“Jingle Bells,” which boomed over her, and Gabrielle sighed. She and her dad had always made a point of dragging home the neediest tree they could find just to hear her mama rip loose with one of her musical giggles.
Last year, dazed and in a stupor, they had let Christmas become spring before either one of them climbed out of the pit they’d fallen into with her mama’s death.
Christmas had always been Mary Kathleen O’Shea’s favorite day.
Gabrielle and her dad hadn’t been able to wrap their minds around the vision of that empty chair at the foot of the big dining room table. No way for either of them to fake a celebration, not with that image burned into their brains.
And so, in spite of a sixty-degree, bright blue Florida day that enticed Yankee tourists to dip a toe into the flat blue Gulf of Mexico, Christmas last year had been a cold, dark day in the O’Shea house.
This year, the giggles might once again be only a memory, but everything else was going to be the way it used to be. They’d have the right tree, the brightest lights strung on all the bushes around the old house, the flakiest mincemeat pie. Everything would be perfect. They’d find a way to deal with the empty chair, with all that it meant. In hindsight, she wondered if they shouldn’t have forced themselves to face that emptiness last year, get past it. They hadn’t, though, and the ache was as fresh as it had been barely a year ago.
But this Christmas, one way or another, was going to be perfect. Whatever perfect was, under the circumstances.
She sighed again and saw the boy’s gaze flash to her face.
He shifted uneasily. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, so softy she almost missed it. “But this is my special tree for me and my daddy.”
She wanted to hug him, to wrap him in her arms and comfort him. Instead, knowing little boys, she tried for matter-of fact.
“Well, that’s life.” Gabrielle thought she’d never heard a kid invoke daddy powers so often in so short a space of time. “Win some. Lose some, she said, hoping to erase the frown that still remained.
“Yeah. That’s life,” he repeated glumly before brightening. “Except at Christmas.”
She heard the hope in his gruff treble. Well, why shouldn’t it be there? All these Christmas lights strung up created a longing even in adults for magic, for something in this season when the world, even in Florida, seemed forever suspended in cold and darkness.
Her throat tightened, but she plunged ahead, desperate to change the direction of her thoughts. All this sighing and reminiscing weren’t going to help her create her perfect Christmas. “You didn’t see me over by the fence? I was there, scoping out this very tree.”
With his too-wise eyes, the boy examined her face, then shook his head with certainty. “Nah. You’re trying to pull a fast one on me.”
“Really?” The kid was too smart by half. “I might be telling the truth,” she said thoughtfully, watching as he continued to study her face.
“Nope.” He grinned, a flash of teeth showing in the twilight of the tree lot. “You’re funning with me now.”
Intrigued, she kneeled, going nose to nose with him. “How do you know?”
“I can tell.” He shifted from one foot to the next, his attention wandering anxiously now from her to the front of the lot. “Grown-ups don’t tell kids the truth. Not a lot, anyways.”
“Oh.” Gabrielle wrapped her arms around her knees to steady herself as she absorbed this truth from a kid who shouldn’t have had time to learn it. “That’s what you think I’m doing?”
“Sure.” His mouth formed an upside-down U. “You’re teasing me now, that’s all.”
This child had learned that his survival depended on knowing when the adults in his life were lying to him. She sensed he’d learned this truth in a hard school, that survival had depended on it. “You can tell when grown-ups are—funning with you?” She made her tone teasing.
“Funning’s different from not telling the truth,” he said matter-of-factly, his gaze drifting once more to the front of the lot. He, like her, was seeking the tough-but-absent daddy. “Funning’s okay. No harm in funning. Most of the time.”
“I see.” Again that squeeze of her heart, that sharp pinch that made her catch her breath. “Want to draw straws for the tree?”
“No way,” he scoffed. “You’re still funning with me.” Suddenly delight washed over his face. “I remember! My daddy took the sticker off the tree, so we got proof.”
“Ah. My loss, then.” She smiled at him easily, letting him know their game was over.
In back of her, a foot scraped against one of the boards that formed narrow pathways between the aisles of trees. An elongated shadow slanted across her, and, still kneeling, still smiling back at the boy who’d shot her a quick grin, she pivoted, looking up at the silhouette looming above her.
“Daddy!” The boy wriggled from head to toe and launched himself at the silhouette, dragging the tree with him. “Daddy!”
Relieved, Gabrielle lifted her chin toward the tough daddy who’d finally shown up. Words formed on her lips—pleasant, instructive words designed to let this man know he should keep a closer eye on his son.
And then she saw the man’s face.
Her heart lurched in her chest. Her throat closed, and her face flushed, with a heat so sudden and fierce she wondered she didn’t burst into flames.
In front of her, Joe Carpenter, a lean, rangy male who’d been born with attitude to spare, attitude he’d apparently passed on to his son, rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder and smiled gently down at the child who’d wrapped himself around his leg. “So, Oliver, reckon you’re still determined to have this tree, huh?”
“Yeah.” Clutching tree and man, the boy fastened one arm around Joe’s waist and leaned against him. “This is the biggest tree. The best A humdinger. Our tree. Right, huh?” He slanted a quick look at Gabrielle and before smiling blissfully at his father.
Gabrielle wondered if she could simply walk away, invisible, into the darkness, disappear behind tree branches, vanish. Anything so he wouldn’t see her.
And then Joe Carpenter looked right at her, wicked amusement gleaming in weary brown eyes. “We’ve got to quit meeting like this, Gabby.” He didn’t smile, but the bayou brown of his eyes flashed with light and mischief.
As memory spun spiderwebs between them, she wished she were anywhere but kneeling at the feet of Joe Carpenter.
Knuckling his son’s brown hair, hair only a few shades lighter than his own, Joe wrinkled his forehead. “Let me see. It’s been what...?” One corner of his mouth gave a teeny-tiny twitch she almost missed in her embarrassment.
In spite of the past, a past embodied in Joe’s son, a past made up of eleven years of creating her own life, she knew to the day and the month how long it had been. And he remembered, too, she decided as she watched his face and willed her own to fade from Christmas red to boring beige.
May
