Family for the Holidays

by Victoria Pade

Dax didn’t care about the specifics, he just appreciated the sight that somehow made the room seem warmer the minute she entered it.

  He stood, unsure if he was going to be able to take his eyes off her.

  “I don’t know about you two, but I’m starved,” she said then.

  “Marsh’ allows!” Kayla nearly shouted, not saying anything about having just shown him the picture in the locket.

  Dax was glad of that, too. He definitely wanted to know the details of Shandie’s past, but he wanted to ask when Kayla wasn’t around. Just in case.

  The little girl’s focus had moved on now, though, because she hopped joyously down from the sofa and tugged on his pant leg.

  “Come on! We gitta has candles when we eat,” she announced, trailing her mother to help lead the way to the kitchen.

  And as Dax followed behind them he felt something he didn’t at first recognize because it had been so long since he’d experienced it.

  He felt a little lucky.

  Just to be right where he was at that moment.

  “Now Dax, too.”

  “You want Dax to kiss you good-night?” Shandie asked her daughter, who had given that command right after Shandie had kissed the little girl’s forehead.

  Kayla nodded with her thumb in her mouth.

  Dax was standing in the doorway of Kayla’s room. He was leaning a shoulder against the jamb, his hands were slung in his pockets and his left hip was jutting out to the side, leaving most of his weight on that substantial leg. At Kayla’s request, he’d been there to listen to her bedtime story reading. But Shandie wasn’t sure if he wanted to kiss her daughter now.

  “How about if I give you two kisses?” she suggested as if that were a treat, hoping it would appease the child.

  Kayla stored her thumb on one side of her mouth and said, “No. Dax, too.”

  “Kayla…” Shandie began on the same note she used to deny her daughter a request.

  But just then Dax pushed off the doorjamb and crossed the room on a swagger that was particularly his own. His hands didn’t come out of his pockets until he reached the side of Kayla’s bed, then he used the left one to press to the wall behind the bed, and the right to grasp the headboard so he could lean far over and kiss her small temple.

  “’Night, Kayla Jane Solomon,” he said.

  Kayla smiled beatifically. “’Night, Dax-like-Max-the-dog.”

  Then, obviously satisfied to have gotten what she wanted, Kayla closed her eyes and turned on her side, away from both Shandie and Dax.

  Shandie didn’t say anything about the incident until they were headed downstairs again.

  “I’m sorry. She just really seems to like you and—”

  “I like her, too. It’s okay. And believe me, I’ve had to do a lot worse than kiss a little girl good-night,” he said.

  “Really?” Shandie responded as if she was buying the mock intrigue in his tone.

  “Oh, yeah. Hundreds of things,” he assured her with a cockiness that made her smile as they went into the living room.

  “Want another piece of pumpkin pie?” she offered.

  “Are you trying to make me explode? No, thanks. Everything was out of this world, and I ate more than I usually do in a week. You didn’t tell me you were a gourmet cook.”

  “I wouldn’t say gourmet…” Shandie demurred, pleased by the compliment.

  They sat on the sofa, not as far apart as they had the night before because neither of them was hugging an end, but not exactly together in the center, either. Dax was clearly feeling at home by then, though. He sat slumped down far enough to rest his head on the sofa back and clasp his hands over his flat middle. His booted feet were on the floor under her coffee table, and his thick thighs were spread far apart—something she had no idea why she’d noticed.

  For her part, Shandie tucked one leg underneath her and sat facing his impeccable profile. “Don’t forget your leftovers when you go,” she reminded him rather than address his compliment any further.

  He angled a challenging half grin at her. “Are you kicking me out?”

  “No!” she was quick to say. Hinting for him to leave was the last thing she’d intended. It was the last thing she wanted. Much as she knew she shouldn’t, she felt as if she’d shared him with her daughter the entire day and had been looking forward to this time alone with him now. “I just don’t want you to forget,” she added.

  “And lose out on a turkey sandwich at midnight? Not a chance.”

  He drew his gaze away from her then, staring at the blank television screen across from them. “So.”

  But that was all he said for a moment before he looked at her again, this time from the corner of his eye. “Kayla showed me the picture inside her locket earlier.”

  “She did?” Shandie said noncommittally.

  “She said it was a picture of her dad, and that he’s in heaven. Are you a widow?” he asked.

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess when I think widow, I think old. And you’re not that.”

  The note of lusty appreciation in his voice made her smile. And feel good, despite the painful territory they were getting into.

  “Yes, I’m a widow,” she admitted. “You probably thought I was divorced, right?”

  “Or never married.”

  “With a three-year-old?”

  “It happens.”

  Shandie conceded that with a slight shrug and a nod.

  “There’s no pictures of him around,” Dax pointed out then. “That seemed more like a sign of divorce or a deadbeat dad.”

  “I can see where you might get that idea,” Shandie agreed. “I have a lot of pictures and other things, but I had to take them down and put them away in boxes, one for me and one for Kayla. I take mine out when I have the urge to wallow in the feelings they bring up. For Kayla, it’s more a sort of novelty at this point—she asks to see what’s in it now and then if she knows I’ve gone through my box. But for me…I just found that reminders around every corner made it harder to move on. And I was determined that I was going to move on.”

