Have Yourself a Crazy Little Christmas

by Megan Crane

  “I don’t remember anything too terrible happening,” Devyn said. Maybe a little too hopefully, because she’d spent her time in Marietta trying to keep Melody’s much, much younger date away from her grandparents, who would not have responded positively to his endless boasts about his weed farm in Oregon.

  “Jesse made us promise to jump in and break them up if they got into a fistfight,” Scottie said. “And believe me, I was expecting high drama. Maybe fireworks. Damon and I were fully prepared to bail everybody out and appeal to the local judge.”

  “I expected flipped tables at the very least,” Skylar agreed.

  “All they said was a chilly little congratulations to each other and it was too much for me.” Scottie shuddered. “I needed a restorative glass of wine for a couple of words. If my dad showed up at my mother’s front door I think I would actually faint.”

  Billy Grey was the middle of Melody’s three older brothers. He was a big man in Billings, Montana, where he ran a regional sporting goods company and had cheated on Skylar and Scottie’s mother repeatedly before leaving her. And had repeated the cycle with the stepmother who had come after her. And had then followed all that up by stealing his own son’s girlfriend one Christmas, marrying her, and having twin girls.

  Jesse had found a way to be okay with his father and his ex, Angelique. His own mother had not reached anything resembling okay, preferring to marinate in her misery—and her maiden name—out in Idaho. But still, Devyn had thought everyone handled themselves remarkably well at Jesse’s wedding this past summer. Surely that had to count as hope for the coming week, she told herself briskly. Sometimes certain disaster could be averted.

  “My parents weren’t fighting,” Devyn said glumly then, because she felt her cousins needed all the facts so they could really be horrified. “They’re getting along famously. Flirting, you might even say. Making eyes at each other, in fact. Or maybe worse.”

  “You have to stop.” But then Scottie made a face. “My God, what if they...?”

  “She just said she’s coming down with something,” Skylar said, cutting her off with a laugh. “Don’t make us all vomit.”

  Devyn stood there at her cousins’ table, marveling for approximately the nine millionth time in her life how similar they all looked. Dark hair. Blue eyes. Very clearly members of the Grey family who resembled their grandfather. Other cousins had inherited Grandma’s once-strawberry-blonde hair and willowy form. And as usual, the similarities Devyn shared with her cousins filled her with something like a sense of purpose. She might not believe in her grandmother’s curse, but she’d always believed that Greys came with certain traits whether they wanted to or not.

  It was in their blood. It was who they were.

  It was the way they all laughed, the way the three of them did now, from the belly and maybe a little too rowdily. It was the way Scottie patted the seat next to hers, with a gesture and expression that could as easily belong to Devyn or Sydney, or any of the rest of them. They’d grown up together. They might be spread all over the place these days, but they’d always had their grandparents and Grey’s Saloon in Montana, where a Grey had been tending bar since the 1880s when the saloon was the first building in what would one day become Marietta.

  The ten older Grey cousins, all daughters of Grandma and Grandpa’s four kids except for Jesse, the single son, had spent a whole lot of quality time together. Their parents might not necessarily have gotten along brilliantly all the time. Uncle Jason was surly. Uncle Billy was always embroiled in some or other issue. Uncle Ryan was the only one Grandma liked, which led to all kinds of tensions with the rest, and of course, Melody was Melody. Grandma and Grandpa might have their issues, especially when Grandpa was younger and had an eye for the ladies. There were always tensions somewhere in the family. But never amongst the cousins. The cousins were eternal.

  Eternally friends. Eternally bonded like nobody else. Eternally family.

  It made Devyn more comfortable than she might otherwise have been after her first one-night stand, ever. She sat down, ordered a very strong coffee from the smiling man behind the bar, and felt more at home in Jackson than she had since she’d arrived last night.

  Well. That wasn’t entirely true. But since she had no intention of telling another living soul what had happened with Vaughn, she was already working on pretending last night hadn’t happened.

  “Talk me through your mother’s deal,” Scottie said, direct as usual. “My first question, and I mean this with love, is...has she gone completely insane?”

