by Donna Ball
He slanted her a look that flashed, for one brief moment, the first genuine emotions she had ever seen from him—surprise, and gratitude.
But it was gone as quickly as it had been there, swallowed in embarrassment and awkwardness as he shifted his scowling gaze quickly back to the fire. To cover, Lindsay punched his arm lightly and injected outrage into her voice that wasn’t entirely feigned.
“You spent the money we paid you on a motorcycle?” she demanded. “Do you even have a license?”
His answer was a shrug. He said, without looking at her, “You still got that ole deer hanging around here?”
Lindsay hid a smile. “We do. We made a place for him in the barn like you said.”
He grunted. “Maybe I’ll go have me a look, after a while. Surprised somebody ain’t et him.”
“That’s not going to happen,” she assured him.
Again he slanted a glance at her. “You shore are the craziest bunch of women.”
This time she didn’t try to hide the grin. “We’ve been called worse.”
And then she added, “We really missed you around here.”
Flames patterned color across his face. “Oh yeah?”
“There’s an awful lot of work piling up, with Cici being hurt and all.”
He grunted.
She said nothing else. He stood there, warming his hands over the fire in silence, for the longest time. Then he said, without looking at her, “I reckon I might be able to help you out some.”
“We were talking about taking somebody on permanently,” Lindsay said casually, “to live on the place and help take care of things. Of course, whoever we hired would have to agree to a few rules.”
“I ain’t much for rules,” he said warily.
“Like no smoking on the premises.”
He shrugged. “Hell, I can’t afford smokes on what you pay nohow.”
“And staying in school.”
He scowled fiercely. “What you running, a damn prison?”
She shrugged, and started to turn away. “Well, I have to get back to my guests.”
He said, without turning from the fire, “Maybe I’ll think about it.”
She smiled. “Why don’t you do that?”
She started to walk away again, and again he stopped her. “Hey,” he said.
She turned.
He reached inside his jacket and brought out a slender cardboard tube of the size that might once have held a roll of paper towels. “Here.” Awkwardly, he handed the tube to her.
She took it slowly, gently prying out the cylinder of paper inside, unrolling it. “Oh . . . Noah,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”
It was a charcoal sketch of their house, painstakingly rendered in exquisite detail. The hydrangeas and clematis were in bloom and the hollyhocks seemed almost to nod in the breeze. Shadows stretched across the front porch, and three rockers awaited their occupants. Mountains swelled in the background and in the foreground a long drive wound toward a road. At the end of it was a hand-painted sign: Welcome to Ladybug Farm.
Lindsay looked at him, her eyes full, hardly knowing what to say.
“I kept a picture of it in my head,” he said simply.
Lindsay had to look quickly away, before she embarrassed herself and him with tears, and she smiled as she carefully rolled the sketch and replaced it in its crude container. “Come on,” she told him huskily, “let’s get you something to eat.”
Cici and Lori sat on the floor beneath the Christmas tree, where Lori quickly emptied a plate filled with one of everything on the serving table, and drank two glasses of nonalcoholic eggnog. “Mom, this fruitcake is outrageous,” Lori declared. “Have you tasted it?” She offered her mother a bite from her fork, but Cici held up a hand.
“No, thanks.”
“Seriously, this doesn’t even taste like fruitcake. It’s like—I can’t even describe it. You’ve got to have some. I think it’s the best thing Aunt Bridget has ever made.”
“Aunt Bridget didn’t make it,” Cici said quickly, “so don’t you dare tell her it’s the best thing she’s ever made. Lori, you did tell your dad you were coming here, didn’t you?”
Lori scraped her plate. “We had a talk,” she told her mother. “The thing is, I think I’m kind of over L.A. Maybe I’ll stay out here for a while, if it’s okay with you.”
Cici stared at her. “Okay?” she repeated blankly.
Lori gave a self-conscious smile as she licked her fork. “Well, okay, I know you don’t like to hear this, but . . . maybe you were right. A little right, anyway, about how you can get mixed up when you’re away from home, and maybe I haven’t been thinking exactly straight lately. It was all so much fun. It was a great adventure and I got to do some terrific things but . . . it just wasn’t going anywhere, you know? And after a while that starts to get old.”
For a moment, Cici couldn’t even speak. Finally she managed, “What about Jeff?”
Lori couldn’t quite meet her eyes. “Married,” she said. “And boring.”
Cici reached across and squeezed her fingers. “I’m sorry.”
But Lori’s heart, if it had in fact been broken, was recovering quickly. “So now that I’m here,” she said cheerfully, “things are going to be different. Lucky for me you’ve got such a super place, right? I mean, who knew? Too bad you can’t do anything about the weather.”
Cici’s own heart was so full that her chest couldn’t hold the emotion, and the simple, quiet joy radiated up into her eyes and spread across her lips in a smile that she could neither explain nor contain. “I love you,” she told Lori.
And Lori replied easily, “Love you, too.”
“And I also hate that you’re so young and cute you can go two days without sleeping and so damn skinny you can eat five thousand calories at one sitting without even belching. And,” she added sternly, “I haven’t even started telling you what I think about you driving a rental car across three states in a blizzard, or getting on a motorcycle with a strange boy. However,” she added when Lori started to protest, “since it’s Christmas, I thought I might skip the lecture and”—she reached under the Christmas tree and brought out Ida Mae’s bottle of wine—“invite you to share a glass of Christmas wine with Lindsay and Bridget and me. This is the secret fruitcake ingredient,” she told her. “Ida Mae gave us the last bottle for Christmas.”
Lori took the bottle, regarding it with the respect it deserved. “It’s older than I am,” she observed in awe, reading the label. And she added with a sly upward glance, “Which, if you do the math . . .”
