Christmas in Cambria

by Linda Seed

  The way they left it, Miles agreed to do some “looking into” Delilah’s case. Since Mitch hadn’t actually filed anything yet, there was no formal work to do. But it paid to be prepared, Miles assured her, so he would do “a little checking”—whatever that amounted to—just in case it came to that.

  Delilah felt better having talked to him, even though he hadn’t given her the reassurance she’d hoped for.

  It felt better to be doing something, anything.

  Now she just had to decide what to do about Quinn. And about her living arrangements.

  Quinn’s family lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Quinn had first learned to love the outdoors. He’d enjoyed hiking and fishing and camping with his brothers and his stepfather—and his uncle, who’d been an integral part of his family until he’d come out and everyone but Quinn had turned against him.

  It was a ten-hour drive, and Quinn opted to do it all in one day. He was driving his van, so he’d be able to stop and take a nap if he got tired.

  As it turned out, he didn’t get tired.

  He arrived in Flagstaff late, checked in at an RV park where he’d made a reservation, used the shower facilities, and turned in for the night.

  He didn’t sleep well, because he wasn’t sure how his family was going to greet him when he saw them.

  One thing seemed likely—they weren’t going to throw him a party.

  Well, that was fine. He didn’t need one. He just needed to see that Alex was okay, and he needed to say what he had to say.

  He could do that whether they wanted him to or not.

  Mitch called Jesse and Gavin again the next day. Under normal circumstances, Delilah would have considered that to be a good thing. But in this case, she knew he was just checking up on whether Delilah had broken it off with Quinn.

  That was confirmed when Jesse returned Delilah’s phone to her after the call.

  “Dad asked if we’ve done any more stuff with Quinn,” he said. “Where is Quinn? We went out on the boat that one day, and then he just went away.”

  “He didn’t go anywhere,” Delilah said, though she wasn’t at all sure that was true. “He’s just been busy.”

  “But he said he was gonna take us to the zoo. He said he was gonna ask you if it’s okay. And then we didn’t see him again. Did he even ask you?”

  “There’s no zoo around here, I don’t think,” she said, avoiding the question.

  “Yes there is. There’s a little one someplace nearby, he said, but there’s a better one in Santa Barbara. That’s the one he wanted to go to. The better one. I’ll bet he didn’t even ask.”

  “Oh, honey.” Delilah ruffled Jesse’s hair with her hand. “He’s got a lot of work to do. Did you know he has three jobs?”

  “He said he was gonna do it, though. He said.”

  “Does Quinn still like us?” Gavin asked, his eyes wide.

  That, more than anything, was what made Delilah’s heart tear into shreds.

  “Of course he does, sweetheart.” She knelt down and pulled Gavin into her arms. He let her hold him, his thumb plugged firmly in his mouth. “Quinn likes you both very much.”

  She weighed whether to tell them the truth, then opted to give them part of it—the part that didn’t involve their father.

  “I’m going to be honest with you guys.” Delilah was still kneeling, facing both Jesse and Gavin, a hand resting on each child’s arm. “Quinn hasn’t come around lately because of me. Not because of you.”

  “Why? What did you do?” Jesse’s look was already accusing, already angry.

  “It’s not that I did anything. It’s just … people have differences, Jesse.”

  Jesse pulled his arm out of Delilah’s grasp. “You and dad had ‘differences,’ and we don’t see him anymore. And now Quinn. Why do you keep making people leave?”

  Before she could answer, he ran away from her and went into his room, slamming the door.

  Chapter 31

  When things had blown up between Quinn and his family over his inheritance, he’d sworn he wouldn’t be the one to come running back, asking for forgiveness.

  If they ever came to him and denounced their Neanderthal closed-minded ways, well, he could be the bigger man and they could talk.

  But here he was, going back home without even a hint that anyone might want to see him. Without even a whisper that anyone might want to reconcile.

  Well, it was one thing to stand on principle. But when one of your own was sick or God forbid dying, you at least needed to have a conversation with each other.

