by Jacie Floyd
“How long are you staying?”
“A couple more weeks, and I’m serious about coming over to see you. You don’t have to do anything special for me. In fact, I’ll cook for you guys.”
“We’d like that.”
Jillian got serious “How are you doing? Really?”
“Better. Really. My chemo’s over. I stay perpetually exhausted, and we’re waiting to see if it worked. I pray that it did.”
Jillian squeezed her friend’s hand. “Me, too.”
“None of my business, but have you seen Liam? Is he one of the things that’s keeping you busy?”
Her friend knew her so well. “It’s complicated. We have issues. History. Baggage, all that. He’s entwined in the businesses. He’s still gorgeous beyond belief and rings my bell, but can I trust him? Do I want to try?”
“If you’re asking yourself those questions, I’d say you know the answers.”
“But how do I get past all that?”
“I don’t know.” Maddie slid her gloves back on and raised her hood, preparing to leave. “Maybe you can’t. Maybe you just have to start fresh. People deserve a second chance. He was always so good to you, and he was distraught for so long after you left.”
“Maybe I didn’t handle that right. You always urged me to come back and finish it with him.”
“You did what you had to do.” A car beeped in the driveway. “And I have to go. Call me and we’ll make plans.” They hugged again. Maddie wrapped a fuzzy scarf across over her mouth, chin, and nose. She started out the door but turned back. “One thing cancer has taught me is that are no guarantees. Don’t waste time on silly things like uncertainty and indecision.”
Jillian rolled her eyes, even though Maddie’s words hit home. “You always did want me and Liam to be together.”
“One of my favorite couples. Ever! Love you. Bye!”
Chapter Nineteen
This is the best mac and cheese I’ve ever had.” Liam leaned back in his chair, tapped Adam’s knee with his foot, and nodded toward Jillian, prodding him to remember his manners.
“Yeah, Jillian. Thanks for dinner.” Adam stuffed the last cheesy bite in his mouth and pushed his plate away after his third serving. Liam really didn’t know where the boy put it all. “This the best mac and cheese I’ve ever had, too, except for my mom’s. Hers is the best.”
“I’ll have to get her recipe.” Jillian sponged off the prep counter, not appearing the least offended that the child preferred something his mom made. “Have you heard from her?”
“Yeah, she called last night,” Adam said. “That was cool.”
“How’s her mission going?”
“She said it’s hard.” Adam stood and took their dirty dishes to the counter, just as he was supposed to do. Shelby stayed by his side, there and back. “There are a lot of sick kids there, but I know she’ll make them better.”
“It’s wonderful that she went there and wants to help.”
The boy got a doggie treat for Shelby. “Uncle Liam and I shot hoops again today,” he told Jillian. “He thinks I’m getting better at it, but I don’t think so.”
Liam had been working with him on physical fitness, building up his body and muscle tone with basketball and gym workouts and even kick boxing. He wasn’t teaching him to beat anybody up, but if Adam felt stronger and more confident, he wouldn’t be easy to bully. “You always hit the rim or the backboard now. You couldn’t say that the first day we played.”
“When did you did you have time to shoot hoops?” Jillian went to the sink to rinse the dishes, but he moved her aside and began loading the dishwasher himself. After bringing dinner, she shouldn’t be on clean up detail, too.
“After I got home from that meeting.” His mouth pulled down in a grimace.
She leaned against the counter close beside him. “Ugh, that was awful, wasn’t it? But after I got home, I had a wonderful surprise. Maddie dropped by! Just for a few minutes, but it was great to see her.”
Maddie, one of their old friends. She’d been sick with cancer this past year and hadn’t been back to visit Sunnyside much. “How’s she doing?”
“Better, she said. But I’d like to go see her in St. Louis one day when I can spend more time with her.”
Liam wouldn’t mind seeing her either. She was one of the people who hadn’t snubbed him when he came back from New York in disgrace. “Maybe you can drive with me when I take Adam back next weekend.”
Jillian smiled and nodded. “Excellent idea. I’ll call and suggest it, thanks. Do you mind if I ride along with you guys, Adam? I don’t want to horn in.”
“I could show you my room,” he said. “You could see my aquarium. And our apartment. You could meet my mom! I mean, see her. You already know her, right?”
“I do, but I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
He’d dropped to the floor beside Shelby and tossed a squeaky toy into the other room, and then looked up at Jillian. “She said she remembered you were really pretty and always nice, and she was sorry she wasn’t always nice to you. But that can’t be right, because she always tells me to be nice to people even when they’re dicks.”