“Means you’re still not twenty-one,” Cici said, with an airy wave. “I know. But someone told me you’re grown-up when your mother says you are. And this is, after all, a very special occasion.”
The smile in Lori’s eyes indicated she understood the significance of her mother’s invitation, and appreciated it. “Thanks, Mom,” she said softly.
“Cici!” Bridget was waving to her across the room, making her way toward her through the crowd. “Derrick and Paul are on the phone. I’ve got them on speaker in my room. They want to wish us all a Merry Christmas.”
“We’ll be back in a minute,” Cici told Lori. “You can open the wine.”
Lori offered her arm for balance as Cici struggled to her feet, and then, grimacing, brushed something out of her hair. “What is that?” she asked her mother.
Cici laughed as she saw the ladybug take flight. “Ladybugs,” she told her. “The heat brings them out. You’ll get used to them.” And she winked. “You’ll get used to a lot of things.”
Paul was regaling Lindsay and Bridget with horror stories about the Christmas blizzard blackout as Cici came into the room. “It’s like something out of Dante, truly,” he told them. “I expect people to start eating each other any minute now.”
Cici laughed. “Peace on earth, goodwill to men. Merry Christmas, Paul.”
“Merry Christmas yourself,” he returned. “There you are in the booni
es having the time of your lives while we’re freezing to death in the heart of civilization wearing every piece of Armani we own.”
“You missed the best party ever,” Lindsay assured him.
“Go ahead, break my heart.”
“Bridget, you little minx, what we really called to talk about was the fruitcake.” Derrick’s voice now. “It was without a doubt the best thing—”
“Confection!” chimed in Paul.
“I’ve ever put in my mouth!”
“Ambrosia!” echoed Paul.
Bridget exchanged a lift of the eyebrows with the other ladies. “It has a reputation around here for being pretty good.”
“And don’t think for one moment we don’t know why. Didn’t you say it was marinated in a Blackwell Farms Shiraz?”
“That’s right.”
“My dears, Blackwell Farms was one of the chichi-est boutique wineries of the 1960s,” said Derrick, who was a self-confessed—and occasionally quite annoying—wine snob. “In fact some people said their Shiraz rivaled that of some of the oldest wineries in France. Did you know a bottle of 1967 Blackwell Farms Shiraz sold at auction last year for over eight thousand dollars?”
The breath went out of Lindsay’s lungs in a whoop. Bridget’s hand flew to her throat. Cici stared at the phone as though it were a living thing that might, at any moment, spring at her.
“Did you say,” Cici managed at last, “nineteen sixty-seven ?”
And Lindsay choked, “Eight thousand dollars?”
“That’s right. We looked it up on the Internet last night before we lost power. Thought you’d get a kick out of it.”
Bridget whispered, “Oh my God!”
And Lindsay gasped, “Eight thousand dollars! A bottle!”
Cici stumbled out of the room, raced across the landing, and caught herself on the newel post before she tumbled headlong down the stairs. “Lori!” she screamed. “Don’t open the wine!”
The house was silent; the guests—save two—were gone. Noah had accepted, albeit reluctantly, the hospitality of one of their guest rooms, and Lori had fallen asleep almost as soon as she had sat down on the newly dressed bed to take off her shoes. The faint glow of kerosene lanterns was all that illuminated the windows of Ladybug Farm, but overhead a brilliant half-moon bathed the furrowed snowbanks and flat white seas that surrounded it. The snow had stopped, and above the sky was awash with stars.
They stepped out onto the porch, bundled up in coats and scarves, to breathe the crisp night air and admire the moon. They each carried a glass of wine—not the Shiraz, which, thanks to Lori’s inability to find a corkscrew, was safely locked away on the top shelf of Cici’s wardrobe—but a nice California cabernet. From somewhere deep within the bowels of the house came the faint strains of the gramophone version of “Silent Night” as Ida Mae enjoyed her Christmas gift in the privacy of her own room.
Bridget said softly, “Some Christmas, huh?”
Lindsay repeated, wonderingly, “Eight thousand dollars.”
“Remember what Derrick said,” Cici cautioned. “Collectibles can be tricky. We shouldn’t start spending the money yet.”
“But still . . .”
“Yeah,” Cici sighed, sipping her wine and smiling into the night. “Still.”
“That Lori,” Bridget said, smiling across at Cici. “She’s really something, isn’t she?”
“And how about Ida Mae, going in my address book and calling her?”
“We’re going to have to keep our eyes on her,” Lindsay said. “She’s a little bit of a busybody.”
Bridget made a face at her. “You think?”
Cici chuckled, and the other two joined in. And then Lindsay said, “Good news about Noah. Reverend Holland says he thinks he can arrange a temporary guardianship as long as he lives here, and if it works out, I can set up homeschooling. I think the reason he never wanted to go back to school was because he was so far behind, and embarrassed to be in class with the little kids.”
Cici shook her head, grinning. “Imagine, raising a teenager at your age.”
“Not exactly raising him,” Lindsay said defensively. “Just—helping him out. Besides, he knows he’s here on the we’ll-see plan. It might not work out at all.”
“It’ll work out,” Bridget said contentedly. “He’s a good kid. And you have your classroom back.”
Lindsay smiled and sipped her wine. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“All those people, coming in the snow,” Cici said after a time. “Can you believe it?”
“I still don’t know half their names.”
“You will,” Bridget said contentedly, “before long. After all, they’re our people now.”
“What a day,” said Lindsay.
“What a year,” agreed Bridget.
Cici raised her glass to them. “Merry Christmas, by the way.”
They touched glasses. “And a very happy New Year.”
And so it was.
