All They Want for Christmas

by M. K. Stelmack

  Sofia gasped, jiggled Isabella’s arm and spoke in excited Spanish. Then she queried Jack, who nodded gravely.

  “Yes,” Jack said, “she spun like a music-box dancer.”

  Honest to Pete! “Who’s supposed to be telling the story here?”

  “You,” Jack said. “Anything you want to add?”

  He was daring her to tell the full story. “You were smiling, too.”

  “I was.”

  “Why smiling?” Isabella asked suspiciously. “What was so funny?”

  “Because it was so beautiful,” Bridget said.

  “So beautiful,” Jack agreed quietly. Her murderous glare drew up against his soft smile. He didn’t back down.

  “And when we got back to shore,” Bridget said in a rush, “it was so cold. We had a key to the restaurant and went inside and had hot chocolate with a cinnamon bun.”

  Jack translated. At least, she could only hope he was sticking to his promise. “That,” he added, “was beautiful, too.”

  What did he want from her? “So after that, we were very tired from our long skate and we both had school the next day, just like you two, and so we went home and went to bed, just like you two are about to do. The end.”

  Jack translated and then added, “Except we slept in separate beds in separate homes. Not just like you two.”

  Bridget felt her face grow hotter than Mano’s grill. The girls burrowed underneath the quilts. Neither Jack nor Bridget kissed them good-night yet. They had agreed that they would let the girls make the first move.

  Bridget slipped to the door while Jack did the final bedtime rituals with the dimming of the lamp and arrangement of stuffies.

  “Bridgie?” Sofia called.

  “Yeah?”

  “Will you tell that story next time?”

  Not a chance. “Maybe a different one.”

  “Good. This one had a—a boring ending.”

  Bridget couldn’t see Jack’s expression in the darkened room, but he’d likely agree. “Yeah,” she said, “it sure did.”

  * * *

  JACK WOKE WITH a start. His girls were calling out to him from...the backyard? What? He sat up in the cot, his phone sliding from his chest, and forced his brain to get oriented. Bridget had picked up the girls from school and took them for their minicinni, so he could price out suppliers and vacuum the girls’ room. He remembered lying back on the cot as he typed an email and then—He checked his phone. The half-written email didn’t even make sense. And it was forty minutes later.

  He flicked open the window blinds. Sun and snow brightened the backyard into a flat whiteness where he could see Bridget and the girls rolling a ball. The makings of a snowman. Sofia’s dream was coming true. She’d been disappointed to discover that Alberta snow was typically too powdery to form balls. But a clash of weather systems had created snow and warm temperatures, perfect for sticky snow.

  A perfect picture of the three people he wanted for his family. If Bridget would have him. He didn’t know how to convince her that he would never let her down again.

  Last night he’d brought up the story of their skate on the lake to see if she’d remembered. She had, though she had dragged her heels down that particular memory lane and had veered right into the ditch at the end.

  As they’d skated across the clear expanse, hand in hand, blades scraping the ice, he’d acted on a force that had been building within him all that evening, maybe for weeks, maybe since he’d first met her at the restaurant as a stringy thirteen-year-old. “Let’s do this together for the rest of our lives,” he had said.

  “Yes,” she’d replied. And they’d skated on.

  Only when they were in the heated darkness of Penny’s with mugs of warm chocolate did Bridget lick whipped cream from her lip and whisper “Just to be clear...you asked me to marry you, right?”

  “Yes,” he said, “and just to be clear, you accepted, right?”

  “Yes.”

  They had kissed, long and deep. When he had pulled back, he said, “I don’t have a ring. It doesn’t seem real without a ring.”