“Adam!” Liam tried for a firm tone but probably ruined it with the smile he couldn’t hide. “Who said you could call people that?” Shelby brought the toy to Liam, who tossed it to Adam, who tossed it into the living room again.
“No one, but this morning at the gym you said that guy who was hogging the weight machine and yelling at his wife was a dick, and you were right.”
“He’s gotcha there,” Jillian pointed out to Liam, but he ignored her.
“You know the difference between words that grownups say and words you’re allowed to say, Adam. You shouldn’t say adult words just because you hear me say them.”
“Is this one of those do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do things?” Jillian asked.
He shot her a disgruntled look. She was just giving him a hard time, but he was trying to get this right. “I’ll watch my mouth in the future, Adam, but I’d prefer you not repeat questionable expressions I use without checking with me first.”
“Words are just words, Uncle Liam.”
The boy had gotten him again.
Jillian was trying not to smile, but she saved him from further discussion. “I’ve got homemade mint brownies for dessert. Who’s ready?”
She passed generous helpings to him and Adam. “When did you have time to make homemade brownies?”
“They weren’t homemade by me. Maddie’s mom sent them over.”
“Uncle Liam, I need to submit my lessons for tomorrow. Can I take my dessert up to my room while I do that?”
“Sure, just don’t get chocolate all over your keyboard.” Now that the Internet was hooked up, Adam was spending more time in his room scamming Liam for more video game time than Leah allowed. “Come back down in half an hour if you want to help me beat Jillian in a game of Monopoly. She’s almost impossible to beat.”
“Okay. I’ve never played Monopoly.” He grabbed his dessert and took off. “Come on, Shelby, let’s go upstairs.”
Jillian set a small brownie at her place. Before she took a seat, he hooked his arm around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. “You should sit here.”
“Liam!” she said. “Is this the message you want to send Adam about us?”
“We’re not going to do anything more exciting than kiss.” His mouth took hers in a demonstration. “Maybe.” He reconsidered that comment as his hand went to her breast. “Maybe I’ll cop a feel, too, but that’s all.”
She moved his hand away and tried to stand, but he held on. “Don’t go. I suffered through that whole stupid meeting today without getting to touch you once.”
“That would have been inappropriate then, and it’s inappropriate now.”
Gripping her hands behind her back, he leaned forward and nipped her breasts. “I wasn’t planning on laying you out on the table, spreading chocolate icing all your stomach, and having my way with you. Althou
gh that does sound appealing.”
“I’ll stay here for a while—” she squirmed in his lap “—because I want to, but don’t try any funny stuff.” She nodded toward the door where Shelby and the boy had disappeared. “Looks like you’ve lost your dog.”
He groaned with pleasure over his first bite of the brownie. “People keep saying that. But it’s just a temporary loss.”
“You’ll miss Adam when he goes home though, won’t you?” She nibbled the bite of brownie he fed her, grazing his fingers with her teeth, and then her tongue.
Heat went straight to his groin, and he adjusted her position. “Yeah. Shelby will, too. But I see him a lot and talk to him pretty often, so it will work-out.”
“Sounds like Leah’s doing great after a rocky beginning.”
The comment sounded innocent enough, but Liam wasn’t sure this was a safe topic. He hadn’t slept with Leah, but in Jillian’s mind, he’d left her behind when he took off with Leah to St. Louis. If there was any residual resentment about that, this might be the moment it reared its ugly head.
“She is.”
Jillian wiped brownie icing on his lips with her finger and licked it off. “How did that happen?”
He guessed he owed her that part of the story, too, but it was hard to focus. He had told her the rest of it the other night. She deserved to know this part, too, but not while she was sitting in his lap and tempting him with chocolate and foreplay. He lifted her up and set her in her own chair.
“Hey,” she said. “I changed my mind. I liked sitting on your lap.”
“I can’t concentrate like that, and you seem curious.” He adjusted his erection behind his jeans and leaned against the sink. “I took Leah to St. Louis to stay with her aunt through her pregnancy. After Caleb died, we submitted paperwork to the Army to prove the baby was his son, so that he would get benefits. Caleb had named me his beneficiary when he went in, so I split his insurance money between her and my grandparents. Leah worked and went to nursing school part-time until I started making enough money to pay for it.” It sounded easy enough, but those had been hard, grueling years. “She graduated a couple of years ago as a pediatric nurse, got her own place, and a great job. Now, she’s met a nice guy and she’s engaged. She always wanted to go on a humanitarian mission, and she wanted to do it before she gets married, so that’s what’s happening now.”
