A Very Merry Christmas

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because I’m good on my own. I’m too independent. I can drive a tractor, bale hay, break a horse, and shoot a gun. I run my own business, I have two kids with various problems, and directing this concert may drive me to drink copious amounts of scotch, but no, I do not need to throw a husband into that melting pot of terror.” Yep. I am good on my own. Except for when I think the loneliness is going to kill me; then I’m not so good. Not so good, either, in the darkness of the night when my worries attack and there is no hand to hold.

  “You are good on your own,” Logan said.

  Why did candlelight have to highlight all the sexy grooves of Logan’s face?

  “You’re one heckuva woman, Meredith. Very capable and strong and smart. You remind me of a stallion, the Rocky Mountains, and lightning bolts. And pink cake.”

  “Pink cake?” That was one of my favorites. I resisted the urge to tap the heels of my cowboy boots together.

  “Yes, it’s my favorite. It’s delicious, unforgettable, sweet, feminine . . . you.”

  “You’re a flirt.” I tried to sound stern as I attempted to take a sip of coffee. My hands shook. I put it down. There was a cookie shaped like holly. Maybe I’d eat it.

  He laughed. “Meredith, if you knew me, even a little bit, you would know how wrong you are.”

  “You’re not a flirt?”

  He stared right at me. “No. I’m not. I have no idea how to flirt; I don’t even try. If relating you to a cake sounded flirty, it wasn’t my intention. I’m telling you the truth, cowboy girl.”

  “Something tells me that you have not needed to flirt in order to meet women in the past.”

  “Most of what I’ve done for the vast majority of my life is work. I don’t flirt. Except with you. I’m trying to flirt.”

  I blushed. “You are?”

  “Yep. Is it working?”

  “Well . . . uh . . . when . . . yes . . . no . . . no, yes . . .” His flirting was flustering me.

  “I’m not doing a very good job of flirting. You don’t even know I’m doing it.”

  I used to be a tough woman! What happened to me? I could handle Logan! “Let me know next time before you start flirting. Put up a banner or something so I’m not caught off guard.”

  He grabbed a crayon sitting in a cup and then wrote on the paper tablecloth, “Meredith, I’m flirting with you.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  He tried to draw a flower; the flower looked like it had been strangled by a black spider. “Nice flower. It looks like it was strangled by a black spider.”

  He drew black legs coming out from a black spot, then gave up. “I tried. So, no husband for you. Ever?”

  “No. Yes. No. No husband.” I sighed inwardly at my fumbling words. “What about you?”

  “I have no desire for a husband.”

  We smiled into each other’s eyes. “I didn’t think that would be an issue.”

  I tried not to shiver, but I shivered anyhow. The man gave me the shivers. In a good way, and a sad, mind-shattering way, because I knew I would not let this relationship go anywhere. Not past tonight. Tonight would be it.

  “Have you been married?” I asked. “Kids?” Already I did not like his ex-wife. Jealousy struck like a mad green elf.

  “No, I’ve never been married. As for kids, I can assure you that if I had them, they would be with me now. Unfortunately, I don’t have any children.”

  I was touched by the look on his face. He seemed genuinely, deeply saddened. “Do you want kids?”

  He nodded. “I do. No question. Five is a good number. I want a family.”

  “So you’re shopping for a wife.” I wanted to challenge the Unknown Future Wife to a kickboxing match in which I would personally have her down on the floor in seconds begging for mercy.

  “I wouldn’t call it shopping, I hate shopping. Can’t stand it. To me, hell would be a shopping mall where I’d have to endlessly try on clothes and buy stuff.”

  I pretended an interest in my coffee and Christmas cookies. Next to the bell were a reindeer, a wreath, and a Mrs. Claus.

  “Why do you want to get married?” I hated that Future Wife!

  “I want to live forever with my best friend.”

  “Well, that’s very touching.” I tried not to let my sarcasm ooze. “If I lived with my best friends I would be living with Vicki, Hannah, and Katie. Vicki would have us all roping calves, Hannah would have us at math parties, and Katie would wander around in bedroom costumes.”