  Now, watching Bridget mess about with the girls, he wished he had produced a ring, even if it was made out of a paper clip. Slipped it on and raised her hand for all the world to see. But Penny—his mother—had convinced them of the wisdom of keeping it a secret until after his overseas internship. He’d thrown himself into the work, eager to prove his value to the agency, to himself, to Bridget. Then he was offered a permanent position. He’d called Bridget to ask her to join him, but she’d talked about the quirky restaurant customers, a summer concert she was organizing, her sisters visiting, Auntie Penny’s garden, the cold lake, anything but how much she loved and missed him. When he broke in and told her about the offer, she’d gone quiet.

  “I don’t know how this’ll work between us going forward,” he’d said. “You have your life and now I have mine.”

  “Yes.” A simple confirmation.

  “I was thinking that—that you could come and join me.”

  “Oh. But—but what would I do there?”

  Do? He hadn’t given it much thought. She could sit in their apartment until he came home. Shop on strange streets. Barter in unfamiliar languages. Follow him into poor, unsafe territories. Or he could give her the opportunity to stay where she already had a good life living out her dreams, not his. “Nothing you’d like, I guess,” he’d said.

  “That’s what I was thinking.” Thinking. As if she’d expected his invitation. Which meant that she’d already put thought to their relationship and their future, and seen how hopeless it was.

  He’d been sitting at a desk in a tiny office he shared with three others who didn’t know English. One looked pointedly up at the clock because he had an important call to make to the agency contact in Bangladesh. “So we should probably let—let our plans to be...to have a future together...go.”

  “Yes.” Quiet but solid. “I get it.”

  Did she also get how much her answer had hurt? Still, there was nothing for it but to replace bad memories with good ones. Starting with one about the time they’d made a snowman with Isabella and Sofia. Work could wait until later.

  The spiced scent of apple cider hit him upon reaching the kitchen. Deidre was ladling it into a mug from a stock pot on the stove. “Want one?” she said as he cut to the back closet.

  “Not right now, thanks. I thought I’d help Bridget and the girls.”

  “They’re doing fine on their own.”

  He stopped zipping his jacket. Her tone suggested that he should leave them alone. “They look like they’re having fun.”

  “So why do you want to go out there and spoil it?”

  She held the steaming mug with such a look of ferocity, she might well toss the contents at him as drink it. He wanted to leave, but Deidre was family—his and, more important, Bridget’s.

  “Bridget told me last night that you broke off your engagement with her.”

  Is that the way she saw it? “It was mutual.”

  “Not the way she told it. She said you chose your work over her.”

  His heart thudded like a boot falling down stairs. “I didn’t. We talked on the phone. She wanted to be here more than she wanted to be with me.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “She didn’t have to. She made it pretty clear she had a full life here without me.” Had he been wrong? Bridget was always giving—discounts, minicinnis, money, time, energy. Had she given him not up, but away?

  “Why did you make her choose between you and her life here? Weren’t you the one who was supposed to come back to her?”

  She was right. “I believed that I could make more of a difference in the world than I could being part of her world.”

  Her fierceness eased. “And now?”

  “And now,” he said, shovi
ng on his boots, “I am going out there so just this once she can remember that I chose her above everyone and everything else.”

  * * *

  THE BACK DOOR slammed and Jack appeared at the top of the deck stairs. When Deidre texted Bridget to say that Jack was snoring louder than a diesel engine, she’d directed the girls straight to the backyard to give him a bit of quiet. She’d made a good call. He looked...energized.

  “Want help with your snowman?” he called.

  “Snow angel,” Sofia corrected. “We’re making a snow angel. Gabriel.”

  He continued to stand there, his boots on but not laced, his jacket on but not zipped, one glove on, the other sticking from his jacket pocket. Was he seriously waiting for an answer to his question?

  “Hurry,” she said, “we’re into the heavy lifting.”

  Bridget figured she and Jack could handle the middle section together, but he swung it into place himself. Right. “Your muscles are for more than show, I see.”

  She meant it as a joke but he held her gaze as he answered, “They are for show, too. If you want.”

