knocking gorgeous than ever. He was taller, broader,
and tougher. The true difference, though, was in his light green eyes. He used to look at me with gentleness, kindness, indulgence, humor, respect, and an abundance of “I want you naked now,” which set me on fire about twenty-four hours a day. All that was gone. His eyes were . . . neutral. Normal. Polite. A little friendly, not much.

  “Hello, Josh.”

  He smiled, but it was a bit restrained. He walked down the porch steps of his home. I couldn’t move. My feet wouldn’t budge.

  “Hello, Laurel. Good to see you again.”

  “You, too.” Ah heck. What a voice. Deeper than before, it seemed. I had waited three days to call him after my mother and aunt told me about the sale. I hadn’t been up to confronting him, to seeing him, and asking if we could talk. I could feel my courage for this meeting fading rapidly, but there was anger there, too. Josh knew I loved my home. How could he have bought it, even if my mother and aunt asked him to, without asking me first? “How are you?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  “Fine.” Sort of. That was a semi-lie. I was wiped out. Felt empty. I’d been dragging loneliness around with me for a long time. Christmas was always hard. Being near him was killing me. Jab a stake in my heart and twist. Get a grip, I told myself. Self-pity is about as attractive as snakebites. “What have you been up to?”

  He didn’t answer for long seconds, studying my face. “You mean for the last twelve years since I saw you?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. Yes.” I closed my mouth. Yes, I wanted to know what he’d been doing for twelve years; no, I didn’t want to sound desperate or stalker-ish. “But what are you doing now?”

  “Right now I’m talking to Laurel Kelly.”

  “Yes. Okay. Well.” I felt myself blush. It was like I was a teenager again, blushing around my boyfriend.

  “Why don’t you tell me first, Laurel? What have you been doing the last twelve years?”

  “I’ve been chasing a rocker around the world. And you?”

  “I’ve been chasing a business.”

  “How is your business?”

  “Chased down.”

  He was always clever with words. The cowboy boots, the jeans, the cowboy hat, they could not hide the fact that the man had a top-notch brain, had top-notch grades in college, and had become a top-notch Montana businessman. He owned a number of businesses and buildings downtown.

  “Good for you, Josh.” My words came out soft, emotional. I blinked so my suddenly hot eyes would stop being hot. “I knew you would.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He took another step toward me. We were standing way too close. I saw those light green eyes travel over my brown slash reddish hair. I had brushed it before I came, my hands shaking at the thought of this very encounter. Still, it’s generally untamable. The ends have pink streaks on the bottom two inches, done when I was in London last month.

  I had tried on six different outfits, three pairs of boots, and had finally settled on a shirt that looked like it had been painted by Monet. It was slightly tight. I also wore jeans, fancy cowboy boots with pink leather flowers at the top, and a puffy pink jacket with a collar and belt. My ears are double pierced, and I was wearing two sets of silver hoops and a red knitted hat with a fluffy camellia on it. I like color.

  “This is your home?” It was a dumb question. Of course it was his home. Whose home did I think it was? Mrs. Claus’s? An elf’s? Josh didn’t make fun of me, though. He never had.

  My mother had given me his address. His home was about ten minutes away from ours, private, on the river, surrounded by land, sixty acres, which attached to ours. It was about five years old. Craftsman style. Huge windows. Wide deck. A view, like ours, of the sweeping, bluish-purple Swan Mountains.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s absolutely stunning.” I looked straight ahead, which set my gaze right on that Paul Bunyan chest. I had lain on that chest a hundred times . . . and more. One graphic naked image after another chased its way through my sizzling brain.

  “Thank you. Come on in, and we’ll talk.”

  And that was that. I walked beside the man that I had run from years ago.

  Say yes, Josh, please, I thought.

  I mean, yes to the house. Not yes to me.

  Because I would say no to yes to me.

  I think.

  “Josh, thanks for seeing me.”

  “Anytime.” He handed me a cup of coffee. I took it and tried to hide the fact that my hands were shaking. He sat down across from me at his kitchen table, and for a moment I stared straight out his windows and watched the snowflakes flutter down.

  His home, if it was possible, was even more incredible on the inside than the outside. The ceilings went up two stories, and the windows framed the Montana mountains and meadows, now covered in snow. They were right there, as if they were a part of the house, only they were freezing cold and we were warm.

