“Why?”
“Because it’s hard, Daddy. It’s just really hard. I had a mental idea of what difficult meant when I stepped into this mom thing. My head knew it; hey, even my heart knew it, but knowing and knowing are two different things. I never know if I’ve made the right decision. I never know if I’m doing a good job unless someone says so, and even then I wonder if they say it because they mean it or if they think it’ll keep me from cracking.”
Her eyes flew up over the table and met the tear-filled ones of her father. “Did I just say all that out loud?” she whispered, her voice sounding like someone else.
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe I said it.”
“Did you mean it?”
The pathetic little nod she gave cut her to the heart, but not nearly as deeply as her next words. “I didn’t say the half of it.”
She found herself pulled from the floor and engulfed in her father’s famous bear hug. “Aggs, I want to tell you something that you’re not going to like to hear.”
“What?”
“I am relieved to hear you say that.”
“Relieved?”
Ron squeezed her tightly before stepping back and leaning against the table she’d erected for her wrapping station. “You’ve been brave—too brave. You have broken down about your loss—about Allie. You’ve broken down about your concerns about your abilities as a mother. You’ve broken down when you thought you hurt a friend or something like that, but you’ve taken the job itself in stride. If you failed, you picked up and made it a success.”
“Isn’t that good?”
“Aggie, if you walk around holding yourself up by your bootstraps, you’ll find that you walk funny and soon the straps break.”
“Can I be Scarlett O’Hara and think about that tomorrow? I’m going to have an epic fail if I don’t get this Christmas going.” She pointed to the stack of wrapped presents. “Can you take those down and put them in the school room?”
Mibs says: Luke?
Luke says: It’s almost Christmas!
Mibs says: Four and a half minutes.
Luke says: Bet I say it first.
Mibs says: You’ll just type it and wait until the clock turns and then hit enter. I know you of old.
Luke says: Who are you callin’ old?
Mibs says: Hey, if the age fits…
Luke says: You seem a bit more yourself. I was worried about you.
Mibs says: Well, I wanted to talk to you, but I knew you needed sleep. Then I saw you online and thought I’d see if you were headed to bed or not.
Luke says: I’m good.
Mibs says: Dad and I got to talk today after you left.
Luke says: Yeah?
Mibs says: I kind of broke down.
Luke says: I’m sorry. I wish I had been there. Are you ok?
Mibs says: I don’t know. That looks horrible, but it is true. I just don’t know.
Luke says: I’m glad you’re honest about it though.
Mibs says: Did you just get a maintenance message?
Luke says: Oh, great now there’s a maintenance message.
Luke says: Yes.
Mibs says: I’ll talk to you about this later then. Probably not tomorrow. No reason to ruin Christmas.
Luke says: Are we ok, Aggie?
Mibs says: As ok as we with me in “we” can be, yes.
Luke says: That sounds ominous.
Mibs says: I’m sorry. It’s just all I can come up with right now that is both honest and reasonable.
This service is temporarily unavailable.
Tears of frustration filled Aggie’s eyes. She needed to talk to him—desperately. Her eyes slid across the couch to the phone. She hated talking for long periods of time on the phone, but surely this was important enough. The clock on her laptop said it was ten minutes past midnight. She hadn’t even gotten to say Merry Christmas. Her fingers flew over the phone keys. She could at least text him that much.
~*~*~*~
All the way up the drive, Luke kicked himself for not calling. What if she’d given up and gone to bed? The house was dark, but the Christmas lights were still lit on the tree and outside. Then again, perhaps she’d left them on for the children if they woke up when it was still dark.
The door was unlocked, assuring him she hadn’t gone to bed yet. Aggie wouldn’t go to bed without locking the door. The couch was empty, the kitchen dark. He stood in the entryway, trying to guess where she might be. The light had been off in her room—maybe the basement.
Just as his hand reached for the doorknob, he jumped, the sound of her voice nearly separating him from his skin. “I didn’t see you.”
“I just thought it’d be nice to look at the lights. I’ve always loved lying on the floor and gazing up at the tree on Christmas Eve.”
“Well, we have something else in common. I actually did that at mom’s last night.”
“You don’t have a tree?”
He lowered himself to the floor beside her and grabbed a pillow from the chair in the process. “Not this year.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” Luke tucked Aggie’s hair behind her ear in order to see her face. “I had another tree that I preferred to visit.”
“I didn’t expect you to come.”
“I didn’t expect that you would expect me to come. I just thought you sounded as if you wanted to talk.”
“I said something awful today.”
The idea was so ludicrous to him that Luke had a hard time not laughing. “What did you say?”
“That I want to give up.”
Dread filled his heart. “Give what up?”
“This pretense that I can do what Allie asked me to do. I’m failing in everything.”
“That’s not true. It probably feels true, but it’s not.”
“Well, then I’m also a failure at recognizing my own weaknesses.”
“Do you really,” Luke began, the despair that had been planted now taking root in his heart, “want to give up on the pretense or is it the reality?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you regret telling the kids you’ll keep them?”