  Quinn didn’t have Alex’s address—not since he’d lost the house—so he started at his mother’s place.

  Barbara and Carl, Quinn’s stepfather, lived in a one-story wood frame ranch-style house on an acre of land off Route 180, north of town.

  The siding was starting to peel and the place needed a coat of paint, but Quinn’s mother had kept the garden perfectly tended, as usual. The shrubs lining the driveway had recently been trimmed, and the flowerbeds were tidy and sparse, awaiting the spring.

  Quinn felt a tightness in his chest as he went up the front walk, stepped onto the porch, and knocked on the door.

  Carl answered the door, blinking twice with his jaw slack as he saw his stepson standing there.

  “Hi, Carl.”

  The older man was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of khakis that were past their prime. The pants were a little baggy, and he had them cinched at the waist with a leather belt.

  If Quinn had thought he might be welcomed home with warmth and enthusiasm, he’d miscalculated. Carl didn’t open the screen door that separated them.

  “Can I come in?” It rankled that he had to ask, and he wondered if it had been a mistake to come here.

  Carl pushed the screen open, yelled into the house, “Barb? Quinn’s here.” Then he walked away, leaving Quinn standing on the doormat.

  “Quinn? Well, my goodness.” Barbara emerged from somewhere in the back of the house looking vaguely stunned, as though she’d just emerged from total darkness into bright daylight.

  Quinn, having given up on the idea that anyone might invite him into the house, stepped inside. “Hi, Mom.”

  His mother had never cut off communication with Quinn the way his brothers had. Her approach, instead, had been to nag him relentlessly, urging him to mend his relationship with herself and his brothers by giving them what they wanted. She’d taken sides, but she hadn’t shut him out. He’d been the one to distance himself from her when she’d repeatedly refused to back off about Nate’s money.

  Now, she stepped toward him as though she might hug him, but she didn’t. Instead, she stopped a few paces away and clasped her hands at her waist.

  “Honey, it’s good to see you.” She looked frail, and he wondered if she’d lost weight. “Come on into the kitchen. I just put some coffee on.” She bustled off into the rear of the house with Quinn following.

  Barbara’s Christmas decorations were still up—she never took them down until after January first—though the tree was starting to lose its needles. In the kitchen, the bulletin board next to the refrigerator was covered in Christmas cards affixed with push pins. A tiny ceramic nativity scene was arranged on the kitchen counter amid a garland of plastic pine boughs.

  Barbara took mugs out of the cupboard and arranged them on the counter with a sugar bowl and a small carton of cream.

  “Let me just take this to Carl.” She poured a cup, added sugar and cream in the exact measurements Quinn’s stepfather liked, then hurried off to the living room to give it to him.

  When she came back, she put on a smile Quinn recognized as false. It was the smile she used for neighbors she didn’t particularly like but who nonetheless had to be treated with courtesy for fear they might talk unkindly about her otherwise.

  “You should have called and let us know you were coming. The house is a mess, and I haven’t done the marketing yet.”

  “The house is fine.”

  She
poured Quinn a cup and handed it to him.

  “Mom, why didn’t you tell me about Alex’s heart attack?”

  Her smile faltered, and she avoided looking at him as she fussed with her own mug, her own cream and sugar.

  “Well, he asked me not to, and I figured it was his to tell, Quinn.”

  That was crap, obviously. Barbara had never kept a confidence in her life, and it made no sense that she would start now.

  “You should have called me.”

  Her shoulders fell and her lips pursed, causing fine lines to fan out around her mouth. “I didn’t call you because if you’d come out here, you and your brothers would have fought, and with Alex’s heart …” She shook her head. “He needed rest. He needed calm. I was afraid if he got too upset, it might kill him.” Her eyes were red and wet, and Quinn knew this—not the part about Alex’s privacy—had been the truth.

  “Well …” Quinn ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not stupid, Mom. I wouldn’t have started anything with him while he was in his damned hospital bed.”

