She hugged him, and he hugged back. She stayed there a long moment in his embrace, that felt at once wonderful and strange. Her father had so seldom hugged her as a child.
When she moved away to the microwave, her father said, “Are you being kept awake by thoughts of that young man who brought you here?”
The question surprised her. “Some, I guess.” She deposited his cup in front of him and took a chair at the table.
“When you were younger,” he said, “you never talked to me about the boys you liked.” He took note of her expression. “Okay, I will admit that I would not have listened. I suppose it is a bit late to start?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, Daddy, I think it is. I don’t think I want to talk about men in my life, other than to say there are not any.” He looked so disappointed that she touched his arm. “But I love you for the invitation.”
As they drank their milk, he reached for the photo album she had given him, opened it, and asked questions about each picture, as if hungry to catch up on his grandchildren’s lives.
“You doin’ all right out there in New Mexico?” he asked her. “Do you make enough to support you and the kids?”
“We do okay. Yes, sometimes things are really tight, but we eat well and have a decent apartment in a friendly neighborhood.” For the first time she realized that she was proud of how much she had made of her life. “I like waitressing, Daddy. I’m good at taking care of people that way. The kids have everything they need and plenty of extras. We’re doin’ okay.”
“You have to think of the future, Lace. What if…” Seeing her expression, he stopped. “Well, if you’d like to come here to live, you would be welcome. I’d…I’d like it Lacey.”
The tone and inflection as he said her name touched her to the core. “Thanks, Dad. That means a lot.”
They leaned their heads close and looked at the picture album together.
* * * *
Sitting cross-legged on the bed, she ran the brush Jon had given her in long strokes through her hair. It was a lovely brush-and-comb set, yet what Lacey held most dear was the look of love on her son’s face when he had presented it, a gift bought with his own hard-earned money. And little Anna had made a snowflake for Lacey at school and carried it all the way on the trip in a card that she had also made herself, with a drawing of Santa Claus. Oddly enough, Anna had drawn the Santa with a black coat, Lacey realized.
She gave thanks for the blessing of her two children, as she looked at the crystal ball snow scene Cooper had given her. She shook it and set it down, watching the snow fall gently onto the little tree.
Just then Anna came in the room. She had a been to the store with her grandparents. She showed Lacey a dog collar that she had bought for her puppy. “Santa said I would get my puppy later, but I thought I would have it by now,” she said, doubt slipping into her eyes for the first time since Christmas Eve. “Cousin Buddy says I did not see Santa, but we did, didn’t we, Mama?”
“Yes, we did,” Lacey said immediately and even though she knew she was digging a big hole for herself. Probably lots of kids had been scarred for life by this Santa Claus thing.
“Oh, what does a kid like Buddy know? I’m sure you will get your puppy. But, honey, we’re goin’ home on the bus, you know, and I imagine Santa found that out, so he will wait until we get home to bring your puppy.” Right then and there she made up her mind that she would get that puppy for her daughter. And she knew a lot of men she could get to dress up like Santa and bring the puppy, too.
Jon entered as she spoke the last part. “Why aren’t we goin’ back with Cooper? I don’t wanna go back on no bus.”
Anna looked questioningly at her, too.
“I know that it won’t be as much fun on a bus, but it’s the way it has to be. Cooper...he has a schedule to keep.”
Jon said, “He would have taken us. I know he would,” and tromped from the room.
Anna wanted to know when they would be going home. She was ready. Lacey showed her on the calendar in her purse. Her daughter said, “Then I will have my puppy!” and went happily out of the room, admiring her dog collar.
Lacey, having something of a panic, took up the phone beside the bed and called back to Gerald’s, where she spoke to Jolene and instructed her friend to go to the pound, or anywhere she could, and get a puppy. Then she talked to Gerald and arranged for him to show up in a Santa suit with the puppy on the evening they arrived home.