  He laughed. “You’re pretty darn funny, Meredith.”

  “Answer the question, he-man.”

  “I want to get married because I think that I can build a happy life with someone I love more than my own life. I want someone to talk to, laugh with, dream with, have children, and build a family, complete with grandkids. I want to ride horses with her on our ranch.”

  He grinned and I felt this wave of black sorrow swirl around me.

  “I want to have dinner on the deck, breakfast with hot coffee together. I can make an outstanding cup of coffee by the way, Meredith. I want to travel the world so we can have experiences together. I don’t want to be alone my whole life. Do you?”

  No, I did not. But I also didn’t want to live anywhere near Logan and the Unknown Future Wife who I would kickbox and intensely dislike all the way down to my molars. “I don’t feel alone. I’m close to my parents, I’m close to Jacob and Sarah, although Sarah thinks I’m an idiot, and I have friends. A man would add stress and mood swings.”

  “You don’t even like to talk about marriage, do you?” he asked.

  Not when it concerns you. “No. I’d rather dental floss a shark.”

  He laughed again, rich and seductive, but I knew that he didn’t know he was rich and seductive. “Why?”

  “Because it’s not something that I’m going to do. I don’t think I’d be happy married. It’s too complicated, difficult . . . My life is too complicated, difficult. A mess.” Oh, what a mess.

  “Life is complicated. It’s a mess. It’s difficult sometimes, tragic, heartbreaking, but even with all of that, I would rather go through the complications, the mess, the tragedy, with someone I loved, someone I could count on. Someone I could grab and hike to the top of a hill and have a picnic, even if we were both crying over something that had happened. One thing I am not is naïve, honey. I know marriage isn’t perfect at all. I get it.”

  No, it couldn’t be perfect. Life made sure of that.

  I ate Mrs. Claus’s head, then took in Logan’s huge shoulders, that steady gaze, the unyielding strength, the funny flower. No, marriage wasn’t perfect, but with Logan, well, it could reach toward perfection.

  The skinny blonde bomb he would marry would be very lucky. He would probably be very unhappy with me when I kickboxed her.

  I ate Mrs. Claus’s feet. Then I ate her bottom.

  Chapter 6

  Late at night, after I made myself a cup of peppermint tea, I wandered into the parlor and stared up at the music Christmas tree. In the corner, behind the piano, I noticed that the wallpaper was coming up. I put my cup of tea on an antique table, bent down, and studied it.

  It wasn’t only one layer of wallpaper. As I peeled one carefully away from the other, I counted six layers. Flowered, striped, paisley, it was all there. Each wallpaper was different, each picked by a different woman, in a different time. What was going on in their lives at that time? Were they excited to be redecorating a room? Had they moved into this house willingly? Was one a war bride? Was another married off young and regretting it? Was one of the women passionately in love with her husband or did she fall in love with someone else? What hardships did they endure? Did they have children? Did they ever go broke? Were they happy with the way their lives turned out? What would they have changed?

  All these thoughts, from wallpaper. I did not need the walls to talk; I needed the wallpaper to talk.

  I heard the swishing of long skirts i
n the kitchen and walked back in with my tea cup. Nope. No one there. I laughed to myself and went to bed, but not before I called out, “You sure picked out nice wallpaper.”

  * * *

  “The worst part is that no one will sit with me at lunch. No one.”

  I thought my body would split from pain, as I covered Jacob’s small hands with mine across the kitchen table. Not even the Wowza Walnut Caramel Tarts I’d made for him were going to sweeten over this problem.

  “Yeah, I’m having fun, too,” Sarah said. “A bunch of girls at school, you know the popular ones”—she drew quotes in the air with her fingers—“they’ve told everyone that I’m a modern day Lolita, as if I’m after all their fathers or something. Why do they hate me?”

