A Vineyard White Christmas (The Vineyard Sunset Series Book 5)

by Katie Winters

  Suddenly, Andrew’s father burst in through the back door. His eyes went to Andrew, to Kelli, and then to Mike’s bloody nose. In a split-second, he knew exactly what had gone wrong.

  “Andrew, what have you done?” his father demanded.

  Andrew had no room for an apology. His hatred for Mike spread through his veins like a virus.

  “Andrew. Come to my office. Now,” his father growled. He stepped toward him, grabbed him by the upper arm, and dragged him toward the hallway like a little kid. All the while, Andrew turned his head back toward Mike. He wanted to give him a look that would tell Mike not to mess with his sister again; that punch wouldn’t be his last.

  Once inside Trevor Montgomery’s office, Trevor grabbed a bottle of expensive whiskey with a shaking hand and poured himself two fingers. For a long time, he studied his glass and shook his head. Andrew heaved toward the side of the room as his adrenaline depleted.

  “I hate him, Dad. You didn’t hear what he said to Kelli. He...”

  “I’ve thought it for a long time, Son.” Trevor’s eyes lifted slowly.

  “So you’ve heard what he’s said to her?”

  His father shook his head, delicately. “No. Whatever’s up with Kelli and Mike is between Kelli and Mike. But you? My youngest? The runt of the litter? I’ve thought about it for a long, long time, and I realized...” He took a long, horrible sip of whiskey. “You’ve really disgraced out family, son. I really don’t know what to do with you.”

  The words felt like shrapnel. Andrew dropped his chin to his chest and blinked down at his ridiculous Italian-made shoes, the ones his mother had forced him to wear for graduation. They pinched his toes horribly; a tension headache had started to form at the base of his skull.

  “Wow. Well, at least now I know how you really feel. I guess there’s nothing left to say,” Andrew whispered as his eyes locked one final time with his fathers. He cast his eyes to the floor and stepped toward the door, slipped out into the hallway, and headed up toward his bedroom. Someday, much sooner than he’d ever anticipated, this wouldn’t be his bedroom any longer.

  Maybe it was better that way, after all.

  Chapter Four

  2003

  The first Boston apartment was run-down and bug-infested. Kurt and Andrew sat out on the leather couch they had bought from Craigslist and counted the cockroaches through the late evening and into the morning as they drank beer and spoke about what they would do next. The idea of the military revealed itself after a recruiter had approached them at the grocery store. “I guess we have that puppy dog look,” is what Andrew said about it as he lifted the brochure. “We obviously don’t know what to do next.”

  Money was tight; neither of them received enough hours at their jobs as a sandwich-maker and pool technician at the local YMCA. Before the end of August, they had signed up for the military, and by the middle of September, they had fallen fully in love with the idea of it all.

  “Man, it’s perfect. While we serve, we can think about what we really want our lives to be,” Kurt said. “Then, they’ll pay for our college. We can go together. Be roommates, even. We’ll be, what? Twenty-four, twenty-five? By then, we’ll know so much more and we’d have served our country in the meantime. It’s a win-win!”

  It sounded right to Andrew. It was ideal to have something to look forward to, a goal he could prop up in front of his remaining sadness about his family and the life they’d left behind. Before they’d decided against paying for the phone bill, his mother had called every few days. Now, the silence that came off of Martha’s Vineyard felt louder than ever and every day, Andrew felt the ache in his heart grow. But none of that mattered now. He was a grown man, off to do what he wanted, and he was just as stubborn as his old man.

  “Weird that we missed a whole summer there,” Kurt said late one night as they packed up for their first training. “I always took them for granted.”

  “Sure, but it wasn’t so bad up here,” Andrew said. As the words tumbled out of his lips, he felt the density of the lie.

  “I talked to Beth a few days ago,” Kurt said.