  “But he’d have started something with you as soon as he was able, and you wouldn’t have backed down. You never have been able to walk away from a fight.”

  That part was true, too, he guessed.

  “Yeah, okay. But still … I want to know if somebody’s sick or hurt or maybe dying, Mom. I want to know. Even if you tell me not to come. Even if you tell me to stay away to avoid making things worse. I still want to know.”

  Since when had Quinn’s very presence been so upsetting, so traumatizing, that it might threaten someone’s life? Just because he hadn’t given his family shares of money that didn’t belong to them? Just because he’d honored his uncle’s dying wish?

  “How is he now?” Quinn asked.

  Barbara nodded, on surer footing now. “He’s doing all right, I think. He’s finally quit with the cigarettes, so that’s something. Cheryl’s been trying to get him to change his diet, and that’s been hard. He doesn’t want to give up his red meat.”

  Cheryl—Alex’s wife—had certainly been part of the decision to keep Quinn out of the loop. He supposed he couldn’t blame her. The whole thing had to have been hard for her. Probably still was.

  “And the house?” Quinn said.

  Barbara’s face changed—it almost collapsed in on itself, deepening the lines between her brows—as she sank into a kitchen chair. “Oh, honey. The insurance didn’t cover all of his medical costs. Not even close. And you know they were stretching to make the mortgage on that big place to begin with. Alex couldn’t work, of course, while he was recovering.” She shook her head. “Cheryl took a second job, but it wasn’t enough.”

  “Mom.” Quinn sat, too, so he could be at eye level with her. “The woman I’m seeing—her ex-husband is saying things about me. He’s saying I’m unfit to be around her kids because I let Alex lose his house while I sat on some big inheritance. I didn’t even know. How was I supposed to help him when I didn’t even know?”

  “Quinn …”

  “And I’m not sitting on some big inheritance, anyway. I spent it. I used it as a down payment on my house. You know that. You all know that. And yet you talked to the investigator anyway. You made me out to be some uncaring monster.”

  “Sweetheart, I didn’t say those things. And neither did your brothers.”

  And then it became clear. “Cheryl did.”

  Barbara nodded, looking at the tabletop instead of at her son.

  “She said that, even though nobody had told me what was happening? Is she so angry that she’d lie about me?”

  “Don’t be too hard on her, Quinn. She’s been through a lot.”

  Now that it was all coming out, it made sense. Alex’s wife had never liked Quinn, and some of that might have been Quinn’s fault. Not all of it, but some of it. And, yeah, she was going through a lot.

  That probably meant she wasn’t going to welcome him when he showed up there. But he was going anyway.

  “Where do they live now, Mom? I need the address.”

  When Miles had said he was going to “look into” Delilah’s potential custody case, she hadn’t thought too deeply about what that might mean. She’d assumed he was going to look into international custody law in general, the statutes on the books, the precedents. That sort of thing.

  What he actually did was employ the same kind of tactics Mitch had.

  He called her on December 30—just as Delilah was packing up Otter Bluff—to give her some news.

  “I don’t think there’s going to be a custody case, Delilah,” Miles said, his face looking smug on the video feed. “I think we can make this thing go away.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “I had someone take a look at Mitch’s new live-in girlfriend. This Celine Mercier. What we found is something Mitch won’t want getting out.”

  Delilah was speechless for a moment, then she gathered herself. “You sent a private detective after them? Like Mitch did to us?”

  “Nothing that dramatic. I just had my researcher do a little Internet search. It didn’t take much. Celine Mercier is a call girl.”

  Delilah was so surprised that she flinched. “She’s what?”

  “Well, she probably isn’t anymore, now that she and Mitch are together. She was advertising her services—using an alias, of course—on a dark web site dedicated to such things, but she took down the ad around the time Mitch moved to Paris. Which either means that she’s no longer in that line of work, or that she’s only got the one client—if you get my meaning.”