  “I try to go slow to the cafeteria,” Jacob said, “so most of the kids are almost done eating when I get there, and then I find a table with a few kids at it but I don’t sit close to them in case they tell me to go away geek-head, but I sit sort of close so not everyone in the whole cafeteria knows I don’t have any friends.”

  “I’m past even that,” Sarah said, defiantly, but I saw the tears in her eyes. “Every time I walk past one of the ‘popular girls,’ they call me names, or run their shoulders into mine, or stop everything they’re doing and glare at me.”

  I tried not to cry. Kids are so awful to each other sometimes.

  “I sit in my classes and do the work and try to look busy at my desk when the teachers let kids talk,” Jacob said. “Everybody talks to each other, but not to me. It’s like I’m invisible. They treat me like I’ve got leprosy or something.”

  Later, after the three of us had pounded out our anger in a mad game of Scrabble, I gripped the sides of the counter and cried my eyes out.

  How many other mothers who had lived here before me spent time crying in this kitchen for the kids they loved dearly whom they could not protect from the outside world?

  All of them, I thought. All of them.

  * * *

  Our concert rehearsals were in the exact place where we would have the concerts, and because we had so, so little time, they were long rehearsals.

  The first night I took the first set of acts and worked with those specific groups, including a huge chorus, which I’d cobbled together from various churches and schools, all ages.

  The next night, I worked with the second set. The third night, we were altogether.

  It was a disorganized, noisy, calamitous disaster.

  “Well, Aunt Meredith, you and me are going to have the same problem when this is all over,” Jacob told me, patting my arm. “No one’s going to want to sit with you at lunch either.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said, cracking her gum. “You’re definitely not going to be in the popular group. But hey, no one in our family is in the popular group.”

  I rolled my eyes, yanked up Sarah’s too-low-cut shirt, then hugged my kids, before they scooted off.

  Martha waved and made a beeline for me. She had agreed to handle the décor of the Community Center. The woman could take twine, duct tape, and tree branches and make something museum-worthy.

  “Okay, Meredith,” Martha said, consulting her clipboard. “We’ll have a cross, natural-looking, tall, in the middle of the stage. We’ll use white boxes, white gauze, white material, and cotton to form snow, sparkling white lights, shiny giant ornaments hanging from the ceiling, and tons of Christmas trees.... Oh, look who’s here! Thanks for coming, Logan.”

  I whipped around and there he was.

  The man who never left my mind, who made me tingle and tripped me up and left me hot and bothered.

  “Meredith, Logan can do anything with a hammer and saw.” She blushed. “You know what I mean. I talked to him at your place, and he’s going to help with the set construction. You simply have to tell him what you’re thinking about. He can do it with a saw! And he has a big drill!” She blushed further. “You know what I mean.”

  He was so hot. “Hello, hot—” I stopped myself, cleared my throat. “Hello, Logan.”

  He was wearing a black jacket, jeans, cowboy boots. He grinned at me.

  I blushed.

  He winked.

  I blushed further.

  I used to be tough! I didn’t blush. What was happening to me?

  He held out his hand to mine, to shake, as if we were meeting. I put my hand in his and hoped that he did not notice the tremble in it. See? This is what that man does to me.

  He held on tight to my hand. It trembled. He winked again.

  He knew it. By darn, he knew it.

  I was so embarrassed I wanted to go out and ride a horse at full gallop.

  To Oregon.

  * * *

  “So why are you here, Logan? In Telena? What brought you home?” I tried to scoot away from him. Everyone else had left the rehearsal, and he and I were sitting at a table. He wanted to discuss the details of the stage, although I had the sneaking suspicion he knew exactly what he wanted to do. I assumed he would sit across from me.

  Nope. The cowboy with the shoulders a thousand angels could dance on sat right next to me. I scooted again. I could smell him. He smelled like Montana wind, mint, pine trees, and serene fly fishing rivers.

  “I’m here because of Christmas.”

  “Christmas?”