  Andrew’s ears perked up. He hadn’t seen Beth since she had driven them both up to Boston. Her eyes had been hollow when she’d said goodbye. I thought we had something; they seemed to say.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Good, I guess. Ready for senior year. She also asked if we’re really sure about joining the army.”

  “I guess it’s too late to back out now,” Andrew said.

  Kurt considered this. “You’re right and besides. It’ll be an adventure, right?”

  MONTHS LATER, WHEN Kurt and Andrew were stationed in Afghanistan, Andrew got up the courage to write his mother a letter. He was gut-wrenchingly homesick. So many men had died around him, and the air held a scent of death. It didn’t matter which way you turned; it was there just lingering everywhere. He missed the soft sea breezes; he missed his mother’s clam chowder, her soft voice and gentle touch; he missed the tender beauty of the New England rain and his nieces and nephews running around and yelling at one another. Home was meant to be where the heart is, he thought, but in his case, that wasn’t always the truth. Either way, he was still homesick.

  It was now 2004, which meant that any wild energy and anger for the devastation that happened on September 11, 2001, had whittled itself down and become strangely passive. War was what they did; war was all they had. As Andrew awaited a message back from his mother, he and Kurt snuck time together to talk about Martha’s Vineyard and exchange old stories of what they had left behind.

  “That night, when we were on the boat headed back from the Blink-182 concert,” Kurt breathed. “I think about that night all the time. I thought the world was full of possibilities. As many possibilities as there were stars in the sky.”

  “Now we just have this,” Andrew affirmed.

  Kurt’s eyes had become sunken with dark circles. They were stressed, going on zero sleep at times, with only their adrenaline to see them through. Andrew avoided mirrors, as he hated to imagine what had happened to his own appearance due to the stressors of war. They tried to keep one another’s spirits light; naturally, it was difficult, though.

  By the time Kerry Montgomery’s letter reached Afghanistan, Kurt Leopold had been killed in the line of fire.

  The attack had come out of nowhere. Andrew hadn’t been on-duty at the time; to think of it later, he’d been fast-asleep, dreaming of Martha’s Vineyard summers and long days on the lifeguard stand, steaming beneath the sun. When someone jostled him awake to tell him the awful news, his grogginess made the impact of the story not as harsh or even a reality. It was only afterward, as he settled into the realization that his best friend from his childhood was now dead, that he began to weep uncontrollably.

  Kurt’s body had been shipped back to Martha’s Vineyard shortly after. Only then did Andrew read his mother’s letter. It was a list of the items she had grown in the garden that year, the things she’d done with her grandchildren, the excitement she had over Claire’s engagement, that kind of thing. She didn’t mention anything about when Andrew would return home; she also didn’t bring up anything about what had happened between Andrew and his father. Hardened by battle and Kurt’s death, Andrew resolved to take another tour. Martha’s Vineyard had nothing for him, anyway.

  Years passed. Andrew turned twenty-one, and then he turned twenty-three. He found himself moving up in rank, stationed in Iraq, Iran, back in Afghanistan, sometimes in Germany or France or wherever the army needed him. Through his travels, he saw much more of the world than he had ever envisioned from the safety of his Martha’s Vineyard home. He took photos, but he had nobody to send them to. As social media became more in vogue, he contemplated making an account and reaching out to one of his sisters or his brother. That said, so much time had passed at this point; they had all lived without one another for so long that it seemed unnecessary that they put the time in to build any kind of relationship.

>   Once in a blue moon, Andrew returned to Boston for some rest, recuperation. Other soldiers hugged their wives and their children and their dogs; they went back to their cozy houses and their beautiful backyards and their enviable worries. Andrew had the same schedule every time he got back. He got a month-by-month rental apartment; he got out some of his things from storage; and he set up shop for a few months, watching sports on TV and hanging at the local bar. Nothing about his life was anything like he had pictured, but heck, he was a soldier through and through. He served his country. Nobody could knock what he had done for his country. In fact, more often than not, people came up to him to thank him for his service.

