by Donna Ball
Well of course I knew better than to believe anything Suze said. I knew there was a Santa Claus, just like I knew my daddy was coming back. But now I knew when: Christmas Eve.
Of course, I was worried about the Christmas tree, and I thought Suze might be right about that. Maybe Santa would be embarrassed to leave our presents under the poor people’s tree, and I didn’t want my daddy to come home and see our scraggly little tree with all its needles falling off and only one string of lights. I’d already written my letter to Santa Claus—or at least my mother had written it for me—but the next night when we went to work with Mother I sneaked off to see the department store Santa. I told him to forget the doll and the two-wheeler I had asked for; all I really wanted for Christmas was the teddy bear tree.
I didn’t tell another soul what I’d asked for. I wanted it to be a surprise for everyone on Christmas morning to see what Santa had brought, and I especially wanted to see the look on my big sister’s smart-aleck face.
Somehow my mother managed to put a few little presents under the tree, but we could tell by shaking them that they were mostly clothes—gloves and socks and scarves and underwear. But of course everyone knew all the good stuff came from Santa.
On Christmas Eve, the store closed at six, so Mother picked us up directly from the babysitter and we went right home. But when we got there our door was hanging on its hinges and everything inside was a mess. The Christmas tree was knocked over and all the presents were gone. So was our television set and my mother’s jewelry box, and when my mother saw that the closet she always kept locked was empty, she just sat down on the floor and started crying.
The police came, and I remember thinking the red lights that were flashing against the window had something to do with Christmas. My sister ran away and locked herself in her room, but I clung to my mother’s skirts while she gave the police an inventory of everything that had been stolen. And then I heard her listing things like a Barbie Dream House and a girl’s bicycle and a baby doll—all the things that my sister and I had asked Santa for. My mother had taken the job at the department store for the employee discount, and she had been putting things aside all year so that her girls would have a good Christmas. She had finally paid off the last toy only that week, and had locked everything away in the storage closet. Then a thief had broken into our house and taken it all.
My sister had been right. There was no Santa Claus. And this year, there wouldn’t even be a Christmas. I will never forget the look on my mother’s face when she told Suze and me how sorry she was. She started to cry, and so did Suze. And I could tell neither one of them were crying about Santa Claus.
We all slept together in the same bed that night, because we were too afraid to sleep by ourselves. But when Suze and I woke up on a very cold and gray Christmas morning, our mother was not there. We hurried out of bed to find her, but not because of the usual Christmas-morning excitement. Our world no longer had any magic in it. It wasn’t even safe. And we just wanted our mother.
But when we got to the living room, we stopped dead. The room was overflowing with magic. There was a bicycle and a Dream House and an EasyBake oven and a baby doll in a pink silk dress. There were wrapped presents and two fat stockings overflowing with candy. And in the middle of it all was a gorgeous Christmas tree decorated with white lights and dozens of white teddy bears with plaid ribbons around their necks. My mother stood in front of it with her hands pressed to her cheeks, smiling so broadly I thought her face would break.
Santa Claus had come after all, and if I live to be a hundred, I’ll never have a better Christmas.
Chapter Nine
In Which Noah Sees an Angel
“That’s the best Christmas story ever, Aunt Lindsay,” Lori said. She sat on the floor beside the Christmas tree, her arms wrapped around her updrawn knees, her eyes bright with approval. “Well,” she felt compelled to add, “one of the best anyway. It reminds me of Whiskers.”
Cici ignored her deliberately. “So where did all the presents come from?” she asked Lindsay. “Did the police find your stuff?”
Lindsay shook her head, smiling as she removed the faintly tattered white teddy bear from the tree and straightened its plaid bow. “No, but the officers who came out felt so bad about a single mother with two kids losing all their gifts on Christmas Eve that they took up a collection and replaced as many things from the evidence list as they could. They even got Tedmore’s to open up special for them, and when the manager heard that it was one of his employees…”
“He donated the teddy bear tree!” Bridget exclaimed, clapping her hands in delight. “And that’s one of the bears, after all these years?”
Lindsay nodded and tucked the bear carefully back into place. “The best part was that, after that, my sister actually started to believe in Santa Claus again.”
Derrick grinned and topped off her glass from the eggnog pitcher. “Now that’s what I call a Christmas miracle. I’ve met your sister.”
Lindsay sighed a little, gazing into her glass without tasting it. “I’m starting to think another Christmas miracle wouldn’t be unwelcome right about now.”
She put the glass on the coffee table and walked to the window, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her shorts as she looked out. The shadows of the mountains lay in deep purple stripes over the sheep meadow as the light began to leech out of the day. Rebel was busily circling and bunching his sheep toward the shelter at the south end of the meadow, a ritual he performed every dusk, whether anyone wanted him to or not. The chickens were quiet, having already gone in to roost. The goat rested on its folded knees atop the thatched roof of the goat house, and Bambi nibbled acorns from beneath the big oak tree in the front yard. The driveway curved like a silver Christmas ribbon toward the road, still and quiet.
And empty.