“No!”
Despite the doubts she’d implanted in his heart, the vehemence with which she rejected that notion left little question of her sincerity. “I’m relieved,” he whispered when he noticed her impatience at the delay in his response.
“I couldn’t do that to them.”
Fear crept back into his heart. “Mibs, that’s not what I asked you. I asked if you regretted it, not if you’d changed your mind.”
Again she shook her head as her fingers played with the tassel on his pillow. “I don’t regret telling them what I did. I do regret not thinking about it more fully before I jumped in like I did.”
“You would make a different decision today?”
It took some time for her to answer, but at last she said, “No, but at least I might have been prepared for the worst rather than assuming that if Allie thought I could do it then I must be able to manage it. She didn’t think I could do much of anything practical.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s true. I can’t tell you how many times I heard her tell Doug, ‘Oh well, Aggie is the dreamer in the family, you know.’”
“And how does that translate to not being able to do anything?”
She shrugged. “It’s hard to explain unless you’ve seen it.”
“Ok,” he began, trying another tactic, “you’re failing at everything. What everything?”
“Um, I think the word is pretty self-explanatory. Everything. As a daughter, I barely think to call my parents. If they aren’t online late at night, I never get to talk to them anymore. As a friend, I am basically a user now. What can you do to keep my head above water? That’s all that matters now. As a sister, well that’s irrelevant now—” she choked back a sniffle.
“But hardly something you can consider a failure.”
“Ok, how about the fact that I haven’t visited the graves once? What about the fact that I have hardly talked to the kids about her at all because every time I do it rips me apart?”
“Mibs…”
“No, you listen to me,” she said, sitting up and leaning against the couch. He watched her cross her arms and felt as if they were the first bricks in a wall she was determined to construct between them. “I’m trying to be honest here. This is so hard. I’m exhausted. I can’t seem to do anything right. The kids are behind in school, they are bickering almost non-stop at times, and Laird… I think I’ve totally lost him.”
“Remember when Uncle Zeke and I told you that things were too perfect—that you all weren’t grieving right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I think the kids got on with the process pretty well, but you were still holding up the fort. Helping them grieve was just one more to-do thing on that unending list of yours.”
“See? I can’t even grieve without blowing it!” Her eyes widened and she whispered behind a strangled giggle, “Did I really just say that?”
Without that giggle, his chuckle might have offended her, but thankfully she’d cracked first. “Well, it did sound a bit amusing.”
“What am I going to do?”
Truthfully, he didn’t know what she meant by the question, but something about it made him hesitant to ask. Instead, he turned the question into another direction. “What were Allie’s weaknesses?”
“What?”
“Just what I asked. What were Allie’s weaknesses?”
“She didn’t have any—I mean she was a bit of a perfectionist, but that’s one of those really annoying weaknesses that at least look like a virtue.”
“I think you should ask your parents. There were enough years between you that I bet you never got to see the flaws that made Allie an interesting person.”
“Flaws.”
“Look, Mibs,” he insisted, “we all have an arsenal of weaknesses at our disposal. They’re there to keep us humble and to remind others that they aren’t alone in this walk we call life.”
“That sounds too profound for my brain.”
“You’re tired. Go to bed. We’ll go have a coffee and talk about it more tomorrow.”
“We can’t get coffee anywhere tomorrow.”
Luke pushed himself off the floor and tossed the pillow aside. “No, we can’t get coffee today, but tomorrow is another story.”
As she walked him to the door, Aggie leaned her head on his shoulder, her hand wrapped in his. “Thanks for coming, Luke.”
“Do you feel any better?”
“Not really, but I probably will when I’m not as tired.”
A sprig of mistletoe, put up by the children just that evening, hovered over their heads. Luke rolled his eyes and jerked it from the tack, stuffing it in his jacket. “I’m just helping them to not make me stumble… or something like that. Call me when you hear the first screech or feel the first bounce on your bed. I’ll be right over.”
“Are you sure your sisters—”
“They expect me by ten, so we’ll have a few hours. They understand.”
At home, he stared at his laptop, still sitting where he’d left it, the messenger box open and the cursor flashing. He didn’t know when she’d see it, but he had to send one quick message.
Luke says: And she heard him exclaim as he closed the website, “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.” Love you.
Chapter Nine
Christmas Cheer
Thursday, December 25th
Despite her predictions, Aggie awoke Christmas morning with a fresh confidence in her ability to do whatever the Lord gave her to do—including raising eight children. However, by the third tantrum of the morning, her confidence had waned. The enormous pile of presents under the tree had seemed enough for a small army, but an innocent comment by Vannie regarding her relief in not having such a daunting pile of gifts sparked a chain of events, some real, even more imagined, that tore at Aggie all morning.
By the time Luke left, she’d given up her rosy idyllic dreams for the day and decided that she simply had to get through it. The mess swallowed the room, but only Aggie seemed to notice. She ignored her father’s urging to relax and made the rounds of the room with a trash bag, stuffing wrapping paper, ribbons, and packaging in it.