  From time to time, Andrew wondered what his father thought of his youngest, “runt” son’s decision to join the army. He could almost hear Trevor Montgomery say something like, “That’ll kick him into shape if nothing else does.”

  Maybe this was it, Andrew thought to himself as he prepared for yet another tour in the Middle East. Maybe this was all life would ever be for him. Maybe it could be enough.

  Chapter Five

  Present Day – March

  “That’s right, Andrew. Just four more steps for me, and then you can take a break. Just four more.”

  Andrew winced as pain shot up and down his right leg. Just short of that final step, he gripped the railings on either side, gasped, and puffed out his cheeks. His tousled blonde hair swept down around his ears as he blinked at the floor, feeling defeated.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “It’s okay. There’s nothing to apologize for,” his matter-of-fact physical therapist, Olivia, said as she made another note on her clipboard. “Let’s call it a day, shall we? You made great progress since last time.”

  “I never thought I’d be so pleased to hear feedback on my walking skills,” Andrew tried to joke. “Not since I was a toddler, at least.”

  Olivia chuckled as she assisted him back to his wheelchair. “Walking isn’t as easy as it looks. We have to trick your muscles into remembering the process is all. I think you’ll be back up on your feet with crutches in a little more than three weeks if you can believe it.”

  Andrew hardly could.

  It had been a little over a month since the accident. He and several soldiers had surrounded an abandoned hospital in Baghdad. Someone had given the all-clear, and they’d missed the bomb waiting in a shadowy entrance. After the ear-splitting explosion, Andrew had collapsed, numb and bleary. When he had blinked down, his right leg had seemed to be nothing but shrapnel and blood.

  He was lucky to be alive. He was lucky that he could learn to walk again. Most of the others weren’t so lucky and hadn’t made it.

  He didn’t necessarily like to think about that, though.

  A van took him back to the ground-floor apartment he had rented in Boston. As he wheeled across the sidewalk, he turned to look down the beautiful street of a city he’d once felt was the pinnacle of all life. Now, however, it was littered with trash and beer bottles. With a jolt, he remembered: the previous night had been St. Patrick’s Day, arguably one of the wildest and outrageous nights in Boston year-round.

  Andrew, on the other hand, had taken a sleeping pill and his pain medicine; he’d conked out just after eight-thirty and hadn’t heard a thing.

  It was March and chillier than ever, but with a friendly little sun poking its head out from beneath a fluffy springtime cloud. Andrew leaned his head back in his chair. He would never return to the Middle East; he would never again be an acting soldier. What would he do with the rest of his life now? Just retire?

  It was one of the strangest years of Andrew’s life. A few months later, he celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday at the bar alone with crutches on either side of his stool and a glass of whiskey in-hand. A woman several stools away gave him a once over with her eyes and asked, “Did you see action?”

  “No,” he answered. “I was hit by a car.”

  What was it about the way he looked? Did he just reek of war?

  He detested his little ground-floor apartment. He never bothered to trade out the furniture it had come with for furniture he might have liked. The only personal decorations he had bothered with was a framed portrait of him and Kurt on the evening of their graduation and one from them sitting in a bunker a few nights before Kurt had been killed. They were completely suited up in their gear and artillery with wide smiles plastered on their faces. They had both looked they were untouchable back then. He thought back to that night when he had punched Mike in the face and all the chaos that had followed afterward— after his life had changed for good.

  Had Kelli stayed with Mike? Had things calmed down between them? Had their dad been right about keeping out of it? Andrew would never know.

  Before Andrew knew what to do with himself, or how to mark the calendar of his passing life, it was suddenly Thanksgiving.

  Previous Thanksgivings had been almost pleasant. Andrew had been stationed abroad somewhere with his fellow soldiers, all of whom took it upon themselves to craft up a half-decent meal and enough booze to go around for everyone. They had sung songs into the night, swapped stories, and eaten their fair share. There was something about eating Thanksgiving while you were also hard at work serving your country. It was like all the meals across the great United States of America were eaten as a way to honor your service and those who served before you.