Noah saw a bright light and blurry white face surrounded by a golden halo. He said, “Am I dead?”
A female voice replied shortly, “Not unless I kill you. Wiggle your fingers.”
He did as instructed, squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them again slowly. The figure became more distinct: a young woman with golden blond hair tumbled over her face, and eyes as blue as the December sky. He said, “Are you an angel?”
“Very funny, cowboy.” She sounded mad, and she was poking at his arms and his ribs and legs. He struggled to sit up.
His head hurt like crazy and he was dizzy for a minute, but he heard her say, “I don’t think anything is broken. You’re a hell of a lot luckier than you deserve.”
She sat back on her heels, scowling at him, and snatched up his blue helmet from the ground. It had a starburst crack in it. “You see this, hotshot?” She pointed at the crack in the helmet, her eyes flashing. “That would have been your head if you hadn’t been wearing this.”
“Hey!” He grabbed the helmet from her. “My--” he started to say “mom” but changed it to, “Somebody gave me that!” He stared at the crack in the shiny blue surface, and felt a little woozy. He tossed the helmet back down on the ground in disgust, and struggled to his feet. The woman—who he now realized was no angel—watched him cautiously, as though she was getting ready to catch him if he fell down.
Every bone in his body felt as though it had been through the tumble-dry cycle at the Laundromat, but his legs held firm. He looked around for his bike, and saw a glint of chrome poking up from a shallow gully a few dozen yards away. He moved toward it, limping a little, as fast as he was able, sliding a few feet down the pine straw-covered slope where the mangled corpse of his motorcycle lay. He stared at it in dismay for a moment. The front wheel was twisted almost perpendicular to the frame, the crankcase cover was missing, the back wheel was turned sideways, the headlight shattered. Oil dripped onto the carpet of dried leaves with a steady tick-tick sound. He plucked a leafy vine from the spokes of the front wheel, then tossed it to the ground, swearing loudly. It was dead, wrecked, completely useless. For good measure, he kicked the machine soundly
in the handlebars, which did nothing but cause a sharp pain to shoot up his leg. He swore again.
“Real mature.” The woman stood a few feet above him, her hands on her hips. “You got a phone?”
He walked around the broken motorcycle in disgust. “Use your own phone.” He wrenched the saddlebags off the back of the bike, but a tell-tale aroma gave him the bad news even before he opened the buckle. The pretty gold box was crushed flat. Broken glass rattled, and lily-scented perfume soaked the leather. He pulled the box out and tossed it on the ground.
She said, “I don’t have one.”
“One what?”
“Phone."
Noah opened the strap on the other saddle bag. Inside was a tool kit, a couple of crushed candy bars, a sketch pad, the remnants of some shattered charcoal pencils, and his phone—now in three pieces. He picked the pieces up and dropped them, one by one, on the ground beside the gold box. The woman walked away.
Noah squatted on the ground and surveyed the ruins of his Christmas for a moment. Muscles he had never even known he had before throbbed like fire. Even his teeth hurt. And Lindsay was going to be as mad as a cat with its tail caught in a door. He should have been home hours ago. He still had chores to do. He’d promised to help with the windows, and if he wasn’t there to do it, Cici would get up on that ladder by herself. Sometimes he didn’t know how those women had managed at all before he came along. And now here he was, stranded in the middle of nowhere with no wheels, wasting time when there wasn’t any time to waste. He picked up the pieces of the phone and tried to fit them together again. He even tore off a strip of electrical tape from the toolkit and tried to weld the casing and the battery back together again, but no dice.
Lindsay was going to kill him. No two ways about it.
He got up slowly and climbed back up to the dirt road. He looked around for the woman, but all he saw was a set of skid marks going off the road and down the embankment. He followed them and saw a white minivan in the woods about ten feet below the level of the road, resting catty-cornered on two wheels and leaning against a tree. The driver’s side door was open and the blond-haired woman had one foot against the floorboard and her hands on the doorframe, trying to rock the van back onto its four wheels.
“Hey,” Noah called.
She didn’t stop. He watched her for a moment.
“You planning to drive it on up here when you get it straight?”
“You got a better idea?”
“You got four wheel drive?”
She paused and looked up at him, and when she did that blond hair of hers fell away from her face. He couldn’t help staring.
Her left cheekbone was a twisted knot that made her eye look as though it had been sewn shut at the corner. Part of her eyebrow was gone, and at her jawbone there was an odd indentation, as though part of it was missing. The other side of her face was the face of an angel. This side was not.
She quickly ducked her head and went back to rocking the car. She put as much force into it as a grown man, and the springs creaked and groaned. The van swayed. Nothing happened.
Noah came down the hill. He opened the side door and grabbed the roofline, putting his shoulder against the frame. They worked in silence for four or five minutes, until sweat was rolling down Noah’s sides and dripping from his nose, and he had to stop to swipe an arm across his face so that he could see.
“This is bull,” he said, breathing hard. “We don’t have enough room for leverage. Even if we get it straight it ain’t going anywhere.”