  He had a two-story fireplace, the fire roaring, with towering bookshelves on both sides. There was leather furniture, wood floors, and a kitchen with everything I’d always wanted—granite counters, two ovens, and open shelving for my collection of cookbooks. Not your collection of cookbooks, Laurel, I said to myself. Sheesh.

  I noticed that he did not have a Christmas tree. He and I used to love Christmas. We always exchanged ornaments and little gifts, as we were both broke. I made him Christmas cookies.

  After more shallow chitchat, I put the coffee down and laced my fingers together before I looked up into those familiar green eyes. “My mom and Aunt Emma told me that they have sold their house and land to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “They said that you’re going to use their land, but they can stay in the house until, Aunt Emma says, ‘They’re flying high in heaven, if they get there.’ ”

  “That’s right.” His gaze did not waver.

  “I didn’t know they needed the money.”

  “You haven’t been home in a while.”

  “I come home, Josh, but you’re right, not enough. That doesn’t mean I don’t talk to them. We call, we Skype, we e-mail. I didn’t know. They didn’t share it with me. They don’t have a mortgage on the home, and they said the aprons were selling well.”

  “Your mom and aunt will be fine, Laurel.” His eyes, for the first time, softened. “If the house needs any repairs, I’ll pay for them. In fact, I’m having a new roof put on in spring. I had the front porch and back deck repaired already.”

  “I noticed. They look a lot better. They sound a lot better, too. No cracking. Thank you.”

  “They like being outside, so they need the decks. When a pipe burst, I had it fixed, too. I’m not going to let the house fall down around them.”

  “I know. You would never do that.” Our gazes locked. I saw a lot in his I didn’t want to see, felt a coldness I didn’t want to feel, a remoteness, a wariness . . . I didn’t blame him. “Anyhow, Josh. I wish they hadn’t sold it to you. I’d like to buy the land and the house back from you.”

  “You want to buy it back?”

  “Yes. I’ll pay you what you paid my mother and aunt, plus, say, fifteen percent?”

  “No.”

  I felt like he’d pushed me, which he would never do. “No?”

  “That’s right. No.”

  “Why . . . why not? It’s pure profit for you.”

  “Because I need the land.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll use the land now, but I plan on eventually donating it to a charitable trust here so that it will never be developed.”

  “I have no plans to develop our land. I just want the house and the acreage. It’s been in my family for generations.”

  “I know, and I understand.”

  I felt my temper start to take off. “You apparently don’t. This is my family’s land, Josh, it’s not yours.”

  “It is now.”

  And there it was. Josh’s strength. His indomitable will. He had always been kind to me, consistently, but even when
we were younger, I knew it was there. I saw it in the way he played sports, how tough and relentless he was, how he skied. I heard it when he told me his plans for his life, for his business. I saw it in the way he stood up to kids who were bullying weaker kids, and how fast his fists flew, to protect them.

  Josh had come from a broken home. His mother died when he was six and his father decided to be a real man and deal with that grief by binge drinking and bullying Josh. Josh had moved out of his home the summer before his junior year of high school into a small apartment above his football coach’s home. He worked twenty hours a week at the grocery store to pay for his expenses and his car. And now that boy was a hard-driving man.

  I tried to stay reasonable. “I’d like it back.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “Please, Josh.”

  “No.”

  “You are still so stubborn.”

  “This is business, Laurel. It’s not personal.”

  “How can you possibly say that? It’s my home. It is personal. It’s personal to me.” I could tell he was not moving.

  “I told you, Laurel. I want the land.”

  “And I want the house.” Oh Josh, I thought. I have missed you, but now I’m getting pretty dang ticked off. “It’s my mother’s, my aunt’s, it was to go to me when they—” I couldn’t even say it. I loved my aunt and mother from here to the moon.

  “You live in Los Angeles. You work for Hellfire. Why would you want a house in Montana? They told me you had no plans to return and live here, ever.”

  “It’s our home, Josh. And I love that home. It’s part of me. Part of who I am. Who my grandparents were, who their parents were.”

  I did not want to tell him that I had quit my job and was trying to figure out where to live and what to do, also called Plan Q, as in Questions. I couldn’t live here, that was for sure, but I could return for vacations. I think. If I avoided seeing this man, right in front of me. “I love Montana. I want to be able to return and stay here sometimes.”

  Josh unexpectedly leaned across the table and wound his finger around my hair. Even though he did not touch my skin, I felt his touch like a blaze of sexy heat. That heat was still there after twelve years. I was not surprised. I thought I was going to catch on fire in his driveway looking at him.