It was a sketch of the two girls, staring up at her, the first faces she’d seen that morning.
“GOOD MORNING, BOBCAT,” LUKE said, stopping at the table where Hannah and Audrey sat finishing their breakfast, in the light-filled dining room next door to the lounge. One whole side of it was nothing but windows, filled with antique glass that had warped ever so faintly over the years. The panes bent and refracted the sunlight that poured through, making it somehow warmer and more gentle.
“Bobcat?” Audrey said, not even making an attempt to stifle her amusement.
“Sure,” Luke said easily. “She’s always been Bobcat.” He turned to Hannah. “You never told her that, Bobcat?”
Hannah shook her head. She appreciated Luke’s attempts to cheer her up, but last night hadn’t been an easy one, full of doubts and questions about Trevor, as well as some moments of genuine fury. Everyone else was fresh and rested, but she felt exhausted.
“He came up with that when we were twelve,” she told Audrey. “I couldn’t get him to stop calling me that.”
“And you won’t have any more luck now,” Luke said. “For one thing, now it’s classic. For another, what are you supposed to call a girl who drives a piece of expensive construction equipment around the circle drive at fifty miles an hour?”
“It wasn’t fifty miles an hour,” Hannah protested. “Those things don’t go that fast.”
“I was there,” Luke said sagely. “I saw what I saw.”
Even in her weakened state, Hannah couldn’t let this pass. “I thought you called me Bobcat because you could never beat me in a race,” she said, with a hint of a wicked grin.
“There she is!” Luke said, grinning back. “That’s the Hannah I know.”
Hannah felt a little surge of pride as he said it, but it was quickly followed by a twinge. They hadn’t seen each other in years. They couldn’t really know each other, after all that time. Not the way Trevor had known her.
But he was right, at least, about the girl she used to be. Which one was more true to who she really was? she wondered. The girl he remembered, or the woman she was now? And where had all the fire inside that girl gone?
Luke clapped his hands. “Okay, kids,” he began.
“What is this,” Audrey interrupted, “summer camp?”
“It’s winter camp,” Luke said. “And your morning activity, Bobcat, is to help me feed the sheep.”
He looked at his wrist, pretending to read an imaginary watch. “Get your boots on,” he said. “I’ll see you at the door in three minutes.”
“I don’t know if I feel like . . .” Hannah began.
Under the table, Audrey delivered a quick kick to her shin. “She’ll be there,” she said.
“I didn’t even bring boots,” Hannah objected to her.
“We will find you some boots,” Audrey said. “Boots are the least of our worries. Think of those poor sheep. Don’t you care about their needs?”
“That’s the spirit,” Luke said, winking as he walked away.
Five minutes later, Hannah stood in the entryway of the inn, bundled in a wool flannel jacket and boots, both procured by Audrey after a conversation with Iris, who had proven to wear her same size shoe.
“Bobcat!” Luke said in greeting. “You ready for this?”
Hannah squinted against the blinding morning light that now bounced off the fields of snow that blanketed the surrounding countryside. “I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for this,” she said.
“Come on,” Luke said, throwing open the door. “You were born ready.”
The air outside was crisp, but so cold it took her breath away. When she first stepped out, the cold felt like it froze her immediately to the spot. But then something in her told her to move, now, so that she wouldn’t freeze where she was.
Luke had already bounded down the front steps, which someone had cleared that morning, and started to cut his own path through the knee-high snow, toward the barn.
The gulps of freezing air made Hannah feel exhilarated. She didn’t usually feel every breath, or notice every step she took, but she felt each piercing inhalation now, all the way down to her lungs, and every step was an accomplishment that made her feel a little more alive, and a little more as if she was still making progress.
“Remember this place?” Luke said, undoing the latch to swing the door open.
Hannah slogged her way through the last few steps to the door, then stumbled from the snow into the dry, dusty barn with relief.