  Devyn laughed. “That’s not a real question, is it? She’s always been insane. She would be the first to tell you so herself. She thinks it adds to her charm.”

  Skylar grinned. “They’re all insane. It’s a defining Grey characteristic. Own it, I say.”

  “Whether we own it or don’t own it, what I want to know is if we’re really going to be awash in a sea of Aunt Melody’s exes all through Christmas,” Scottie replied. “How can she really think that’s going to be fun?”

  “Why does she think anything’s fun?” Devyn asked, with a shrug. “Remember when she decided we needed to move to North Carolina and dedicate ourselves to the life and times of a honeybee commune? Because I do. And that wasn’t even as crazy as when she thought we should live on a houseboat in Seattle because she saw that one Tom Hanks movie. But apparently missed the part where it was in Seattle. In the pouring rain.”

  “I admire Aunt Melody,” Skylar said after they all laughed at that. “It’s easy to get confused and think you have to live the way everyone around you does. Aunt Melody never did, no matter what. She never even pretended.”

  Devyn didn’t want to argue with Skylar about the virtues of following the crowd. She knew her cousin came at it from a different angle and who could blame her? Skylar had done everything the right way. She’d gone off to Georgia for college, met a boy when she’d moved to Atlanta, and had planned to settle down and marry him. But fate had intervened in the form of a car crash, and Skylar had spent a long time mourning the life she’d lost when her fiancé had died. No one had ever thought she’d move on, least of all Skylar. And yet here she was, looking perfectly happy despite the fact she’d run off with a bull rider last summer. And was, according to the Grey Family Gossip Machine, living quite happily with said bull rider to this day.

  I ran off with the rodeo, she’d told Devyn at Jesse’s wedding, after her bull rider had come and claimed her in Grey’s Saloon in Marietta like something out of a movie. I’m finally my own country song.

  Skylar had gone and found herself a happily ever after right where people had told her not to look, so of course she admired Melody, who lived in the places people didn’t want look at.

  Not that Devyn was comparing herself to Skylar. She hadn’t lost anything. She hadn’t suffered. She’d just acted inappropriately with a man who had almost been her stepbrother. So inappropriately, in fact, that she could still feel him every time she inhaled.

  “I’m not sure I admire my mother’s devil-may-care attitude in quite the same way you do,” Devyn said instead, choosing her words carefully and opting not to focus on all the things she could feel in her body. All the glorious little things Vaughn had done to her. All the many ways he’d touched her and taken her and she’d responded in kind. She had to fight off the flush she was sure was turning her beet red. “Because I’m the one who had to live through her choice to follow the beat of her own drum, even if actually it turned out to be something else, like a cliff. Like my dad, in fairness.”

  “Is he still so...scary?” Skylar asked.

  Scottie leaned forward. “Is he still so illegal?”

  Because of course, neither one of them had laid eyes on Derrick Voss in years. If ever, now that Devyn thought about it. It wasn’t as if her mother’s long-ago summer lover, as she nauseatingly liked to put it, had been invited to a lot of family functions.

  “I mean, he’s who he is.” Devyn shrugged. “There’s no get
ting around it. But he said he flew here on a commercial plane, so I’m guessing that means he’s not wanted by any law enforcement agencies at the moment. Or on the no-fly list. Or actively involved in any known criminal pursuits.”

  “Well...” Scottie began, but stopped abruptly.

  Skylar smiled as she removed her foot from her sister’s shin, making no attempt to hide the fact she’d kicked Scottie under the table.

  “Thank you, counselor, but I don’t think you took the bar exam in Wyoming. Maybe put the lawyering away.” She ignored the rude hand gesture Scottie made at her. “Devyn. You’re all...flushed. Maybe you really are sick.”

  “I was subjected to my parents entirely too soon. I’m just reeling, I’m sure.” Devyn shifted her gaze from Skylar to Scottie, then back again, and ordered herself to stop flushing, not that she expected that to work. “I hardly recognize you two, just sitting here alone like you’re lonely and single, like we’re all teenagers again. Don’t you have hot men waiting for you somewhere?”