When she got off the phone, she sank down on the side of the bed and wondered if she had done the right thing in encouraging her daughter’s belief in a fantasy. How would this help her daughter learn to cope with life’s harsh realities? Would her daughter develop a deep distrust in her own mother for all this lying, no matter how well meaning?
She once more lifted the snow globe and thought how she didn’t care about any future problems. She wanted her daughter to enjoy the idea of Santa Claus as long as possible. Soon enough Anna would be a woman and have to face realities.
With this idea, Lacey put the snowglobe away in her suitcase. She didn’t need to keep looking at it. She was no longer a child.
Christmas Lights
Another winter storm came, dumping snow from North Carolina on up to Boston and stopping traffic for the better part of two days. Cooper, who had delivered his payload of computer printers in Washington, D.C., and picked up a load of televisions and video equipment, which had been stranded because a driver couldn’t get through, had made it to delivery in Baltimore and then was stranded there. He figured it was as good a time as any to rest up and didn’t worry about hurrying west again.
Down in Pine Grove, the citizens saw the most snow of a decade. Children and adults with young spirits were thrilled, running outside to make snow angels and snowmen.
Jon and Anna spent several afternoons sledding with their cousins at a nearby hill, and Lacey and her sister Beth even joined in. Lacey’s mother threw a party, inviting old friends and family. The snow encouraged long girl-talks between Lacey and Beth, companionable ones with her mother over coffee, and stubborn arguments with her father, although he did most of the arguing. Lacey managed to contain herself to listening. She thought that she was finally learning to be an adult.
Her father fumed when Lacey maintained that hers and the children’s home was in Albuquerque now. He would not understand why she did not now choose to come home to live, where it would be a lot easier for her.
“I think what you mean is where you would be able to direct me,” she said.
“I would be here to help. So would your mother. What’s so wrong with that?”
When she explained that she and the children had their own home out west, that she had a good job, good friends, the that the children had their familiar school and friends, he pointed out her lack of money and security, and most of all, family.
“You and Mama can still help me. You are only a phone call away,” she told him, to which he grumbled irritably.
He would help with money, he told her, and if she had any sense at all, she would take it.
“Then you can start by givin’ me bus fare back,” she said, her pride relieved by the opening to ask.
But her father then started to rave about how she had not adequately planned the trip, nor did she have a decent savings account.
“Oh, Leon, you didn’t have any savings account at Lacey’s age. And you kept lookin’ at all those brochures of far away places, like Houston and Dallas, because you wanted to get away from your father,” her mother said.
Conversation stopped and all eyes turned toward Emily Sawyer.
“I do have opinions,” she said. “I simply have never seen sense in shouting them.”
* * * *
Though she had gotten firm with herself about being a grownup and not believing in fantasies anymore, Lacey found herself repeatedly gazing out the window, imagining the maroon Kenworth rolling up the street. She couldn’t quite let Cooper go, in the way it was hard to let
Christmas go and one kept the tree up and lights going every night.
One evening Beth found her at the front window. “Are you hopin’ he’ll come back?”
“No, not really...oh, maybe I imagine a little bit, but I barely know him. It’s just silly.”
“You seemed to know him pretty well to me. You’ve been waitin’ on him for years, and you came clear across country with him.” Beth flopped on the couch. “And I don’t think it’s silly. Lots of people have fallen in love in a matter of days.”
“Who that you know?”
“This lady at the library. She went for a vacation in Cancun and came back with a husband.”
“You are makin’ that up.”
“Well, not entirely. She came back next to engaged, and she did marry him. People do fall in love quickly.”
“And they fall out of love quickly, too.”
“Your point being?”
Lacey shook her head but resisted comment.
“Oh, just because things didn’t turn out well with Shawn doesn’t mean you couldn’t fall in love with Cooper in a matter of days. And he could change his mind, too,” Beth persisted. “He could think about what he’s missin’ and come back.”
Lacey bent and prodded the fire with the poker. “It would be more probable for it to snow in July. Cooper isn’t like that.”