  There he was again with his innuendoes. The girls hadn’t picked up on a thing—they were quarreling over a lump of snow, cracked and dotted in red mitten lint. The angel’s head.

  “Jack,” she muttered. “Not now.”

  His gaze continued to bind to hers. “Not never, either. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” she said, not quite sure what she was agreeing to. Viewing his muscles or talking about what she wanted. Supposing the two were different.

  Sofia let loose with a loud shriek. Isabella was stomping the angel’s head to bits. “Stop it,” Isabella said. “We need to make a new one.” At least, that’s what Bridget assumed she’d said from what she could pick out from the Spanish.

  “Here,” Jack said, plunging into fresh snow. “Let’s start again.”

  Sofia had grown attached to the present monstrosity, so it took all the delicate diplomacy of nuclear-disarmament negotiations to bring the peace of the season to bear on the creation of Gabriel.

  “Good job,” Bridget said to Jack when the girls had dashed inside to grab carrots and raisins for the final decorative touches. “Left to me and the girls, spring would’ve melted Gabriel away before he was done.”

  Jack gave the snow angel an appraising look. “Honestly? If I was the Virgin Mary and this appeared before me with glad tidings, I’d be worried. For my sanity or God’s.”

  Bridget laughed and Jack gave her one of his later-not-never looks. What did he want?

  He pointed to the garage. “You need help there?”

  “Deidre is working on the crates. She wants to feel useful.”

  “Then what do you want me to do?”

  “There’s still the problem of finding money for the event.”

  “Do you have a list of sponsors? I can call around.”

  “Auntie Penny announced last year when thanking sponsors that there were enough funds to cover this year. I don’t think they’d take kindly to either of us hitting them up for more money.”

  Jack kicked a chunk of snow apart. “You know, I can’t decide whether or not to be annoyed or grateful about what my mother did.” The word came out bitterly.

  “If it’s anything like how I feel about my mother, it’s both.”

  The door opened to the girls and, surprise, Deidre. They were weighted down with all kinds of clothing and accessories, and as they descended the deck stairs, Bridget recognized exactly whose.

  “You can’t use Auntie Penny’s things.”

  “They’re mine now,” Deidre said, “and I’d like the girls to enjoy them.”

  Deidre and Bridget locked gazes. Jack shifted beside her, and Bridget picked up on his tension. She had no business creating a scene in front of his girls.

  She plucked off a gaudy orange shawl that Auntie Penny had worn to book-club meetings. Sofia gasped. “Jewels!” Bridget understood that Spanish.

  Sofia tried to drape the shawl around the wide triangular bottom of the snow angel as a skirt. It twisted and rolled and looked more like something the wind had blown onto it.

  “Here,” Jack said. “How about we put it around her neck instead?”

  He arranged the material tenderly, as if putting it on a real person.

  “Next, how about we use the coat—the red one, yes?” He arranged it on Gabriel’s shoulders with all the care of a valet and brushed and smoothed the weft of the wool.

  Piece by piece, Jack, with fashion advice from the four females, dressed Gabriel until he looked like not quite an angel, not quite a snowman and not quite Auntie Penny. Deidre said quietly, “Isn’t that something else entirely?”

  “Yeah,” Bridget admitted. “It’s...good.”

  The sun was banking off now, light giving way to the sunset blaze of oranges and pinks.

  “What’s for supper?” Isabella asked Deidre, who had designated herself as the cook for suppers. An easy enough job, considering they’d barely skimmed the surface of the meals from the funeral service.

  Guiding the girls inside with a hand on each shoulder, Deidre said, “I do believe it’s lasagna.”

  Alone again with Jack, Bridget said what she could no longer not say. “Thank you. For taking care of Auntie Penny’s clothes.” She whisked stray snow from a jacket shoulder.

  “I remember that jacket. It was worn-out years ago,” Jack said. “I see here she’s sewn up holes under the arms and restitched the lining. She couldn’t give up on things. You’re like that, too, Bridget.”

