Christmas on the Ranch

by Arlene James

  Chapter Three

  His sister!

  A four-month-old sister. Bella. Bella Jo.

  Dixon could barely believe it, but evidently it was true. At forty-four, Jackie had given birth to her second child. His sister. In addition, Jackie was in ill health, but dying? He had much more difficulty believing that than everything else. He set it aside for the moment.

  He hadn’t known Harry Griffin at all, but apparently Jackie had been happily married to the man, who turned out to have been a few years her junior. Dixon recalled the times his mother had urged him to get to know his stepfather, and now he regretted that he hadn’t found a way to do that, but he simply hadn’t seen any reason to do it. Until now. Now that it was too late.

  Unsure what to say, think or do, Dixon found himself in prayer for the third time since he’d arrived home that evening. The only words his whirling mind could come up with were, Lord, help. I could really use some help.

  One thing about being Jackie Jo Crane Lyons Griffin’s son, though, was that a fellow learned to stand up and take life like a man early on. It was either that or cower in shame. Dixon didn’t cower any better than his mother did, so after a few minutes he got up, squared his shoulders and walked back into the kitchen.

  His mother still sat at the table, cradling Bella Jo in her arms. Jackie pulled the nipple of a bottle from the baby’s cupid’s-bow mouth and tilted Bella up onto her shoulder. She’d barely landed the first pat before the baby belched like a twelve-year-old boy trying to impress his buddies.

  “Always the lady,” Jackie quipped, lowering Bella to her lap. “Just like your mother. Poor thing.”

  Dixon couldn’t help a sudden fascination with the infant and went to look over his mother’s shoulder. “Can’t believe I have a sister.”

  “I don’t know why not,” Jackie said brightly, holding up the baby for him to view. “She looks just like you.”

  Dixon narrowed his eyes at the plump-faced infant. “No, she doesn’t.”

  “She does,” Jackie insisted. “Except for the dark hair, she looks just like your baby pictures.”

  “And your baby pictures look just like your mother’s baby pictures,” Fawn put in from the sink, which was full of suds.

  “I have a dishwasher, you know,” he pointed out, aware that he sounded surly but unable to help himself.

  She shot back with, “It’s full.”

  Surprised, he lifted an eyebrow. It took him days to fill up the dishwasher. Looking back to his mother, he asked, “Is that true? Are my baby pictures that much like yours?”

  “Why do you think your father tried to name you after me?”

  Now that was a surprise. “Dad wanted to name me Jack?”

  She nodded. “We settled on my mother’s maiden name and his middle name. I think he did it partly to curry favor with her. If I’d been a boy, she’d have named me Dixon. So, Greg decided you would be my mom’s Dixon. Didn’t matter. She still hated him.”

  “Hate is a strong word,” Dixon muttered, but it wasn’t far off the mark. His grandmother had been the driving force keeping him from his father. She’d always said it was to protect him, but Dixon could never figure out what she’d been trying to protect him from. Greg was a solid citizen, never missed a child support payment, attended church regularly, kept his nose clean and ran a successful business. Yes, he’d gotten her daughter pregnant too young, but he’d married her and tried to be a good parent, which was more than could be said for his mother.

  Jackie lifted Bella onto the edge of the table, holding her there in a sitting position. “Would you put her into her carrier, son? She’ll need a dry diaper soon. Then she’ll go down for several hours.”

  “I haven’t handled many babies,” Dixon hedged, wiping his palms on his jeans.

  “Just pick her up under her arms and lay her in the carrier,” Jackie said with a chuckle. “She holds her head up well now.”

  Dixon wiped his hands once more then placed them just above his mother’s. He lifted gently and was shocked by how little the baby weighed. “She’s light as a feather!”

  “Duh. She’s a baby.”

  “What does she weigh?” he asked, gingerly laying the infant in her padded carrier seat.

  “A little over fourteen pounds.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Well, she only weighed five pounds when she was born.”

  “Was she early?”

  “About three weeks.”

  “But she’s healthy,” Fawn said.

  “Perfectly healthy,” Jackie confirmed, smiling.

  Bella kicked a foot, and Jackie pretended to gobble her toes, which made the baby smile, her eyebrows dancing.

  “She’ll be laughing before long,” Fawn predicted.

  “Remember when I used to do that with you?” Jackie asked Dixon. “You used to howl with laughter.”

  “I remember you called me your mistake,” Dixon blurted, quite without meaning to.

  Jackie’s face registered shock, and she twisted around in her chair. “I did no such thing.”

  “You did,” he insisted quietly. “Well, as good as.”

  “I don’t know what you heard,” Jackie insisted, “but I never would have said that.”

  He told her then exactly what he remembered, and she shook her head sadly. “Son, son. You weren’t the mistake. Yes, I got pregnant and married too young, and it was much more difficult than I thought it was going to be, just as my parents predicted, but that wasn’t the mistake. My real mistake was divorcing your father.”

  “But...you hated Dad as much as Grandma did!”

  “No. No, no.” Jackie shook her head, smiling sadly. “I was heartbroken when Greg came home married to Lucinda. Frankly, Dix, until Harry, I never thought I’d love again.”