  The Thanksgiving after he was injured, Andrew ordered Chinese food and watched football on his television screen. He didn’t say a single word, not even to the delivery driver when he slipped him a tip. When he went to bed that night, he wondered if it was possible for a throat to close up due to lack of use.

  It was now heading into December. He couldn’t believe that eleven months had already passed since he had been released from duty due to his leg injury. Andrew hovered over the magazine and candy bar section at the grocery store. He always gave himself extra time to think about it. Did he want a Sports Illustrated and a Twix bar, or a Time and a Reese’s? This was about as much excitement as his life had these days. As he scanned, his eyes hovered over the wedding section, where two celebrities peered out with wide smiles.

  The Most Expensive Martha’s Vineyard Wedding Ever. Read about the Wedding Planner Who Made it Happen: Charlotte Hamner

  Andrew’s hand shook as he lifted the magazine off the rack. The woman beside him in line looked at him, incredulous, shocked that he had picked up a wedding magazine. By the time he reached Charlotte’s page, his eyes were so bleary and he couldn’t read the words. He bought the magazine, a Twix bar and a Reese’s, and by the time he arrived back to his couch, he had the energy to read.

  It was just a fluff piece, hardly anything: mostly information about the flowers (all done up by Claire Whalen, the wedding planner’s sister, his sister), the decorations, and the fact that the bride and groom had called off the wedding for a full five hours before they had decided to go ahead with it at a nearby chapel.

  Andrew stopped breathing for a moment. Although there weren’t any photos of the chapel, he knew exactly the one they had gone to. They had frequented that place for church services for a few years, and he had fond memories of the soft light in the space, the way the Bibles felt in his hands, reading the passages that seemed to matter so much to a young, sensitive heart like his.

  “I have to give a lot of credit to my daughter, Rachel,” Charlotte said in the article. “She’s only fourteen, but she kept me together every step of the way. Sometimes I asked myself, who’s mothering whom, you know?”

  Of course, Andrew had imagined Charlotte had had children. The fact that this daughter was written about so plainly here in a magazine he’d picked up from the grocery store chilled him. It was like, any reader in the world might have learned this fact that he should have learned fourteen years ago. It almost felt like a calling.

  ANDREW WASN’T SURE if he believed in fate. Actually, if anything, his previous years at war, in the Middle East, or
in washed-up apartments in Boston had taught him that there was nothing to this life at all. You were born, you lived, and then you died. That was that.

  But the very night he read the article about Charlotte’s wedding planning on the Vineyard, his phone rang deep in the night. It had been so long since anyone had called him that he hardly dared answer it.

  The Martha’s Vineyard area code—508—was the only reason he did.

  His voice faltered. “Hello?”

  It seemed likely that there would be a ghost on the other end of the line.

  There was silence for a long stretch. Andrew lifted his phone from his ear and prepared to hang up. Maybe it was a prank call from the great beyond. Heck, maybe it was even Kurt. They’d loved to prank phone call people, back in the day.

  Finally, a voice called out, “Andy? Andy, is that really you?”

  Every person who wasn’t a Montgomery or a Sheridan had a lot of trouble differentiating between the Montgomery sisters’ voices. If anyone else had been listening, they might have thought this was Kelli or even Charlotte.

  Andrew’s ears knew it instantly, though.

  This was Claire.

  But how in the heck could he answer? His heart raced a million miles a minute. He ran his fingers through his hair and finally answered, “It’s me, Claire. It’s me.”

  Again, there was silence. What could two siblings say to one another after seventeen years apart?

  “I wasn’t sure if this would be the right number,” Claire finally said. “Previous numbers the army has given me over the years always ended up disconnected.”

  “I guess I never stuck around Boston long enough for any of the numbers to hold up,” he told her. “I was always switching SIM cards.”

  “Wow. Andy.” Her voice cracked with emotion. “I wish I was calling you under better circumstances.”