  Her hand still on the jacket shoulder, he laid his hand over hers, lightly, like when he helped her from the ladder. Touching, not holding. “But I gave up on us. That phone call I made. From Nigeria.”

  Bridget gave an involuntary flinch, and her hand twitched underneath his. “The last thing I wanted was to upset you,” he said softly. “I didn’t think—You sounded so calm on the phone. It was easy to convince myself that we’d grown apart, that you wanted it, too.”

  “I guess I was in shock.”

  “You cried.” A flat statement of regret.

  “Yes.”

  “I am sorry. You don’t know how sorry.”

  “That,” she whispered, “was a long time ago. Apologies aren’t necessary.”

  His fingers curled around her hand and squeezed. Definitely holding hands now. “Apologies are absolutely necessary,” he whispered, “for our future.”

  He powered up another of his we-must-talk looks, and she stood inches away from kissing the only man she’d given her heart to.

  Truth was she had forgiven him. Or rather, she’d never blamed him. It was as Auntie Penny had said when she told her they’d broken up. “It’s sad to hear but, my dear, you weren’t meant to be together.”

  She’d believed her aunt for twelve years, but now... Had they all been wrong?

  “Yeah,” she said, “I get it.”

  He released her hand slowly, gently, like it was the last thing on earth he wanted to do.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BRIDGET WAS WRAPPING silverware for tomorrow’s breakfast service at the bar counter when Jack set his open laptop in her line of vision.

  He singsonged a line from the Christmas tune “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and pointed to the bottom row of a spreadsheet.

  Bridget stared at the number. It wasn’t a negative. Very much a positive. And plump. And to the side, the confirmation: profit.

  “A way, a way, to pay for our mortgage,” she answered, keeping up the Christmas carol.

  “With a little more for our fund,” he ad-libbed.

  “With a little more for—” she began, stopped, then said in a flat voice, “Wait, what fund?”

  Jack held up a finger and disappeared into the back. Bridget glanced at the girls playing by the chairs and table. The
y had a talent for playing with anything. Utensils were children put to bed under a napkin. Ladle and spatula were Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. The sleigh was a breadbasket.

  Jack returned with a tin box and set it on the counter. It was the one Auntie Penny had kept in her office filled with buttons and loyalty cards and gift cards with little or no balances. Jack flipped open the lid and Bridget saw he’d chucked the lot and replaced it with a wad of cash. “Tips. From last week’s service.”

  “All that? I add mine into the deposits. How did you separate it out?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “This is all mine. After Mano’s cut.”

  “Yours? Wow. I’m not the only one who thought you looked sensational in that shirt this weekend.” He’d worn a soft cotton shirt that had set off his tan and made his blue eyes pop.

  Those eyes gleamed. “I didn’t know you thought that.”

  Bridget got busy placing a fork and knife just so on the white napkin. “I said you looked good.”

  “Yeah, but not sen-sa-tional. And I don’t wear that shirt in the morning, when I pick tips up like crumbs off toast. Sofia and Isabella rake in a lot for me. Customers see me as this hardworking single dad, just trying to get by in a woman’s world.”

  Bridget snorted. “It’s Marlene, isn’t it? You run over like a happy dog with her coffee and cinnamon bun.”

  “Yeah. Mel, too.”

  “Mel and Daphne, both. They’ve got their own nieces and nephews to spoil.”

  “Hey, are we really going to complain that they willingly give us their money?”

  Bridget waggled a freshly wrapped fork and knife at him. “Sounds like charity to me.”

  “It’s not charity,” he said. “It’s payment for a service.”

  “It’s charity disguised as payment for a service.”

  “What it is,” he said, “is a tiny rainy-day fund for us to build on to cover payments in January when business tapers off.”

  “Um, I don’t know that your tips—as great as they are—will take us over the top,” Bridget said.

  “No, but I figure it’ll be enough for us to get by until we sell the units.”