“The hayloft,” she said, looking up. “You can see for miles from up there.”
“You used to climb up there, too?” Luke said. “I thought that was only my spot.”
Hannah smiled. “Guess not,” she said.
From the left, a set of noses began to poke themselves through the slats of the sheep pens, some white and some black.
“Oh my gosh,” Hannah said. “I forgot how cute they were.”
“They’re pretty cute,” Luke agreed. Then he turned to the sheep. “You guys hungry?”
In answer, the sheep shuffled in excitement.
“Here,” Luke said, handing Hannah a bag of feed. “Dump this in the trough. I’ll grab some hay.”
“How much should I give them?” Hannah asked, looking down at the earnest faces gazing back up at her.
“Just so there’s a couple inches on the bottom. Think of it as an appetizer. And then we’ll give them some hay.”
As Hannah poured the feed out, walking backward along the low gate that ran the length of the trough, the sheep dove into their breakfast, jostling against one another and smacking their lips. Watching them, a feeling of satisfaction stole over her, along with something that felt surprisingly like contentment.
When Luke came back, a bale of hay on his shoulder, she looked up and smiled. “This is kind of great,” she said. “I think maybe I should have been a shepherd.”
“You’re not the only one,” Luke said with a grin, pulling out fistfuls of hay and tossing them into the trough. “People love taking care of animals. I’ve seen the most hardened kids, you give them an animal to take care of, and suddenly they become a different person. One kid I worked with, when he first came to us, no one in the program could get him to even say a word to them. So I put him in charge of the rabbits at the ranch. From the first day, I could see him out at the hutch, having whole conversations with them.”
“And then he started talking to everyone else?” Hannah asked.
“It’s not quite that simple,” Luke said. “It took him a long time. For a while, I’d go out there and as soon as I got in range, he’d stop talking. But eventually he kept on, even after I got near. And then, one day, he finally said something to me.”
“It sounds like he must have gone through something terrible,” Hannah said.
Luke got a faraway look in his eyes. “It was the kind of thing I wouldn’t ever want to talk about if it happened to me,” he said. “I couldn’t blame him for just clamming up the way he did.”
The trough full, Luke set the remainder of the bale of hay down beside the pen.
“So what about you?” he asked. “You feel like talking?”
“Oh,” Hannah said, surprised. She had been lost in thoughts of what would make a kid decide he never wanted to talk to anyone again. And that made her own pain, fresh as it was, fade in comparison. It was hard to even think of them in the same sentence.
But something about the way Luke looked at her made the emotions of the past day rush up again in her heart, begging to be let out, because there was someone here who seemed strong, and ready to listen.
Maybe, she thought, she was reacting to Luke just like one of the kids he worked with. Still, she couldn’t resist the urge to answer his question.
“It’s not even a good story,” she said. “It’s just—everything was hard for me and Trevor for a long time. But I thought that if you love someone, that’s what you do. You stay even when it’s hard.”
Luke
nodded but didn’t offer any comment.
Hannah shook her head and wrapped her arms around herself. Now that they’d stopped moving, the cold was starting to seep into her again.
“Here,” Luke said, moving toward the far end of the barn. “Walk with me.”
Hannah fell into step beside him, meandering down the length of the barn. “I guess I thought we had finally gotten over it,” she said. “I thought things were going to be all right from now on. But I guess not.”
“Well,” Luke said. “There’s more than one way for things to be all right.”
Tears sprang to Hannah’s eyes, as anger bubbled inside her. “I know that!” she said. “Of course it’s better not to marry Trevor if he doesn’t really love me.” This was the first time she’d said this out loud, or even thought it, and for a moment she was speechless at the sound of it. “It just . . . hurts,” she added, her voice cracking.
“Listen,” Luke said. “When we were growing up, you were the toughest girl I knew. And not bad-looking, either,” he said, with a self-deprecating wink. “I wasn’t kidding when I said you were my big crush back then. And you had some tough competition. Nelly Furtado,” he said. “You totally beat her out. I promise you, Trevor is not the only man in the world.”