  “I...I don’t understand any of this.”

  She sighed. “Pride and pain make us do foolish things, Dix. I have no pride left, and Harry took care of the pain. He was a good Christian man. He forgave all my mistakes, loved me in spite of them and made me happy, even though I didn’t have you with me.” She looked at Bella, smiling. “We never expected to have a child of our own. He thought he couldn’t. Imagine our joy last Christmas when the doctors told us we were expecting.”

  “I confess I’m surprised,” Dixon said, looking at his now drowsy-eyed baby sister. “I wouldn’t have thought you even wanted more children.”

  Jackie looked up, obviously surprised. “Why would you think that?”

  “It’s not like you were around a lot,” Dixon pointed out. He didn’t say that some folks would have called her neglectful. His grandmother had.

  “I needed to work to help pay the bills, Dixon, and that meant either driving long distances on a daily basis or moving you away from your grandparents, which was exactly what your father wanted me to do. That was our main problem, actually. Eventually he gave me an ultimatum. And I made the wrong choice. He left, and I stayed here with you, which meant that I had to work even more, and that just made your grandmother even more critical. Eventually she was raising you, and I was...inconvenient.”

  Dixon hadn’t realized that she’d felt that way, but he could see now how she might have. His grandmother had been a strong-willed woman of firm opinions. He didn’t doubt that she’d loved him, but her love had been a rather possessive sort.

  “How is Greg?” Jackie asked lightly, too lightly, interrupting Dixon’s thoughts.

  “Fine,” Dixon answered in the same vein.

  “Still married?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s good.”

  Something about the way she said that set off alarm bells in Dixon’s mind, which made him say, “Lucinda and the boys are fine, too.”

  Jackie smiled knowingly. “Your brothers
must be all grown up.”

  “Sixteen and fourteen.”

  “That’s quite a group of siblings,” Jackie mused. “Twenty-eight, sixteen, fourteen, and four months.”

  “Almost twenty-nine,” Dixon corrected. “I’ll be twenty-nine this month.”

  Jackie beamed. “Yes. My two Christmas gifts. I found out about your sister on the nineteenth, the day before your twenty-eighth birthday.” She laughed. “I thought they were going to tell me I had cancer. They told me I was pregnant!”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, sincerely puzzled.

  She sighed. “I guess I was afraid you’d say what everyone else did, that having her was foolish. Harry and I were going to bring her together to meet you as soon as she was born and able to travel, but then...” She bowed her head. “God had other plans.” She looked up once more and said, “You do think I was foolish to have her, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Greg would probably agree with you.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Dixon repeated more firmly.

  “Your grandparents would certainly agree.” She chuckled sourly. “That would probably be the first time Greg and your grandparents agreed on anything.”

  “No one has said you were foolish to have Bella,” Dixon told her.

  “Well, I don’t care,” she went on as if he hadn’t even spoken, her fingertips brushing over Bella’s tiny foot. Dixon realized that the baby had dropped off to sleep while they were talking. “She’s worth it. You’re both worth it.”

  Feeling eerily as if his mother had somehow slipped away, Dixon murmured that he was going up to the attic for some things they might need. Tossing aside a dish towel, Fawn asked if she could help. He wanted to wave her away, but he doubted he could move down the necessary items alone.

  Nodding, he led the way to the game room and pulled down the hinged attic ladder. It was the one feature from the garage that he had elected to leave in place. After climbing the ladder, he switched on the attic light and went straight to the farthest corner. Fawn scrambled up after him. The white crib, with its yellow and green trim, stood collapsed against the wall, with the metal spring platform behind it and the mattress, wrapped in plastic, in front.

  “What do you think?”

  “That’s good,” Fawn said. “Bella can’t sleep in her carrier for long.”

  They moved all three pieces to the hole in the floor then let each one down.

  He got some rags while Fawn located an appropriate cleaner, and together they wiped down everything. As they worked, he considered what to do next. Obviously, he couldn’t put his ill mother and baby sister out in the cold, but he worried that he didn’t know the whole story yet, and he feared that Jackie might resent his father and vice versa.

  Over the years, every time anything about his mother had come up, his dad had always quickly changed the subject. Not once had he expressed an opinion or a thought about her, though the man had to feel something for her. They were once married, after all, and had a child together. Dixon assumed that Greg’s feelings for Jackie were mixed at best and most likely negative, given that few divorced couples thought highly of each other. Jackie, on the other hand, might well resent Greg and Lucinda’s successful marriage and family, which could lead to some truly appalling episodes.

  The best course at present seemed simply to say nothing to his father about his mother’s presence. After Christmas—if Jackie stayed around that long, because Dixon had his doubts on that score—he would decide what to tell his father. They saw each other almost every day at work so it wasn’t like Greg dropped by the ranch very often. Dixon reasoned that he’d surely know more about the situation by Christmas and know better what was what. He accepted that she was ill, even seriously ill, but she couldn’t be actively dying. Could she?

  Meanwhile, there was a baby in the house, and someone had to make sure that she had everything she needed. That included the best possible care. If it just so happened that care came in the best-looking package he’d ever seen, who was he to complain?

  “If Jackie’s as ill as you say, should Bella be in Jackie’s room?” Dixon asked.

  “Jackie’s her mother,” Fawn replied simply, “and we have a baby monitor, so whenever Bella wakes, I hear her.”

  That made sense, especially if Fawn slept in Dixon’s old room, which he had vacated long ago. First, he’d moved to his mother’s old room. Then, after his grandfather’s death, he’d remodeled the master suite and moved in there.

  He and Fawn carried the crib into the front bedroom, the one nearest the living room. Jackie used to complain about the noise, but since he’d moved the television into the game room, it should be quieter. Now, with a baby in the house, he was glad of that.

  When he went back through the living room into the game room for the metal bedspring, Fawn followed and took up the mattress, which weighed next to nothing. They carried both back to the bedroom. Then Dixon ran to the storage room behind the carport for tools. He was bolting the metal spring platform into the center of the crib frame when he asked Fawn why she was doing all this.

  “She’s my friend,” Fawn answered simply, tearing the protective plastic from the mattress. “My coworker. What was I supposed to do when her husband died and she fell so very ill?”

  “What about your job?”

  Fawn shrugged. “I can always find another job waiting tables.”

  “That’s what you do, wait tables?”

  “That’s what I do right now.”

  “How do you plan to manage in the meantime?”

  “I have a little income from my late parents’ estate, and my sister and grandmother will help as needed. That’s where Jackie and Bella have been until now, with us at my grandmother’s.”

  Dixon stopped what he was doing. “I didn’t know.”

  “She didn’t want you to know until Bella was born.”

  Did she really think he’d have tried to talk her out of having the baby? She didn’t know her own son very well. He shook his head and went back to work. “Can you hold up that corner over there?”

  Fawn did as asked, keeping the platform level until he had the other three corners securely bolted in place. He set the fourth bolt and tightened everything down then took out his pliers.

  “There’s some sag in the middle, but I think I can tighten it up. How’s that mattress?”

  “Seems fine.”

  “Doubt we can find any crib sheets.”

  “I can make a twin work.”

  “Those are in my old room.”

  “I’ll find them.” She nodded toward the dresser, adding, “I suppose we should move that down and set the crib in the corner.”

  “Seems right. You get the sheet. I’ll move everything.”

  She didn’t argue, just went out to do as he’d directed. He couldn’t help watching her. She moved with more grace and ease than any woman he knew. And he was mooning over her like a twelve-year-old.

  Irritated with himself, he removed a few drawers, then picked up a suitcase and set it on the bed before sliding the dresser down the wall. As he was putting back the drawers, he accidentally knocked the suitcase off the bed. The top of the hard case popped open, and several items spilled out. One was a small, thick photo album. He put everything back inside and placed the suitcase back on the bed, but then he picked up the photo album and opened it.

  The very first picture was that of a tiny, scrunched-up infant tucked into a large Christmas stocking. That had to be him. The next page was a more formal photo, labeled, “Six Mos.” He wore a tiny suit of baby blue with short pants and satin shoes. The page opposite was a picture of Bella Jo, looking like a doll in frilly pink. He saw it then, the family resemblance, though she had more hair and looked smaller, younger. His sister.

  His
grandmother had been quick to point out that Bass and Phillip were his half brothers, but he wondered if she would feel the same about Bella. He hoped she wouldn’t, but he didn’t know. He loved Bass and Phil. He supposed he would love Bella, too. She was a sweet little thing. He wondered who she’d take more after, Jackie or Harry.

  He hoped it was Harry. Then he wondered what Fawn would think of that. And just the fact that he might care about her opinion made him wish that he’d never laid eyes on the dark-haired beauty.

  Chapter Four

  Nothing more was said about their leaving. Or staying. Fawn thought about pressing Dixon for clarification on the matter, but after he set up the crib, he made himself scarce for the rest of the evening. Exhausted, Jackie followed the baby to bed shortly after 8:00 p.m., but Fawn watched television until Bella woke at ten for a bottle. As usual, the baby woke again about five in the morning and went right back to sleep after her bottle, but Fawn always found sleep elusive after that early-morning feeding. After making coffee, she sat down at the kitchen table with her Bible and daily devotional.

  She had just finished reading when Dixon walked in. Freshly shaved, he looked younger and strikingly handsome. He went straight to the coffeepot and took down an insulated travel mug from the cabinet above it.

  “You’re up early.”

  “Your sister likes breakfast early.”

  “Let me guess who fixed the bottle.”

  “Bella can’t fix her own.”

  He filled the mug and screwed the top onto it before turning to face her, leaning his hip against the counter. “My mother is so unwell she can’t manage a bottle of formula?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and sipped his coffee, his gaze carefully averted. Then he broke off a banana from a bunch on the counter and began to peel and eat it.

  “I’ll gladly make your breakfast,” she offered, starting to rise from her chair.

  Waving her back down, he shook his head. “No time.” He went to the refrigerator, took a packaged sandwich out of a box in the freezer and carried it to the microwave. A minute later he tossed the banana peel, plucked the sandwich from the microwave oven and grabbed his travel mug. “Gotta go.”