We Need a Little Christmas

by Sierra Donovan

  She spoke to Rachel again, her tone milder this time. “The color wheel’s got to be in the house somewhere. After all, she held on to the tree. We’ll find it.”

  “You know where it might be,” Scotty said. “She had me take some things up to the attic a few times when I was over. She just didn’t believe in throwing things away.”

  Liv frowned. “There’s an attic?”

  “Well, more of a glorified crawl space. California houses aren’t much on attics. Not even way back when that house was built.”

  “How much stuff is up there?”

  “A lot of boxes. No furniture or anything like that. But if I moved a box with a color wheel in it, I wouldn’t have known what it was. I’m still not sure what a color wheel is.”

  A smile glimmered on Rachel’s face. “You’ll just have to see.”

  Liv gave Rachel a scolding look. “You’re not going up there.”

  Then she bit her tongue. The big-sister routine was hard to shake.

  “I’ll help,” Scott interjected.

  “We can’t keep—”

  “Look,” he said. “Here’s what we’ll do. The heater company’s sending a guy out Tuesday. It makes sense for me to be there when he shows up. After all, I’m the one who put the heater in.”

  “You installed the heater?” Liv asked. “When?”

  He shifted his feet. “About a year ago.”

  “It’s a new heater?”

  “Right. So I must have done something wrong, and I want to know what. I’ll make it right. I promise.”

  Liv turned to her mother. “Did Nammy have any trouble with the heater last winter?”

  Mom shook her head. “Never.”

  She turned back to Scotty. “So what makes you think it’s your fault?”

  “What else could it be? The truth is, I’d love to know it’s not my fault. But I’ve got to know what the problem is.”

  Liv was silent. She understood that. She hated making mistakes, and when she did, she wanted to know what went wrong.

  “So, anyway. While I’m waiting for the heater guy to show, I’ll unload the attic.” His eyes flicked from one woman to the next. “Safely,” he assured them. “So we don’t have any pregnant women jumping up on chairs like mountain goats.”

  “Did you say Tuesday?” Liv said. “That’s when Mom has her appointment with the specialist.”

  “I can drive Mom,” Rachel said. “She doesn’t really need both of us there.” She looked to their mother for confirmation, and Faye nodded.

  Liv hesitated. Mom seemed to mean it. Maybe having both of them hover over her got a little overwhelming. And maybe Rachel didn’t need Liv second-guessing her judgment. Maybe the most useful thing she could do was stay behind and go through the attic.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, and Mom and Rachel both nodded.

  “Meantime,” Mom said, pulling herself up from the armchair, “we’ve got a tree to decorate. Let’s get to work.”

  They uncapped the first tin of ornaments and got started, unrolling the decorations from their protective wrappings of tissue paper, paper towels and kitchen napkins. There were so many, and no two were alike. What one of them didn’t remember, another of them would.

  “Oh, gosh, Liv, remember these?” Rachel’s face lit up as she unrolled another ball of tissue paper. “The gingerbread men we made that year we decided to make decorations for Nammy. This one was yours.” Rachel handed a stuffed felt figure to Liv.

  “No, the pink one was yours. The green one was mine.”

  “Are you sure?” Rachel squinted, studying the workmanship.

  “Positive. Pink was your favorite color then, remember?”

  “Either way, not a very natural color for gingerbread.”

  “Well, neither of us liked brown.”

  Rachel grinned. “I guess kids don’t go in much for realism.”

  “And here’s that bluebird.” Liv gently pulled out a sequined glass bird with blue feathers to fill in the details of its wings and tail.

  “Oh.” Rachel sighed. “I love that one.”

  “That’s mine,” Mom said, but Liv was already handing it to her.

  “What’s the story behind that one?” Liv asked.

  Mom held the ornament by its hook, letting the blue sequins catch the light. “I’m not sure. We had it from the time I was little. I always wanted to be the one to hang it.”

  Leaning on one crutch, she hung the bird with care on a prominent branch near the top of the tree, while Liv silently prayed she didn’t topple over.