She sank back against a tree, bracing her hands on her knees, breathing hard. She was a skinny woman, wearing jeans and a baggy blue tee shirt, older than Lori but maybe not quite thirty. Her head was down so he couldn’t see her face. “This isn’t my car,” she said. “I borrowed it from a friend. Some friend I turned out to be. Why the hell did you have to come flying around that corner like a crazy person? None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for you!”
He felt bad about that. He wiped another stream of sweat from his forehead and was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “A tow chain can get it out. It doesn’t look too messed up. Maybe your friend won’t be too mad.”
She lifted her head long enough to shoot him a dark look. “Do you happen to have a spare tow chain on you?”
Noah blew out a breath. He looked up at the sky through the fingers of the trees, and it seemed to him the color was getting paler. He didn’t have a watch, but he didn’t need one to know it was late. He muttered, “What kind of grown woman doesn’t have a phone, anyhow?”
She answered, pushing away from the tree, “The kind that doesn’t have any money.”
She started to heave her weight against the car again, but Noah caught her shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Give it up.”
She glared at him for a moment, then jerked away. She turned back to the van, then drew back and kicked the front tire with all her might.
Noah said, “Real mature.”
She reached inside the car, grabbed her purse, and stalked up the hill. Noah stood beside the car for a minute, trying to think of something that would help. Finally, angry and frustrated with himself, he climbed back up the hill. She had already reached the paved road, and was walking in the direction from which he had come.
“Hey!” he called.
She just kept walking.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“Where do you think?” she tossed back over her shoulder. “To find civilization.”
“Well, you won’t find it that way.”
Her steps slowed. After a moment, she turned and came back toward him. “What are you talking about?”
He shrugged. “There’s nothing up that road but cow pastures for twenty miles. I just came that way.” He jerked his head over his shoulder in the direction from which her car had come. “What’s back there?”
She scowled and hunched her shoulders as she trudged closer, her head ducked. “I don’t know. I guess I got kind of lost. The next thing I knew I was on this dirt road. I guess I’d been driving it about half an hour. I didn’t see any houses. The van doesn’t have a GPS.”
Noah looked around unhappily, screwing up his face as he measured the shadows on the road. “There’s a county road about five miles south,” he said, at last. “Maybe we can pick up a ride. The nearest town’s at least half an hour away by car.”
“Terrific,” she muttered. She turned back toward the paved road. “Thanks a lot, kid. See you around.”
“Hey.”
She looked back impatiently.
“Didn’t you say you were lost?”
“So?”
He shrugged. “So I’ve been living around here all my life. Spent most of it walking. You got a flashlight?”
She scowled. “What for?”
“It’ll be getting dark pretty soon. Lots of critters around these woods at night. They mostly stay away from light, though.”
She looked around uneasily, then back at him. Her expression said she wasn’t sure whether he was pulling her leg or not. She straightened her shoulders and turned on her heel and started back to the road. Then she whirled back and demanded impatiently, “Well? Are you coming or not?”
He grinned. “Hold on a sec.”
He went back into the woods a few dozen yards until he found the tree. He grasped the lower branch and, sore muscles protesting, hoisted himself up. She stood on the road, watching in disbelief.
“What are you? Crazy?”
“After all this, I’m not going home without what I came here for. I’m going to be in enough trouble as it is.”
He found foothold and handhold and pulled himself up through the branches until he found the cluster of mistletoe. He used his pocketknife to cut it loose, and watched as it fell to the leafy ground below. He climbed down more rapidly than he had ascended, dropped lightly to the ground, and picked up the mistletoe.
The woman was watching him, agape. “Mistletoe?” she said, incredulousl
y. “You wrecked my car and your bike, could’ve gotten yourself killed—not to mention me—and stranded us both in the middle of the woods for mistletoe?”
He picked up his saddlebags, tucked the mistletoe carefully inside, and swung the bags over his shoulder. “It’s Christmas,” was all he said. “You about ready?”
Wordlessly, she fell into step beside him.
Chapter Ten
In Which It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn
Ida Mae said, “About what time are y’all figuring on eating supper?”
“When everybody gets here, that’s when,” Lindsay snapped at her, and Ida Mae drew back, puffing out her chest.
“You don’t need to bite my head off. I’ve got a bread pudding, to bake, you know. And that turkey’s already been resting half an hour. You want me to start carving or not?”
“Oh, no, don’t carve yet,” Bridget said, moving toward the kitchen. “I haven’t even started the cranberries.”
“And I need to get the asparagus puffs in the oven,” Derrick said.
Ida Mae looked at him skeptically. “What in blazes are asparagus puffs?”
“Little bites of heaven, my darling,” he assured her, slipping his arm through hers. “Little bites of heaven.”
“Whoever heard of asparagus this time of year?” She still sounded disgruntled, although not even she was immune to Derrick’s notorious charm.
“Californians.”
Cici got to her feet as the three of them disappeared toward the kitchen. “I guess I’ll go feed the animals.”
Lindsay said sharply, “That’s Noah’s job.”