“What did you like best about me back then?” Hannah said wryly. “My braces or my glasses?”
“I liked your spirit,” Luke said simply.
At this, the tears began to roll down Hannah’s face in earnest.
“I just don’t feel like I have much of that left,” she said. “I remember feeling that way when I was a kid. Like I could do anything. I loved it. But then you grow up, and you find out—you can’t. You can’t even get your boss to approve your idea when you know it’s better than his. You can’t even get the man you want to marry to love you back.”
She was afraid Luke might get upset himself, as Trevor sometimes did when she was having a hard time. But Luke just looked at her, waiting to see if she had anything more to add.
She took a deep breath. “I know these aren’t the worst problems in the world,” she said.
“But they’re yours,” Luke said. “And they matter.”
By now, they had reached the end of the barn, where a dozen fancy chickens were roosting in various wire hutches.
“They’re so pretty,” Hannah said.
“Look at the green and black on those tail feathers,” Luke said, crouching down to get eye to eye with one particularly curious rooster, who strutted back and forth just behind the chicken wire.
But Hannah was looking at something farther back. At first her eye was fooled, because the smooth oval shape was familiar, but the color wasn’t: a pale aqua.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
Luke followed her gaze, peering pack into the dim depths of the coop.
“Well, look at you,” he said. “Not bad for a city girl.”
“Is it an egg?” Hannah asked, her excitement rising at the prospect.
By now, Luke was already pulling the door of the coop open, and reaching in. “Yep,” he said. “And I bet it’s not the only one. Man, is Jeanne going to be glad to see these.”
He turned back and grinned up at Hannah. “We thought we were just gonna feed the sheep,” he said. “But it looks like now we can feed a whole lot more than that.”
“THAT’S NOT HOW YOU do it,” Addison said, frowning as her little sister broke off a piece of her waffle and dipped it in the generous silver cup of maple syrup that had been set to the side of Bailey’s fluffy waffle.
Unfazed, Bailey completed her dip, thoroughly dunking the light, cakey confection, flavored with both orange and lemon peel, in the syrup, making sure to douse the whole thing as completely as possible. Somehow, she managed to keep her chubby little fingers pristine.
“It’s like ketchup,” Bailey said reasonably.
Marcus looked from one of his daughters to the other, bemused, as Addison looked at him for backup, outrage building from mild to serious in her blue eyes. Bailey blithely tore another piece off her waffle and dunked it in the syrup.
He often found himself in this predicament as a single dad. Part of him couldn’t help but admire Bailey’s inventiveness. When you came right down to it, she was right. Enjoying her waffle this way wasn’t much different from getting through a bag of fries. And Bailey was so prim about it that there was nothing that could be construed as impolite in her comportment, even if it didn’t exactly match the generally accepted conventions.
But he knew that Addison’s ferocity in the matter wasn’t just the glee of knowing something her little sister didn’t. Sometimes Addison seemed to feel even more responsibility than he did to make sure that her little sister understood the ways of the world around them. It was her way of protecting her sister, and even though she could be imperious about it, Marcus was always touched by the spirit behind it.
“Hey, Bailey,” Marcus said. “How about you just pour some of the maple syrup onto the waffles? Then you don’t have to do all the work to dip every piece.”
“I don’t mind,” Bailey said lightly, thoroughly dunking another piece of waffle.
“Well, honey,” Marcus said, “that’s not really how people eat waffles.”
At this, Bailey immediately got the stubborn look on her face that her mother used to get when she was determined to do something. Marcus’s heart both swelled and dropped at the sight of it.
But Bailey, aware she was outnumbered at her own table, was now scanning the small dining area for reinforcements.
At the table next to them, populated by an older couple who had already been seated and were chatting quietly, she found her backup.