  The man behind the bar came over to give her the very large, very strong coffee she’d ordered then, and she almost wept with gratitude.

  “Damon is neck-deep in a case,” Scottie was saying of her equally high-powered attorney boyfriend, who she lived with back in San Francisco. She eyed her phone as it buzzed sullenly against the tabletop, but didn’t pick it up. “He’s coming in on Friday. Supposedly. I pointed out to him that if he keeps pushing his flight back it will almost certainly snow too much and he’ll be stuck in the Denver airport for Christmas. So we’ll see if he makes it. But he’s pretty good at getting what he wants, so I wouldn’t bet against him.”

  “Cody’s upstairs,” Skylar said, of the bull rider who’d swept her off her feet this past summer. And who was clearly still doing his job, judging from the dreamy look on Skylar’s face as she mentioned him. “He officially retired from the circuit this past October, but he still has to ice his knees after all the years of abuse.”

  “Does he complain about it?” Scottie asked. “Damon pulled something on a run a few months ago and you would have thought he was facing immediate amputation, the way he carried on.”

  Skylar’s blue eyes danced. “I love that man, but you would think there was a stampede of bulls using his knees as trampolines every minute of every day. And before you think I’m mean, he does this every single morning. When he was actually competing he was much more stoic about it. Now that he’s retired, all I hear about is his battered body and how he’s aged decades before his time and am I prepared to spend my life with a broken man in pieces who’s basically useless, blah blah blah.”

  Though Devyn noted she seemed more than okay with that prospect.

  “Men.” Scottie sighed. “Don’t you remember what it was like growing up? Every time Dad or Jesse did anything, like get a splinter or a hangnail, the whining took over the whole house. And heaven forbid one of them ever got sick. Damon is even worse, though. You can trust that man to make a sniffle into an opera.”

  “Cody has never had a headache,” Skylar said, grinning. “He has, however, successfully fought off any number of terminal brain tumors with his grit and determination alone.”

  “I’m so glad they’ve managed to be so strong in the face of such adversity,” Devyn murmured, and her cousins laughed.

  And kept right on going.

  Chapter Seven

  Devyn sat back and sipped at her coffee as her cousins continued to discuss their men and their various afflictions, in tones of voices that suggested they found it all endearing.

  It occurred to Devyn, not for the first time, that she was sorely lacking male influences in her life. Her father was a whole thing, it was true, but he wasn’t a day-to-day figure in her life and he never had been. She knew he loved her in his fierce, gruff way, and she also knew that should she ever need to put that to the test, he would happily rise to the occasion. But Derrick was a voice on the other end of the phone, normally.

  The same was true of her uncles and grandfather. She saw them in the summers and on some holidays, but they were incidental to her life, not at its center. She had no stories to tell about life with men.

  Of all her mother’s boyfriends and fiancés, there had only been one real stepfather. Sydney’s father had been married to Melody for five years when Devyn was very young. She’d seen him after that, because he’d shared custody of Sydney with Melody, but he hadn’t been a force in Devyn’s life and the truth was, she couldn’t really remember her five years with him.

  If she was ever going to sit around telling knowing little stories about what it was like to share space with a man, it was going to have to be her man, not random members of her family. And she couldn’t help but think about what it would be like to know a man like Vaughn that way. To be able to make throwaway remarks about his vulnerabilities, or the ridiculous things he did, secure in the knowledge that the people listening had met him and knew that he was gorgeous. And seemingly invulnerable. And would only ever share the other sides of himself with a woman he loved enough and trusted to handle the fact he was a whole person who had as many quirks and moods as she did.

  Because that’s what this conversation was, she understood. A way of talking about love by pretending to find it annoying when clearly, neither one of her cousins was all that annoyed.

  The truth was, Devyn couldn’t imagine it. She wasn’t sure she’d ever really reached that level of intimacy with anyone, not even her most serious relationship—which had lasted almost two years after college. Pete had been a nice guy. They’d had a good time. But they’d never been this at ease with each other. They’d never tended to each other’s illnesses or felt comfortable enough with each other to whine or complain.