  “Do you not want to talk about it? Or him?” Dax asked, giving her the out.

  Shandie considered that. But she’d hated having people treat her the way Dax’s friends had treated him the night before—being careful of every word they said to her. She’d been happy to finally get past that, she didn’t want to have it start again now because she gave the impression she was on shaky ground. So she said, “I’m okay talking about it if there’s something you want to know.”

  “There is,” he said without a pause.

  Shandie smiled at his openness. “Don’t be shy, Dax,” she said, repeating what he’d said to her the previous evening when she’d inquired about what was going on between him and his brother.

  “Hey, I told you my stuff. It’s your turn,” he claimed.

  “You told me the stuff about your brother, not about your relationships with your ex-wife or with Lizbeth Stanton,” Shandie said.

  “We can talk about them another time,” he countered as if they were inconsequential.

  Shandie didn’t believe they were, but she was thinking more about the slight promise he seemed to be making of other times together. Even though that shouldn’t have mattered to her.

  “So tell me about him—Kayla thinks his name was Daddy,” Dax said.

  “Well, she’s three. I guess that makes sense since that’s the only way I refer to him with her,” Shandie said with a laugh. “His name was Peter. Pete Solomon.” She didn’t know if it was off-putting to Dax that her affection for her late husband echoed in her tone, but there it was anyway, and she didn’t apologize for it. “He was my first client on my first day as a licensed cosmetologist. I was really nervous and I gave him a pretty bad haircut—which was particularly unforgivable because he’d already told me it was the first cut he’d had since his hair had grown back in after chemotherapy treatment.”

  “Chemothera
py—there’s that word again. First with the wigs, now here. I’m betting there’s a connection.”

  “There is. Going through cancer treatment with Pete, I met a lot of other people having to do it, too. I saw the need and one small thing I could do to help. The wigs are the result of that.”

  “He had cancer when you met him?”

  “He’d had melanoma—skin cancer. Which a lot of people think isn’t such a big deal. But it is. It can be. It was his second bout when we met—it had metastasized to his lymph nodes. But he was in remission at that point.”

  “But with a bad haircut,” Dax pointed out.

  Shandie smiled at that memory. “He was a good sport about it. He even wanted to pay me, but I couldn’t let him. He came back that night when I got off work, though, and insisted he take me to dinner with the money I hadn’t accepted for the cut.”

  “And you went?”

  “That surprises you?”

  Dax arched his eyebrows. “You weren’t scared off by the thought that the guy had already had cancer twice?”

  “Well, it was just dinner. But he had such a positive attitude that I guess the cancer just somehow seemed less important than maybe it should have been, since that is what ultimately took his life.”

  “If you had it to do over again…”

  “I still would have gone to dinner with him that night. I’d still do exactly what I did from then on, too. We didn’t have much time together—not even five years—but the time we had was great.”

  “Even though he was sick?”

  “Actually, he was perfectly fine until the last five months. He’d been doing his regular checkups, he was still in remission…” Shandie shrugged as some of the sadness inevitably washed over her when she talked about Pete. “I guess I kind of thought we were home free. That he would be one of those success stories.”

  “So you went ahead and got pregnant with Kayla?”

  “Oh, no, that isn’t how it happened. Pete and I thought that our only option if we wanted a family was to adopt because there’s an increased risk of infertility as a side effect of chemotherapy. Even when he proposed, Pete made it clear that he likely couldn’t father kids—”

  “And you were okay with that?”

  “I loved him so much that I was willing to accept it. I was willing to accept anything to be with him—he was just that terrific a person. He was fun and funny and life affirming. He was interested in everything. He saw the good in everybody. He was definitely a glass half-full guy—”

  “Sounds like you and Kayla,” Dax observed.

  “I learned a lot about how to look at things through those eyes. And Kayla? Well, she’s his.” Shandie’s voice cracked a bit as emotion welled up, but she tamped down on it rather than allow it to take control.

  “So if you thought adoption was the only way you could have a family, Kayla must have been a surprise.”

  “A big one! Our little miracle—that’s what Pete called her, which was a huge relief to me.”

  Dax frowned in confusion. “A relief?”

  “Pete found a lump under his arm in the shower one day, went in to his doctor and this time he didn’t get the clean bill of health he’d been getting from his routine physicals. The doctor discovered that the lump was malignant, that the cancer was active again and was pretty widespread already. We’d never used birth control, and it was just as Pete was starting intensive chemotherapy that I realized I was pregnant.”

  Dax sat up straight and turned to face her, laying a long arm across the top of the rear sofa cushions. “You weren’t sure how he’d take the news under the circumstances.”

  “No, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t. He—we both—had a lot on our plate with his health issues and there I was, pregnant. But like Pete’s outlook on everything else, he looked at the bright side and he was thrilled. He joked that we could throw up together—him from the chemo, me from morning sickness.” Shandie chuckled slightly. “And believe me, there were days when that was exactly what we did, and when he actually made me laugh about it.”