The man was executing a modified version of Bailey’s strategy, cutting off pieces of his waffle and then using his fork to dunk them into the syrup, rather than dousing the whole mess to begin with.
“He’s eating like I do!” Bailey said, loud enough that the couple, diverted from their own conversation, looked over.
The older man, dressed in a chunky blue sweater, grinned at her, dunked a bite of waffle in syrup, and gulped it down.
“See?” Bailey said, bouncing in her chair.
“He’s using a fork,” Addison pointed out.
“That’s true,” the older man said, quickly grasping the situation. “But you know how to use a fork, don’t you?”
Bailey nodded vigorously.
“I’m Eileen,” the woman said, sotto voce, to Marcus, extending her hand. “This is Frank.”
Marcus shook her hand as Frank waited for Bailey to pick up her fork.
“Are you ready for this?” Frank asked.
Bailey nodded again.
“Okay, let’s go,” Frank said.
As if they’d spent all morning working to choreograph the ballet, Bailey and Frank each used their forks to whittle a small piece off their respective waffles, doused them in syrup, then raised them to their mouths.
As they took the bite, they looked at each other and grinned.
“Thanks,” Marcus said. “I’m Marcus.”
“I’m Addison,” Addison announced, and then spoke for her sister, who was still enjoying her bite. “This is Bailey.”
“Okay, girls,” Marcus said. “Let’s let Frank and Eileen finish their breakfast. You probably came on vacation to enjoy being away from kids,” he said to Frank and Eileen with an apologetic smile.
“Oh, no,” Eileen said. “We just got our last kid out of the house. And now we don’t know how we’re going to live without them. They’ve both flown off to Europe this year. Our son is staying with his fianceé’s family. And our daughter is on a research boat in the North Sea. It’s the first Christmas we’ve ever spent without either of them.”
Beside her, Frank shook his head vigorously. “Honestly,” he said, “neither of us could figure out how Christmas was going to feel like Christmas without kids. And your kids,” he said, smiling at the girls, “are obviously of the absolute highes
t caliber.”
Addison preened under the praise, sitting up even straighter in her chair, while Bailey, pretending to be too cool to notice the compliment, ate another forkful of her waffle with a performer’s flair.
“Have you two been here before?” Marcus asked.
Eileen shook her head. “We didn’t even plan to be here this time,” she said. “We got forced off the road by the snow, and luckily, they had a place open when we floundered up the drive.”
“Us, too!” Addison said.
“Daddy was afraid we were going to have to build an igloo in the snow,” Bailey added.
“I never said that,” Marcus protested with a smile. “I never said anything like that.”
But as Bailey cocked a skeptical eye at him, he marveled again at how his youngest daughter always seemed to be able to read his thoughts, no matter how well he was trying to hide them. He had wondered how in the world to provide a warm shelter for his family if they weren’t able to find a place to stop on the harrowing drive, more than once.
“Well,” Frank said. “I don’t know how the kitchen managed to turn out a breakfast like this, under the circumstances.” He winked at the girls. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m a bit of a waffle aficionado. And these are some of the best, anywhere on the globe.”
“You make it sound like we’re seasoned world travelers,” Eileen said with a smile. “Which might be somewhat misleading.”
“What are you talking about?” Frank said. “We’ve been to Key West. Isn’t that another country?”
Eileen shook her head. “It depends who you ask,” she said.
“New York,” Frank went on. “London. Saint Louis. Southern California. All quite different countries.”
Marcus glanced at Addison, whose brow was knitting in concentration.
“And I’ve had waffles in all of them,” Frank said. “You don’t deny that, at least, do you?”
“I do not deny that,” Eileen said. “I’m not sure I remember ever visiting a place where you didn’t have waffles.”
“I rest my case,” Frank said.
As he and Eileen were talking, Bailey had finished off her waffle, and was now peering covetously at the large, fluffy one on Frank’s plate.
The White Christmas Inn Page 13