  Are you ever at ease with anyone? a voice inside asked.

  Devyn shoved it aside. Go to hell, voice, she thought. I’m fine.

  “Do you know when Grandma and Grandpa are getting in?” Skylar asked, and Devyn forced herself to pay attention to the conversation happening in front of her. Not little voices dropping unpleasant truths deep inside her. Not last night, or the way entirely too many images seemed to swirl around inside of her, making her wish she hadn’t rolled out of Vaughn’s bed quite so quickly.

  “The last I heard they were coming in a few days ahead of Christmas,” she said, trying her best to sound normal and not awash in R-rated scenes. “I imagine they’ll be here soon enough, spreading joy and love wherever they go.”

  “I talked to Luce while we were on our layover yesterday,” Skylar told them, leaning in close to indicate that she was delivering some good old Grey Family Gossip. Luce was the only one of the cousins who actually lived in Marietta, Montana, where their uncle Jason was in charge of the old saloon and Luce’s parents, Ryan and Gracie, ran an outdoor expedition company. Luce was the one who saw their grandparents more than anyone else, for good or ill. “She confirmed that Christina and Dare are staying at home with the newborn and that Aunt Gracie and Uncle Ryan are staying over in the Bitterroot Valley with them. They’ll be there through New Year’s.”

  “Did you see the baby pictures?” Devyn asked. “Aunt Gracie posted about a hundred the other day.”

  Christina was Luce’s younger sister, between Skylar and Scottie in age, and had married her college sweetheart a long time ago. They’d had some hard times a few years back, but these days seemed loved up and happy to keep their hands full with a toddler and their brand-new baby, delivered just in time to keep them in Western Montana for Christmas instead of down here with the rest of them.

  “You can tell that baby is a Grey,” Scottie said with a grin, looking up from another spate of typing into her phone. “She looks ornery already and she’s barely three weeks old.”

  “Luce also said Grandma has been on an extended tirade about Melody’s ‘latest foolishness’ and the fact she’s dragging everybody down to Wyoming at Christmas when everybody knows it’s not Christmas unless it’s up in Big Sky.” Skylar smiled. “Quote u
nquote.”

  Devyn had similar feelings about the whole exercise, but Grandma didn’t need to be quite so much of a curmudgeon or quite so mean to Melody, in her view. “It’s going to be December twenty-fifth on Monday here the same as it will be anywhere else,” she said dryly.

  “Please tell Grandma that,” Scottie encouraged her. “Directly to her face. I’ll sell tickets.”

  “Don’t dare me,” Devyn muttered. “I mean that. Don’t. I’m going to have to spend the next week trying to keep my mother from getting in a screaming match with Grandma in the middle of her party. I certainly can’t do it myself.”

  “Uncle Jason is pissed, according to Luce,” Skylar continued. “He finds it annoying enough to go to Big Sky for Christmas, apparently. Jackson Hole is a bridge too far.”

  “I’m guessing that he’s not overly supportive of his sister’s quest for true love,” Scottie said. “Or maybe it’s the participating in it he’s not into, which, in fairness, I can understand. I enjoyed Jesse’s wedding, for example. I’m not sure I want to hear anything else about that supposedly epic winter storm he and Michaela got stuck in. Or even one single thing they did on that road trip to Seattle from Marietta.”

  “Um, no,” Skylar agreed, with a shudder. “Ew.”

  “And as far as I’m aware or want to be aware, you decided to travel around with Cody because you really, really like bulls.”

  Skylar laughed at her sister. “Right. The bulls. That was the draw.”

  “How exactly did you and Damon get together?” Devyn asked Scottie.

  “We met at work,” Scottie said mildly. “And what did you say you were doing in this hotel at this hour?”

  “I like the coffee,” Devyn replied in the same tone. “Best coffee in Jackson Hole.”

  They all gazed at each other, blandly innocent expressions all around.

  “So anyway, point taken,” Devyn said at last, grinning at her coffee. “Uncle Jason isn’t all that fired up about a tour through his sister’s romantic life, and who can blame him?”