  They couldn’t keep Mom off her feet the whole time, so she spent half her time leaning on one crutch while she hung an ornament with her free hand. To make rest breaks easier, Liv and Rachel brought in a kitchen chair and put it close to the tree. They kept Scotty involved by handing off some of the more masculine decorations to him: a toy train, a nutcracker, a duck in flight.

  “Is this as old as I think it is?” Scotty handed their mother a tarnished, flat gold bell. Mom, seated in the kitchen chair, brushed the ornament’s surface lightly with her fingertips, as if to shine it.

  “I don’t remember that one.” Liv stepped behind Mom and peered over her shoulder. Rachel joined her on the left.

  “Nammy always hung this one.” Mom’s voice had that rarely heard shaky quality. A faint inscription was engraved on the surface of the bell. Liv could barely make out her grandparents’ names, with the year below. “It was from their first Christmas,” Mom said. “She told me she ordered it with cereal box tops. I don’t think they even make that cereal anymore.”

  They helped Mom out of her chair and helped her find a prominent spot for it. Scotty slipped toward the kitchen. “More eggnog, anyone?”

  It wasn’t a man’s world tonight, and he seemed to recognize the fact.

  Half an hour later, the second tin of ornaments was still half full, but they were definitely running out of space on the little tree. Liv and Rachel stood back to view the results of their work, while Mom reclaimed her armchair, her foot dutifully propped up in front of her.

  Scott, once again, stood to the side. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “It needs the color wheel,” Rachel said.

  Liv nodded in agreement. It was wonderful to see Nammy’s old decorations, but without the colored light to reflect off its branches, the silver tree itself wasn’t quite as she remembered it. Of course, the last time she saw it was nearly twenty years ago. Maybe, through the eyes of an adult, its dime-store origins were simply more apparent.

  “We’ll find the color wheel,” Liv said.

  They contemplated the tree in silence. With all the memories on the branches in front of them, it was a bittersweet moment. That had been the point, after all—to celebrate Nammy’s memory.

  Then, suddenly, Rachel was circling the room, gathering empty plates and eggnog mugs. She whisked them off to the kitchen before Liv had a chance to help. Her sister’s sudden flurry of activity kept the mood from getting too somber, if nothing else.

  Rachel returned from the kitchen, extending her arms over her head in an elaborate stretch. “Well, that was fun,” she said. “But I’m beat. How about you, Mom?”

  “It has been a long day,” Faye agreed, and Rachel was by her side in an instant, helping her up out of the chair.

  Before Liv could recover from her mental whiplash, her mother and sister had excused themselves and gone to get ready for bed. It was barely past nine o’clock. Scott stared down the hall after them, looking as startled as Liv felt. Unless he was a talented actor, he didn’t appear to be part of the conspiracy. Because that was definitely the description that came to mind.

  I should have seen this coming, Liv thought. Rachel’s intentions to throw her together with Scott had been pretty obvious from the start. What wasn’t clear to Liv was why. What was even more baffling was, what was she supposed to do now that they’d been so abruptly abandoned?

  She could get Scotty’s coat and hand it to him
with a cheery smile, but that seemed pretty rude. Michael Bublé was still playing on the stereo, for heaven’s sake.

  All evening long, Rachel had made sure the carols on the CD player never ran out. Right up until her quick exit, her sister had worked overtime to infuse the evening with Christmas spirit. Liv knew her heart was in the right place. Rachel always tried to keep everyone around her happy. It was an endearing trait, Liv told herself, one she could use more of herself.

  This agenda to leave her alone with Scotty, both at the start and the end of the evening, was just a little . . . blatant.

  My sister went from warning me about Scotty-the-Serial-Dater to setting me up with him.

  Scott regarded her patiently, not quite smiling, with a bemused look in the blue eyes that contrasted with his bright red sweater. Looking at him didn’t help her think objectively.

  Offer him his coat? Or offer him more eggnog? Between the four of them, they’d already gone through enough eggnog to sink a battleship. She couldn’t think of anything she could say or do that wouldn’t point up the inherent awkwardness of the scene.