“It has snowed in July,” Beth stated. “In Vermont, I believe, back in the eighteen-hundreds. So you see, miracles do happen. Besides, I thought you said you hardly knew him. How do you know, then, that he isn’t like that?”
“Oh, I don’t know what he might do. But it isn’t like some passionate song or romantic story. Oh, I guess those things might really happen, but it isn’t anything I can imagine for myself. I don’t even want to. How I see me with Cooper is more real. He’s reliable, for one thing. I feel safe and solid around him.”
Then, more thoughtfully, “What I think happened to me with him is that I suddenly saw that I could actually be attracted to a man. I felt like a woman for the first time since...well, since I don’t know when. Maybe ever. I had set aside any thought of a man in my life. The kids have taken everything I had. But now, I guess now I kind of hope that someone will come along.”
“Then it would be just as well to hope for the guy that’s already in the lead,” Beth said, giving a grin.
“I think I’m too afraid of such a hope. I know there isn’t a Santa Claus for grown women,” Lacey whispered.
“Now, who told you that lie?” Beth said righteously. “Honey, if you are gonna hope, you might as well hope for exactly what you want. That’s how it works.”
Lacey tried to smile for her sister, who was lovingly and loyally trying to make her feel better.
“Let’s take down the tree. Christmas is over,” she said.
* * * *
Cooper pulled off the highway at a rest stop outside of Richmond. He walked around the flatbed trailer load of axles he had picked up in Baltimore, checking the tie-downs. Hearing a shout, he looked over to see a rest stop maintenance worker toss aside something. A second maintenance worker swore and went after it—it was a little dog, which went right under Cooper’s rig.
The two men came running over, one of them saying, “The damn thing peed on me. I ain’ holdin’ on to no peein’ dog.”
The other one had knelt down and called to the dog.
Cooper looked under, too. The dog had laid down. It was only a little puppy, and it looked half starved.
“People drop ‘em out here all the time,” the one man said to Cooper. “Fred...go get that chicken you had for lunch.”
The puppy was easily lured by the food, and the man grabbed it up by the back of the neck, causing it to cry out, and didn’t even give it the chicken.
Cooper, standing there watching for some reason, saw the man go to throw the little animal over into the dump bed of the maintenance truck like so much garbage.
“Hey!” he hollered out.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take it.” He strode toward the man. “Give it here. I’ll take it.”
“He’s yours. Let him pee on you.” The man tossed the dog at Cooper, who caught it and then had to hold it out from him, as it dribbled and whimpered.
Then, with a deep breath, he held the trembling animal close, wondering what in the world he had been thinking.
Standing there and watching the maintenance truck drive off and feeling helpless, his gaze fell on the Dumpster at the end of the drive. He went over to see if he could find a box to hold the puppy. The Dumpster lid was heavy with snow. He had to clear it with one arm in order to open it.
Right inside was a surprising sight. A basket of a perfect size just sitting there, as if waiting for him.
Cooper felt called on to look upward. Was something going on here? He asked silently.
He pulled out the basket and plopped the puppy inside of it. And then he spied a MacDonald’s sack that still had most of a hamburger in it, too.
He headed the big rig down the road, with the puppy, now happily fed and curled atop a towel inside the basket. He knew very well he was heading for Pine Grove, and he argued with himself all about it all the way: It was probably too late. She might already be on the bus back to Albuquerque. She might have met up with an old boyfriend. She probably wouldn’t even be interested anymore, and if she wasn’t, he was going to be stuck with the stupid puppy that had chewed holes in one of his good leather gloves.
He wanted a cigarette badly, which did not help his mood.
Night had fully come, when his headlights fell on the exit sign for Pine Grove, and right at that same moment the country song came floating out from the radio, “Only Here For A Little While.”