  For a moment she was lost in the past and silence fell. Then, quietly, respectfully, Dax said, “So when did he die?”

  Tears moistened her eyes but she’d had a lot of practice keeping them from going any farther.

  She took a deep breath, exhaled, blinked and said, “I got over the morning sickness, but Pete just got sicker and sicker. The chemotherapy didn’t have much effect on the cancer that third time, and in fact it weakened him terribly. His weight dropped, he got pneumonia, then they found that the cancer had spread even more—to his lungs, his brain…He died two months before Kayla was born.”

  With the hand that was behind her on the back cushion, Dax took a strand of her hair to let it wave around the side of his hand. Shandie had the sense that he wanted to touch her more than that, to comfort her, but that he wasn’t certain he should.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his deep voice soft, soothing. “That’s…about as lousy as it gets.”

  “It was pretty lousy,” she agreed. “I didn’t know how I was going to make it through burying him, having a baby and raising it on my own…”

  “So last night, when I told you about the accident, you could relate because you’ve had some experience with looking up at the underside of hell,” he commiserated.

  “I know about grieving for a loss. Loss of a person, loss of a life you wanted, loss of what makes you happy.”

  “It stinks,” he contributed, succeeding at lightening the tone because she laughed at his more down-to-earth terminology even as she confirmed it.

  “And Kayla never even met her father,” Dax said then.

  “Not in person. Pete did start making videos of himself for her almost the minute he found out I was pregnant—just in case. She has those in her memory box—”

  “Has she seen them?”

  “A few. But unless there’s animation and bright colors and music and dancing, her attention span is low and she loses interest. So I haven’t pushed it. I’m sure when she gets a little older she’ll watch them all and get to know her dad and what he was all about. He did make sure not to do any recordings on the days he was sick or as his failing health started to show, so everything is of him looking reasonably healthy and robust—which is good. He was always about so much more than illness that it’s important that that’s what Kayla gets to see of him.”

  “What about you? Do you look at the videos?”

  Shandie shook her head. “I sat through what I played for Kayla but to tell you the truth, when her attention wandered I was glad to turn them off. I’m thinking that that will get easier later on, but in the meantime it’s better for me to work on the present and on building a future than to spend too much time in the past and regretting what isn’t anymore. And having Pete in living color on the TV screen? Hearing his voice? Having every detail brought back to mind? That makes it harder to do. Harder to keep my spirits up, to stay seeing the glass half-full.”

  Dax studied her, his espresso-colored eyes nearly burning into her. Then, after a moment, his mouth barely curved into a smile and he said, “Are these the secrets to how you’ve come out of it so…”

  “Chipper?” She supplied the word he’d used the night before when he’d said that wasn’t what he’d been since his accident. “I don’t think there are any secrets. Or that it’s a breeze for anybody to suffer through hard times and come out the other end to go on. I just think that when lousy things happen,” she said, using another of his words, “you get through it, you grieve, you feel miserable and sorry for yourself, and then you have to start thinking about what you have left, and go from there the best way you can. You do have to figure out all over again what makes you happy when what made you happy before is gone. And for me, one of the biggest things has been the people in my life—Kayla, of course. And friends, and Judy because Judy is my family. Like D.J. is your family…”

  Dax’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Are we ending up with a m
oral for me in this story?”

  “Looks like we might be,” Shandie said, refusing to be intimidated by him. “You’ve lost a lot—your mom, your dad, motorcycle racing—but you still have your brother. The two of you aren’t kids anymore or rivals for your father’s attention or for the same woman. It seems to me that—”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Dax cut her off.

  Shandie got his message, too—he didn’t want to hear her say any more about making up with D.J. But she felt compelled to make one more comment. “Don’t let your life get too limited, Dax.”

  Something about that made him give her the one-sided, cocky smile. “Is that what I’m doing?”

  Shandie shrugged yet again. “If you let your friends go, if you let your brother go—on top of all that’s already gone? Seems like it’s shrinking to me.”

  “Yeah, and shrinkage is never a good thing,” he said with a full heaping of bad-boy innuendo that put a lascivious twist to it.

  But using that killer charisma to divert them from a more sobering subject also gave her a glimpse at a side of him that made her think he could be a hard nut to crack. No wonder his friends were giving him a wide berth—they probably didn’t know how to get through to him or what to do to help him.

  He gave her hair a tiny, painless tug and then released it and hoisted himself off the couch.

  “Tomorrow’s a workday for us both,” he said to explain his actions and announce that he was leaving. And probably to make sure he didn’t have to talk more about what he didn’t want to talk about.

  Shandie thought she might have pushed him too far. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it if she had, so she didn’t try. If he avoided her because of what she’d said, well, that was his choice. And it would save her from herself, she decided, since despite knowing that she really should steer clear of him, she somehow couldn’t make herself.

  He’d worn a peacoat when he’d arrived that afternoon, and it was hanging in the entryway. He went for it, and once he’d slid it on, his broad shoulders curved forward into a minor slouch as he jammed his hands into the coat’s pockets.

  “Thanks for today,” he said as they moved to the front door.