  Did she want him to leave?

  Of course she did. Anything else wouldn’t make sense. She wouldn’t even be in Tall Pine a few weeks from now.

  Rachel had spirited away the plates, so Liv busied herself gathering stray tissue wrappings off the floor and off the couch. Maybe that was a nicer cue that the evening was, in fact, over. But Scotty, being Scotty, stepped in to help her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t need to do that.”

  “Neither do you.” He eased a bundle of tissue paper from her hand and deposited it into the empty tin. “This could probably wait until tomorrow. You’ve been going nonstop since you got here.”

  “No more than Mom and Rachel. And they’re pregnant and wounded.”

  “And they just went to bed,” he pointed out.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Funny, that.”

  Leave it to her to bring up the elephant in the room. As if this situation needed to get more embarrassing.

  “Okay,” Scotty said. “They weren’t very subtle. But they meant well.”

  “I guess.” Liv rubbed her arms as they stood facing each other. The flames in the fireplace were growing dimmer—one touch Rachel had overlooked in her hasty departure—and the room was getting cooler. “It’s just sort of... borderline creepy, that’s all.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “No offense. But doesn’t it weird you out a little? Being pushed together like this?”

  She made the mistake of meeting his eyes again and saw crinkles of amusement forming faintly at the corners.

  “Liv, all they did was give us a little time alone together. I don’t think they expect to come in here tomorrow morning and find our clothes all over the floor.”

  Now, that would serve Rachel right. “So what do we do?” she heard herself say.

  “Whatever you want.” Those eye crinkles edged upward into genuine smile lines, but this time it wasn’t his trademark broad grin. “We could go out for a walk. Play gin rummy. Whatever.”

  That smile was almost enough to thaw away the awkwardness. Almost. Liv tried to steel herself. She was getting way too comfortable with him, and that didn’t make sense either. Three weeks. You’re here for three more weeks. There’s no point. Who ever heard of a winter fling?

  The silence stretched long enough for Scotty’s half smile to dim. “Or I could go home. No biggy.”

  She could just let him go. But it didn’t feel right. “Scotty—”

  “Scott.”

  “Scott,” she amended. “I’m sorry. It’s just a lousy time.”

  “I know.” He shrugged. “Like I said, no big deal. I’ve gotten the ‘just-friends’ speech quite a few times. Maybe I can even help you with the script.”

  Just friends. She should grab at that. Scotty certainly had turned into a friend, and a good one, in a very short time. But just friends was such a standard-issue brush-off.

  “It’s not that,” she said lamely. “But—we keep getting thrown together. All this stuff with the heater, and now Rachel. And I keep jumping in your truck.”

  “Maybe because we enjoy each other’s company? It’s not exactly a crime, Liv.”

  “But there’s no point. I’m leaving in less than a month.”

  “So what are you afraid of?”

  “Who said I was afraid?”

  “You act like it.”

  “I’m not. I’m just trying to save us both some trouble.”

  But maybe he wasn’t so far off.

  She couldn’t think when he was looking at her. As if he was hearing more than she was saying. Maybe it wasn’t so hard to see why he was such a hit with heartbroken women. But she didn’t want him to hear what she wasn’t saying. So she turned away and contemplated the tree.

  It was . . . incomplete. Without the color wheel, and under normal lighting, it looked sad and spindly, even with the long-forgotten ornaments. Because nothing could bring Nammy back.

  “Hey.” There was that multipurpose word again. She felt his hand on her arm, felt tears threaten, and stepped away. If he touched her again, she was sure she’d cry. And she didn’t want that. Behind her, she felt Scott move away, too, as if she’d singed him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Really. I know you’re trying to help. I just don’t want to start bawling again the way I did the other day.”

  “You don’t have to be strong all the time, you know.”

  “I like being strong.”

  Scott looked at Liv in the soft living room light—the determined lift of her chin, the waver of vulnerability in her eyes—and felt a tug somewhere inside. He started to reach a hand toward her face, then stopped himself. He needed to quit reaching out when she kept pulling away. So he lowered his hand. But he stood his ground.