Swearing under his breath, he turned down the exit ramp and pulled to the side at the bottom, stopped the truck, got out and strode to the front, where he worked at the grill, while his fingers grew numb with cold. The passengers in a number of cars looked at him, wondering at the actions of a man who seemed really mad about something.
He got back into the truck, thinking that he might have been able to save himself a lot of trouble if he had had a phone number for her.
* * * *
A sound drew Lacey’s attention from the game of chess that she played with her father. She shifted in order to see out the window.
Lights? She had thought of it so much that she was imagining. But she got up to go look.
Her eyes fell on the truck, the glimmer of maroon beneath the street lamp. Cooper?
She turned and stared at her father. “It’s Cooper.”
“Well, don’t just stand there. You had better get on out to see what he’s come for.” Her father urged her with gestures. “Go on!”
She hurried to the door, flung it open, and then she was running down the walk. Halfway down she stopped. Maybe he had not come back for her. Maybe she had left something in his truck, or he had to tell her something.
He appeared in front of the truck. When he saw her, he stopped, too.
Lacey waited, her heart pounding.
Slowly he walked toward her. Then faster, walking with anticipation!
She flung herself at him, and he caught her hard against him, and it was, “Lacey…Lacey,” and “Cooper…Cooper,” and they were kissing and touching and searching each other’s eyes.
“I don’t know what’s happened to me,” Cooper said in such a tone that she had to laugh out loud.
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
He looked at her as if he could eat her up. It amazed her. She had not bargained for that.
He said, “I just know I couldn’t leave without you and the kids. Yes, even the kids.” He gave a hoarse chuckle, then frowned down at her. “Will you go back with me, Lacey? Can we…can we see about us? No promises,” he cautioned. “I don’t know about any of this. I...”
“Oh, Cooper,” she interrupted him, laughing at once. “What’s happenin’ to you is love, darlin’.” She wound her arms
around his neck. “And I think I love you,” she whispered just before his lips crushed hers in a hot kiss.
When at last he lifted his head, Lacey had to gasp for breath. Her mind whirled with the wonder of it all.
The next instant he was tugging her along.
“What in the world…”
“I have something to show you.” He was as excited as a child. He tugged her to the front of the Kenworth. “Look.”
The Christmas lights on the grill. They no longer said, Bah, Humbug.
H-O-squiggle-O-squiggle-O. Why, it said Ho, Ho, Ho, if one was imaginative.
“I had trouble with the H’s,” Cooper said.
Lacey, tears of joy streaming down her face. “You believe.” She felt almost ashamed at how easily she had given up on such belief.
Cooper grinned gently. “Yeah, well, I guess I do. I sure couldn’t let the other stay, with Anna ridin’ in the truck.”
There came a yipping, drawing their attention to the windows, where the puppy bobbed up and down.
“Oh, yeah...Santa sent Anna’s puppy by way of me.” He felt about ten feel tall at the way Lacey regarded him.
Epilogue
The events of that Christmas became so precious to Lacey and Cooper that they put off their wedding until the following Christmas, wanting to have the ceremony at what they now looked on as their own magical season.
In the years that have followed, as the holidays roll around, each season is made more precious by the sweet reminiscing of that first that brought them together. Cooper claims that Lacey’s deviousness holds them together, because it had been her plan to sneak the puppy around to her parents’ back porch. Emily Sawyer had jumped in with the plan and put a note from Santa in the basket with the dog, who only halfway ate it.
In the morning, when Anna found the puppy, she kept saying, “He’s just like I imagined!” she kept saying. “Santa didn’t forget! And he must have found out we were goin’ back with Cooper, right Mama?”
She promptly named the puppy Skippy.
Cooper felt thoroughly satisfied in the face of Anna’s delight, and at the way Lacey, Jon, and the others regarded him. He had told them about how he had rescued the puppy, which had not been so unusual, and how he had also found the perfect basket, which Lacey told him she felt was actually a dog basket. The finding of the basket at that same place was a little unusual, but stranger things had happened.
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