“Aunt Aggie, here’s one from Luke.”
Her heart sank. She’d forgotten to insist he opened his before he left. “Just set it in the window. I’ll open it later.”
“Come on, open it!” several voices urged, but Aggie refused.
“Who is next then?” her father asked.
“Laird. He has only opened two.”
Eager to see which one he’d open, Aggie watched closely, but what she saw disturbed her. Laird’s expression was fleeting but telling. He was clearly upset and yet also seemed—smug. Though tempted to call him on it, she decided that it wasn’t the time.
Several jokes about the size of the present erupted from the room. However, Vannie’s quip about how it should count for all of his gifts just by its size earned her a snarky response. Aggie was appalled. “Laird!”
“Maybe you agree with her? I can go dump it in the van with all the other stuff you decided we didn’t deserve.”
Ron pounced on that quickly. “That’s enough, Laird.”
“What—”
“I’m sorry, Laird. It was a bad joke. I want to see what it is. Open it.”
She hated the relief that washed over her as he complied, giving Vannie a half smile. As he pulled the guitar from its case, she saw joy on his face for the first time that day. Maybe he was just tired. They’d all had a rough few weeks, and it was the first Christmas without Allie and Doug. The kids would feel that—particularly Laird and Vannie—wouldn’t they?
The horrible sounds he tortured from the instrument made her wonder if she’d regret the decision. Lessons—she’d have to find a teacher and soon. There went the idea of not having any activities this semester. One glance back at him, and Aggie didn’t care anymore. Laird was laughing at something Cari said and showing her how to strum the strings gently. There was the boy she knew and loved.
A text message chimed on her phone. She opened it to see a picture of Luke wearing a T-shirt with handprints all around the words, “The World’s BEST Uncle-daddy.” A second message followed that read, “Mom did it with the kids a couple of weeks ago. Apparently it was their idea. Thought you’d like it.”
Aggie passed her phone around the room so the children and her parents could see Luke wearing his shirt. As she typed out a response, she reminded him that she hadn’t given him his gift and told him she was saving the one he’d left under the tree for when he came over again. HUG YOUR MOM FOR ME, she added as an afterthought.
Tavish squeezed her excitedly once he unwrapped the snowshoes she’d thought were a dumb idea but had risked anyway. Out the backdoor he ran, eager to see if they worked. Lorna and Cari stood at the dining room window, watching with evident glee. “He looks like a penguin! Hey! He fell down. I thought they were supposed to make it easy!”
“I think they do if you know how to use them,” Kenzie chimed, following them to watch. “He’s still a novel at them.”
“Novice, Kenzie.”
“Right. Novice. Because novels are for novelties?” The girl’s eyes brightened as the cogs clicked into what she considered perfect places. “And novelties are short novels, right?”
Aggie giggled. “Not quite. Short novels are novellas now. All novels were once novellas. It all comes from the same thing, but one kind of novel is now a book—” She could see the child’s eyes glazing over and chose to stop it. “Well, anyway. It’s close, but not quite. Look, he’s doing great now!”
Just then, Sammie dashed around the corner of the house, obviously having escaped their latest attempt to keep the dogs penned where they belong, and jumped on Tavish, knocking him over. “Well, he was doing great anyw
ay.”
“How come the dogs don’t need snowshoes?” Cari asked.
Kenzie snorted. “Because they’d just eat them.”
~*~*~*~
Her door pushed open slightly as Vannie knocked gently on it. “Aunt Aggie?”
“Come in. It’s safe now.”
She shoved her laptop aside, closing the lid. With pillows to support them and blankets up to their chins, aunt and niece began a difficult but important conversation. “I think something is wrong with Laird,” Vannie blurted out without ceremony.
“I’ve wondered the same thing. Why do you think so?”
Nervous fingers picked at the bedspread while Vannie worked to articulate the troubles in her heart. “He said something about the heating vents being shut off in the spare room and then something about too much school. It wasn’t what he said really, but the way he said it was weird. Laird doesn’t even care about that stuff! I don’t understand what is going on.”
The girl was right. It didn’t sound like what he’d said was too terrible, but Vannie wasn’t likely to overreact over a few words. No, something else had to be bothering her. One look at those hands—nearly shaking with the weight of whatever was pressing on her—told Aggie she had to ask. “There’s something more, isn’t there?”
“He scared me.”
“How?”
“It was the way he shoved me when he went past and how he almost charged me when he wanted me out of the room. Honestly,” she ducked her head and dropped her voice to a whisper, “that’s the kind of thing I might do if I was upset—not Laird. He just ignores everything and then if he can’t take it anymore, he walks away. He doesn’t…um…”
“Engage?”
“Yeah! Engage. It’s just not his personality. It’s hard enough to get him to get worked up over anything in the first place. Usually it’s when he can’t do anything right, but I don’t think that’s it this time.”
Here We Come (Aggie's Inheritance) Page 13