  Finally she met his eyes. “It’s not you. And it’s not just Nammy. It’s—everything.”

  “I know.”

  She looked at him questioningly.

  “With women, it’s never just one thing. It’s like you’re walking down the street and a big truckload of everything falls on you.”

  Usually, though, there was a guy at the heart of it. In his experience, It’s everything always seemed to come after It’s not just Joe. Or Mac. Or Todd.

  This time, Nammy was at the heart of it, and that made Liv a different story. One he could relate to, because he felt that loss, too.

  She was avoiding his eyes again, rubbing that area just below her temples.

  “You know, you do that a lot,” he said.

  She looked puzzled a moment. “Oh.” She lowered her fingers. “I carry tension in my jaw.”

  He couldn’t help it. He reached up slowly with both hands and used his thumbs to rub that same area, from her jaw line to her temple, his fingers sliding into her hair. She didn’t try to pull away this time.

  The stereo had stopped, he realized, and the room was virtually silent except for the sound of the half-hearted fire on the other side of the room. Liv’s eyes dropped shut, and the world seemed to pause. Scott tried for a cooler head. She said she didn’t want this, he reminded himself. But she stood motionless, eyes closed, as if a spell had fallen over them both.

  He smoothed his thumbs through the hair at her temples, more slowly. His eyes wandered down to her parted lips. He wanted to kiss her. But not unless she wanted him to.

  “Is this how it starts?” she said, almost languidly.

  “No,” he admitted wryly. “Usually it starts with a girl venting to me about some so-and-so.”

  Her eyes stayed closed, and he let his thumbs come to a rest at her temples, holding her face cupped in his hands.

  “At least in your case there’s no so-and-so,” he said.

  That brought her eyes open. Her hazel gaze fixed on his, as if uncertain whether or not to speak. And he knew.

  Oh, crap. He’d fallen right into his demographic again. Scott let his hands
drop.

  Liv blinked, as if coming out of their mutual trance.

  “See?” she said. “I told you. It’s a bad idea.”

  Scott made himself step back, but it wasn’t easy. An invisible magnetic pull seemed to draw him toward her. Even though everything she said made sense. A little too much sense.

  “Do you ever hate being right?” he asked.

  And he left, before that invisible magnet made him reach for her again.

  Chapter 12

  By the time Rachel came down the hall the next morning, Liv’s clothes were strewn over the living room floor.

  Liv waited, listening, at the far end of the kitchen table, where the partial wall between the kitchen and living room kept her blocked from view. She heard Rachel’s slippers shuffle down the hall—definitely Rachel, not Mom, because the crutches made distinctive sounds with the shifting of Mom’s weight.

  Liv sipped her coffee, savoring the flavor, drinking in Rachel’s shocked silence.

  Then came a tentative, “Liv?”

  Liv lowered her mug, grinned, and waited a few more seconds.

  “Liv? Where are you?”

  “In here.”

  Rachel entered the kitchen, her round gray eyes at their roundest. Liv let her sister take in the sight of her in her robe, slippers, and pajamas.

  “The coffee’s warm.” Liv took another placid sip.

  Rachel sidled toward the coffeepot, still staring at Liv. “What happened last night?”

  Liv was tempted to let the game go on a little longer, but decided it was better not to let wild images implant themselves too firmly in Rachel’s imagination. “Nothing. Scotty left about fifteen minutes after you went to bed.”

  “Where’d you sleep?”

  “In bed next to you, snore-meister. I got up half an hour ago.”

  “What about—” Rachel’s head swiveled toward the living room, scattered with yesterday’s clothes.

  Liv shrugged. “Just an idea I got from Scotty. Didn’t you wonder what happened to his clothes?”

  “I was too busy freaking out.” Rachel swatted Liv’s arm and glared at her.

  Liv took another sip of coffee, hiding a smile of triumph. Rachel heaved an exasperated sigh, then went to the cabinet and pulled out a blue coffee mug. Rachel had always liked blue.