  “Yes.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “I was in a meeting, in Los Angeles, about this time last year. We were acquiring another business. It was an engineering firm, and they would complement the construction part of my business in California. Anyhow, the meeting was long, started to get heated, and I was wiped out. I’d been traveling almost constantly for years, I had boxes stacked in my home, which I was rarely in, I hadn’t had a vacation in as long as I could remember, and I slept about six hours a night.

  “I remember looking around the room at all these high powered, Type A people, whom I’d hired. They were all like me. Driven, relentless, ambitious. Anyhow, it was 8:00 at night, and I broke the meeting up, and everyone went home. I drove to the beach and walked out on the pier. I remember thinking how beautiful the ocean was, which got me thinking about water, fishing, then Montana.”

  “And?”

  He didn’t say anything for a while, brushed a hand through that thick hair, then focused those bright eyes on me. “And I realized that I had achieved what I needed to achieve.”

  “Which was?”

  “Financial stability.”

  I nodded. I wanted financial stability myself. Dumping all the money I’d earned in New York into one business scared me to death.

  “And I was ready to go home. You know I grew up poor, Meredith, and being poor, that feeling of desperation, of inadequacy, the fear and struggle, it never leaves you. Never. My mother worked all the time because my father, who was no man in any sense of the word, decided it would be better if he ran off and saw the world than stay home and take care of his wife and son. She worked for the mining companies in the office, then three nights a week as a waitress.

  “I ran a paper route starting when I was nine, mowed lawns in the summer, and worked in the mines before I left for college. In the summers, I’d go back again and work in the mines. It was dangerous, hard work. I watched my mother struggle and decided at a very young age that I would never sit at the kitchen table counting out quarters for food, and crying when the car broke down, and worrying about how to pay a medical bill, and I haven’t.

  “Financially we were always right on the brink of going over a cliff. Once we went over the cliff when my mother got pneumonia, couldn’t work, and we lost the house. I knew I didn’t want to live like that. I had to make money. No other way around it.” He rolled those huge shoulders. “A lot of people who have successful companies, who chase after money, had the same sort of childhood that I had. We can’t, under any circumstances, go back to where we were. So we scramble to create what we didn’t have, and desperately needed, and can’t relax until we have it.”

  I nodded.

  “But the price
I have paid for that financial security is that I had no personal life to speak of. All I did was work. And yet, always, I have wanted my own family. My mother passed away when I was twenty-five. She was an only child, so there was no one else. After that night in Los Angeles, I thought about things for about six months, and every day I was more sure that I wanted to move back to Montana and find a life. I’m still going to work, but I’ve promoted people, restructured some, and will delegate more.”

  “How’s the move gone?” I asked.

  He leaned in, our shoulders together, and smiled that easy smile. “Better than I could have possibly imagined.”

  “But do you miss the excitement of your business, the deal making, the people?”

  He shook his head. “I miss some of the people I work with who have been with me for years. We still talk, e-mail. They’re threatening to come to Montana and move into my house and fish all day, but I’ve told them they can’t because I need someone running the company. But the other parts of building a business? The travel, the intensity, the politics, working with people’s difficult personalities, no, I don’t. In fact, the longer I’m here, the more alive I feel. It’s almost like I’ve been half dead these last years, buried under a crush of work.”

  “So you’re here to stay.”

  He grinned at me. “Yes, Meredith, I’m here to stay. Coming back was the best thing I’ve ever done.” His eyes swept my face, my top half, in a flirty, warm sort of way that brought every nerve end to screaming awareness. “I needed to meet someone with a white streak in her hair.”

  * * *

  That night I dreamed of the accident.

  In my dream I could see his eyes, but it was dark, and I had black in my head. I heard his voice, dimly, and watched him work on my body as if I was floating above it. I heard him yelling at me, and then, in my dream, I started to die.

  I woke up with a start, sitting straight up in bed, breathing heavily.

  The motorcyclist, I was told later, did CPR on me. Another motorist, a friend of my parents’, rushed for a phone and called for an ambulance, which arrived within minutes, my parents following the ambulance. By then, the motorcyclist had stabilized me, and I was breathing again, though unconscious.