  Delilah was stunned, processing all of the various repercussions of what Miles had told her. Yes, it probably meant Mitch’s threat would go away, and that was good. But she felt vaguely sick at the idea of dragging another woman’s name through the mud—even one who’d stolen her husband.

  “I didn’t ask you to do that. I didn’t ask you to … to dig up dirt on Mitch’s girlfriend.”

  “You didn’t have to ask. I was doing the job you paid me to do. Now, if you’d like me to give him a call, make it clear to him what will be discussed in court if he pursues this …”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me. No?”

  “No,” Delilah repeated. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Are you sure? It might be best if I speak to him rather than you. Tempers can get heated, and we don’t want—”

  “I said I’ll talk to him.”

  She ended the call feeling dirty, as though she’d sold herself just as much as Celine had.

  Chapter 32

  Quinn strategically planned his visit to his brother’s house. Cheryl was a cashier at a local grocery store, and his mother had told him she worked the eight-to-five shift most days. So Quinn showed up midday, when Cheryl would be busy scanning six-packs of beer and Swanson’s frozen dinners.

  He walked up to the front door of the little two-bedroom place they were renting, knocked, and huddled in the cold, pulling his coat around him as he waited.

  Alex had worked construction—hard, physical labor that was unsafe for a man with heart problems. He hadn’t yet found a new, less taxing line of work, so he was still home, still unable to earn a paycheck, still seething, probably, with feelings of helplessness and the devastating blow to his pride that came from relying on his wife’s employment for their livelihood.

  When Alex opened the door, he looked thinner and paler than Quinn remembered.

  “Well, shit.” Alex looked at his brother through the screen door.

  “Hi, Alex. Can I come in?”

  Alex seemed to consider slamming the door in Quinn’s face. Instead, after a time that seemed far too long for comfort, he pushed open the screen door and stood back for Quinn to enter.

  “If you’re here to apologize …” Alex began.

  “I’m not. I don’t have shit to apologize for.”

  “Goddamn it, Quinn—”

  “I’m here to find out how you are. To see for myself that you’re up and around and
doing okay. Since you never told me you had a goddamned heart attack, Alex.”

  They stood just inside the front door, a coat rack to Quinn’s left and a side table holding a basket of keys, sunglasses, and other random items to his right. The fact that they hadn’t gone farther into the house indicated to Quinn that he wasn’t welcome here.

  Alex looked at the floor and rubbed an eyebrow with his thumb—a gesture he’d used since his teen years whenever he was uncomfortable about something. “Yeah, well … it kind of seemed like you wouldn’t much care.”

  “Ah, bullshit.”

  “Yeah, okay. You can just fuck off, then.”

  They both stood there seething, neither willing to back down. Finally, Quinn decided to be the bigger person. It was why he’d come, after all.

  “Look. Can we just lower the temperature a bit? I didn’t come here to fight with you. I came to see how you’re doing. So can we maybe talk about that? And can I maybe come in instead of standing two steps inside your damned front door?”

  Alex’s expression was hard, and he still wasn’t looking at Quinn. Then he shrugged, and his features relaxed. “Hell … I guess so. Sure. Come in. You want coffee?”

  They sat at the kitchen table, mugs in front of them, and talked. They kept it polite and superficial at first. Alex told Quinn about his latest doctor visit and the fact that his recovery had gone well. They talked about the new house—a rental, and much smaller than the old one—which Cheryl had found for them. It was close to Cheryl’s job, close to Cheryl’s mother’s place, so that was good.

  They talked about what a bitch it was to stop smoking. Cheryl wanted Alex to give up burgers and bacon, but he’d already given up alcohol and Marlboros. What was the point in recovering if life wasn’t worth living?

  They talked about Christmas—who’d gone to whose house and who’d argued about what over the holiday dinner.

  Through the archway into the living room, Quinn could see their tree still up. Past its prime and sparsely decorated, it reminded him a little of the tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas.