Kids by Christmas

by Janice Kay Johnson

  He’d never articulated it so clearly before, even for himself. The truth was, he’d enlisted because he knew he’d be good at being a soldier, and he didn’t know what else he could be good at.

  Hanging around with other kids—regular kids—he’d quickly realized that the kind of discipline he was used to wasn’t the norm, that they had talked back to their parents without getting the crap whaled out of them. They were used to having opinions and arguing for them. He didn’t know how.

  Maybe the Army had been a good choice for him at that age. He’d grown up, gained confidence in himself, faced the challenge of becoming a Ranger, where thinking on your feet—yeah, making tough decisions—was encouraged. And he was damn good at what he did. The funny part was, from the day his doctor had told him his knee was never going to be stable enough to allow him to return to active duty, he’d reverted and gone back to feeling one hell of a lot like the bewildered kid he’d been when he was eighteen and nineteen. A stranger in a strange land.

  “That sounds pretty normal to me,” Suzanne said. “Most teenagers go through a phase of rebelling against their parents’ values, but then they find their way home, too.”

  “I never thought of it that way.” Could it be that she was right? If so, what did that say about him? Why did he walk through life with a perpetual sense of alienation? The Army had never felt like the right fit for him, but neither did civilian life.

  Tom had a suspicion it all came back to his sister’s death. His dad never had been what could be called warm, but after Jessie had died, both his parents had withdrawn. Silence had settled over their government-issue house, and it had never really lifted. Boys his age didn’t know how to talk about death, so he’d pretended nothing had happened with his friends. It got to be a habit, that sense of standing apart from the people around you, not sharing what you felt.

  “I sure didn’t know what I wanted out of life when I was eighteen or twenty,” Suzanne continued. “I went to college, I got married, I found a job. A boring job. It wasn’t until a year ago that I really examined myself enough to understand why I wasn’t happy with my life.”

  “You threw your husband out a lot longer ago than that.”

  “That’s true,” she agreed, “but that was just a first step. I kept feeling…empty. Oh, I don’t know how to explain.”

  She didn’t have to. He knew exactly what she meant.

  “The first step for me was deciding to keep the promise I made myself when I was little that someday I’d find my brother and sister and we’d be family again.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Mark Kincaid—the P.I.—gave me this lecture early about how I shouldn’t expect too much from finding my sister and brother. He said people doing that kind of search often imagine they’ll be happy once they have family again. That everything wrong with their lives will be right again. They depend on the found person to fulfill them. I didn’t think that, not consciously, but I know now that I was guilty of having too high expectations.”

  “In what way?” Tom asked. “Sounds like you hit it off with your sister and brother.”

  “I did.” She hesitated. “But what I discovered is that I still wasn’t very happy with my life. My dissatisfaction didn’t have anything to do with having a sister and brother or not. So, of course, I quit my job. Nothing like taking a big financial risk to fulfill yourself.”

  “And then take on kids, too.”

  She laughed ruefully. “I don’t do anything by half.”

  “I take it you don’t think remarriage is likely?” Tom was pleased with how casual he made the question sound.

  “Well, not in the near future, and I’m thirty-two going on thirty-three. I’m running out of childbearing years,” she said frankly. “Besides…I liked the idea of adopting. Because of what happened to Carrie and Gary. They got split up, you know, and his adoptive home wasn’t a very happy one. So I was a sucker for the idea of taking two kids so they could stay together.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” He still thought it was a shame she was so determined to be a single mother. As beautiful as she was, he knew damn well there must have been plenty of men interested since her divorce. Yeah, her ex was a creep, but most women remarried anyway.

  She pushed her plate away and rested her elbows on the table. “I just hope…”

  “It works?”

  Her smile wasn’t totally convincing. “Read my mind.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Sophia scares me a little. Sometimes she seems…” She paused again, as if struggling to find the right words. “I don’t know. As if she doesn’t feel the same things most people do.”

  He leaned back. “You mean about her mother?”

  A long breath escaped her. “I suppose that’s most of it. I just get the sense sometimes that she’s intellectually curious about other people’s reactions to her, but doesn’t emotionally care. If that makes sense.”

  “Yeah, it does, but couldn’t that be a front?”

  “Are ten-year-olds that good at putting up a front?”

  He remembered himself after his sister had died, pretending to all his friends that he hadn’t changed. “Oh, yeah. They can be.”

  “She is really protective of Jack, which says something about her. So I’m probably worrying for no reason.”

  “You’re afraid she’s like kids who’ve grown up in orphanages or a string of foster homes and never really bonded with anyone. You know that isn’t the case with her.”

  “That’s true, although she’s certainly had a weird childhood.”

  “And she’s developed coping skills. Of course she doesn’t act like a normal kid her age.”

  Forehead crinkled, she searched his face as if for reassurance. Then, suddenly, she laughed. “Listen to me begging for reassurance. Has anyone ever told you what a good listener you are?”

  Great. She thought of him as a friendly ear.

  “Or maybe it’s just me.” She gave a little nod, as if deciding once and for all. “For some reason, I can talk to you. At this speed, you’re going to wish we still barely knew each other.”

  He recognized that she was once again asking for reassurance, and he had no trouble giving it.

  “No. I won’t wish that.”

  For an unguarded moment, their eyes met. He didn’t know what his held, whether his voice had changed timbre, but she flushed a little and looked away.

  Instinct told him to lighten the moment. Making his tone jocular, he said, “Hey, if we hadn’t gotten friendly, I’d be looking for something to do every weekend instead of having a project waiting out in the garage.”

  As he’d hoped, Suzanne laughed, her self-consciousness forgotten. “Is that a euphemistic way of saying I’m using you?”

  “No, it’s a euphemistic way of saying I don’t mind being used.”

  “Oh.” She nibbled on her lower lip. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a nice man?”

  A nice man. A good listener. Apparently he was a real exciting guy.

  But at least she was talking to him instead of scuttling into her house when she caught sight of his pickup coming down the block. Maybe, given his deep wariness about love and ever-after, he should be grateful she still saw their friendship as uncomplicated.

  So he took what he could get, said, “I hear it all the time,” and was gratified by her laugh.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MELISSA STUART INTERVIEWED both children Monday afternoon and then came to Knit One, Drop In to spend a couple of hours talking to Suzanne—and left her shop with the class schedule after expressing an interest in learning to knit. She declared herself satisfied that all concerned were ready for the big step.

  Moving day. She was actually getting her miracle—kids by Christmas.

  By Wednesday morning, Suzanne didn’t know whether she was more excited or terrified. She’d once again asked Rose to handle the store all day so she could be home.

  Melissa brought the kids herself a
nd was opening the trunk when Suzanne came out of the house.

  “Hey, guys!” she said. “Guess what? You have beds now.”

  “You mean, we each have one, in our own rooms?” Sophia asked, as if the concept still amazed her.

  “Yep.” Suzanne gave Jack a quick squeeze in passing, even though he hadn’t rushed to her. At least he didn’t reject physical intimacy. She’d better hurry up and teach him to hug now, before he got to the age when he wouldn’t be caught dead hugging a parent.

  Suzanne joined Melissa at the rear of the car and gazed inside the trunk in dismay.

  It wasn’t a quarter filled. A couple of duffel bags, a few cardboard boxes, and that was all they had brought of their former life. Suzanne hadn’t expected anything else. After all, their life with their mother had been transient. But still…she thought, appalled. Clearly they needed everything, and between the Christmas shopping she’d done this week and the money she’d spent on furniture and getting their rooms ready, her budget was shot.

  Quelling the anxiety, she told herself they’d manage with what they had, and they could continue to manage until she could afford more. At least now they did have a real home with their own bedrooms, and that was a big start, wasn’t it?

  “Nothing heavy from the look of it,” she said.

  Their bedrooms were almost completely furnished. Last night, she and Tom had carried the second dresser from his garage into Jack’s room. With the beds that had arrived yesterday and were now all neatly made up, the kids’ bedrooms needed only artwork and messes and sleepovers to make them real, like the Velveteen Rabbit.

  Suzanne knew that today Tom was working on the bookcase headboard for Jack’s room. He’d been disappointed in the wood once he’d stripped it, so they had decided to paint it kelly-green to match the chest of drawers.

  Melissa piled two cardboard boxes atop each other and lifted them. Galvanized, Suzanne took a duffel bag and a plastic grocery bag stuffed full of clothes, and led the way into the house.

  Jack, carrying his school book bag, hurried to Suzanne’s side to lead the way. “This bedroom is mine,” he said importantly, then stopped in the doorway, his jaw dropping. “Oh, wow!”

  “You like it?” Suzanne lifted the duffel bag. “Is this yours, or Sophia’s?”

  “It’s mine,” his sister said, so Suzanne turned the other way, into Sophia’s bedroom.

  “Tom’s working on a desk we bought for you, but it’s not done yet.” Suzanne set the bag down on the bed. “But at least you have drawers for your clothes. And I bought a package of hangers for each of your closets.”

  “Cool.” The ten-year-old sat down on the edge of the new twin bed and gave an experimental bounce. “It’s new? I mean, brand new?”

  “Yep. Do you think it’s going to be comfortable?”

  She bounced again and then nodded. “I never had a new bed before.”

  Coming into the bedroom with another bag in her arms, Melissa said, “Wow, this is gorgeous! Did you pick out the color, Sophia?”

  She nodded. “I wanted my room to be different. Special.”

  “You succeeded.” Melissa stroked the satiny top of the cherry dresser while looking at the bright comforter and sherbet-orange walls. “It’s exotic, like something out of Arabian Nights.”

  “It’s going to be even better, once I hang pictures and stuff. And I’m going to have my own desk, too.”

  Melissa smiled at Suzanne. “You’ve gone all out.”

  “You know who really has is Tom,” Suzanne admitted. “I painted the bedrooms, but he’s the one who’s refinished the furniture. He’s such a perfectionist, he does a beautiful job, doesn’t he?”

  “I didn’t know you two were friends.” There was something a little funny in her tone, a stiffness.

  Suzanne didn’t know what he’d told her about their relationship, but she wanted to make sure Melissa knew he wouldn’t have lied about those domestic disturbance calls because he was a friend of hers.

  “All the years I’ve lived here, we’ve never done more than wave in passing,” she said. “But then he met the kids and offered to haul any furniture I bought because he has a pickup. When he saw Sophia’s dresser, he offered to strip it for me, and I think he got hooked. He insists that he loves woodworking, and I’ve been too grateful to argue.”

  Visibly relaxing, Melissa laughed. “You’d be crazy to argue! This dresser is spectacular.”

  “Tom’s also working on a headboard for Jack’s room…”

  “He gets a headboard?” Sophia asked, her chin jutting. “How come I don’t?”

  “Because I haven’t found one for you yet. I’ll keep looking.”

  “Oh.”

  On the way back to the car, leaving the kids in their bedrooms, Melissa smiled at Suzanne. “Their bedrooms are wonderful. What a welcome for them.”

  “I wanted to make them special, since they don’t remember ever having their own before. But I’m a little worried at how few clothes they have. Have they shot up lately?”

  The caseworker shook her head. “They came into the foster system with almost nothing. Remember that their mother wasn’t in any condition to shop, even if she’d had the money. I think most of what they have came from School Bell. They distribute donated clothes to needy children.”

  Suzanne looked involuntarily toward Tom’s garage. “That’s a wonderful thing to do, but it must be humiliating for the kids. What if they wear something that a classmate discarded?”

  “That’s always a risk, but most of what kids wear is mass-produced, so you see the same shirts and jeans all over the place.”

  “That’s true.”

  “It’s pretty much all the kids have ever known anyway,” Melissa continued. “Sophia says she remembers when they lived in a rental house, but I don’t think Jack does.”

  “I get the impression they’re more excited about having bedrooms than they are about having an adoptive mother.”

  “Suzanne…”

  They were interrupted, and Melissa left without Suzanne having another opportunity to talk to her privately.

  “Forget unpacking,” Suzanne told the kids. “Let’s go pick out a Christmas tree.” Usually she put her tree up two weeks before Christmas. Here they were this year with Christmas Eve only four days away.

  They both cheered and raced to the car. She made sure she had cord to tie the trunk closed, grabbed her purse and followed.

  At the tree lot, she felt as if she had two toddlers with her, the way they tore around and kept disappearing. After Jack ran into a man bending over to examine the trunk of a Noble fir, she put a firm hand on his shoulder. “Please tell him you’re sorry.”

  Head hanging, Jack mumbled an apology.

  The man smiled. “I’m fine. It’s Christmas. Kids get excited.”

  Nonetheless, Suzanne kept her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Now you need to stay with me. You, too, Sophia,” she added when his sister stuck out her tongue at him from between cut trees.

  Popping out, Sophia pointed at the aisle she’d been investigating, where the Noble and Grand firs leaned against supports of raw two-by-fours. “These trees are the prettiest.”

  “And the most expensive. We either get a teeny tiny one, or we can get a bigger one of those.” She waved toward the Douglas firs.

  “Oh.” For a moment she looked crestfallen, then went to study the more common, sheared firs. “These are okay, I guess. We should have a big tree.”

  “Yeah, a big tree!” Jack chimed in.

  They finally agreed on one. Suzanne paid and the tree-lot attendant helped load it and tie down the trunk.

  The kids chattered excitedly all the way home and trailed her to the garage when she went to get the stand and her boxes of lights and ornaments. She had trouble getting either child to help by holding the tree while she centered it in the stand and tightened the screws. All they wanted to do was take ornaments out of the boxes and say, “I get to put this one on the tree!”

  Fin
ally, she wrapped the string of lights around the branches, plugged it in and made sure no bulbs were burned out. She put in a cassette of Christmas carols and announced, “Time to decorate!”

  She sang along happily to the carols as they hung ornaments.

  “I don’t know the words,” Jack said a couple of times.

  “You know ‘Rudolph.’ Everyone knows ‘Rudolph,’” his sister said, as if he were stupid for not remembering the words. But Suzanne noticed she didn’t sing along, either.

  Had they even celebrated Christmas in the recent past? She didn’t want to spoil the mood today by asking, and tried not to think of them last Christmas, living in a shelter.

  She put the star on top because she was tallest, but mostly she let them decorate. Of course they put too many ornaments on, not wanting to leave any in the boxes, and the lower branches that Jack could reach best were most crowded. There was no color theme, just bright shiny balls next to wooden and felt and tin ornaments she’d acquired through the years. But when they were done, and they all stood back to admire the tree, both of their faces shone.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Sophia whispered.

  “It’s the best Christmas tree ever,” Jack said reverently.

  “It is beautiful,” Suzanne agreed, blinking away tears at the wonder she saw on their faces. She knew forming this new family wouldn’t always be as easy as today had been. She needed to store moments like this away to remember.

  With determination, she sounded upbeat instead of weepy. “Now, what do you say to some hot chocolate?”

  “Yeah!” they both cried and thundered toward the kitchen.

  Shaking her head and laughing despite misty eyes, she followed. Clearly, life in this house would never move at the same relaxed pace again.

  JACK WENT TO THE LIVING ROOM to watch TV when Suzanne started dinner, but Sophia sat at the table kicking her heels against the chair leg and watched.

  Suzanne took the opportunity to ask, “Does Jack believe in Santa Claus?”