“And you stayed in contact with them all this time?”
“While I was still in college, I visited them a lot. By the time I went to New York, I mostly sent money. When my life exploded, and I couldn’t help them financially anymore, I told Leah I’d stay away. No point in embarrassing the kid for stuff that didn’t have anything to do with him. But she said, I was there when they needed me. They’d be there for me in return. She likes him to have someone connected to his father.”
Jillian chewed on her bottom lip like she had something on her mind. “I always thought you’d become a couple. Shared history. Ready-made family. That would have been tempting.”
“Not for me.” He’d never even thought of it. Leah was Caleb’s girl, not his. “If she ever entertained the idea, she would have realized pretty quick she didn’t need my chaos in her life.”
“And she never reunited with her parents? That must have been tough.”
“She was pretty bitter about them at first, but I keep wondering if her sending him back here for this visit is her way of tempting fate. Or sending them a signal. Adam seems pretty insistent on trying to meet them.”
“Did you ask her about that when she called?”
He snorted. “She said to use my best judgement. Like anyone in this world would trust my judgement about anything.”
“She trusts you with her son, so that says a lot right there.”
Hearing paws on the stairs, Liam knew they were about to have company. He was glad he’d had time to deflate. He didn’t even have to hide behind a solid object.
“Hey, Uncle Liam,” Adam said, rounding the corner, “I was thinking. If we’re going to put a tree up this weekend, maybe Jillian would like to help. Would that be all right?”
All right with him, but from the look on Jillian’s face, it wasn’t all right with her. But when Adam turned his most winsome look toward her, she couldn’t seem to refuse him. “Sounds like fun. Do you have decorations, or should I bring some?”
After pacing in front of it for five minutes, Jillian pulled open the door to the attic storage in her house. The stale, unused odor smelled like the past. It smelled like death. Not like recent death. And maybe not so much like death as the opposite of all living things. If that made sense.
As her stomach clenched, she stepped inside. The space had gotten more crowded since the last time she’d seen it. It was more crowded than it looked in her nightmares. Not so much nightmares as bad dreams. Dreams that left her sad and unsettled. That left her feeling empty. Searching for something that was missing. Missing her mother.
Time to set aside the melodrama and face her fears. She never liked to admit it, but she hated Christmas. Maybe hate was too strong of a word. She disliked it. Intensely. She avoided it. She ignored it whenever she could.
For the past ten years, she made sure she worked on Christmas day, so she didn’t have to deal with it in the traditional way. She and her father got together the first week of January and went somewhere warm. They pretended that was what they preferred. But really, what they preferred was pretending that Christmas didn’t exist.
Christmas had been ruined for them forever when Jillian was sixteen and her mother died on December twenty-second. The trauma of that still echoed inside her. She had taken down the tree on Christmas Eve, boxed everything up including the presents, and hadn’t had another tree since. The holiday had never been the same.
That first year, she and her father had floated through the day in a painful haze. For Christmas dinner, they tried to eat the leftover food from the wake, but Jillian couldn’t stomach it. Her Christmas feast had consisted of a handful of grapes. Everyone in town invited them to join them for Christmas, but the holiday had lost all meaning. The next year, they didn’t fare much better. Liam came over, and they had grilled cheese sandwiches and potato chips on paper plates. Whatever was the opposite of their Christmas tradition, that’s what they wanted to do.
It was the next year, the year she was in Paris, that they began taking a post-Christmas trip. She hadn’t celebrated the actual holiday from then on. Weird, sure, but she had so few close friends that no one really noticed. Except Lance. They’d lived together long enough for him to realize she freaked out around the holidays, but good friend that he was, he gave her whatever space she needed to get through the day.
With the loss of her father, she felt the loss of her mother more keenly than she had in years. There had been a nostalgic pull for the old traditions when she made plans with the Santa Walk committee. She’d even been touched by the tacky trees at the Kitty Kit. And she’d nearly cried when Adam asked her to help them trim Liam’s tree.
She wanted to. For the first time in twelve years, she really wanted to. But could she? Wouldn’t she have to face her Christmases Past to do so?
While her bedroom had remained almost a shrine through her absence, the attic had become the repository for her mother’s life. Her golf clubs with the zebra-striped club covers. Her grandmother’s antique sewing machine. Boxes of clothes, jewelry, scarves, and purses. All neatly labeled in her father’s precise way. Her bicycle was there, for heaven’s sake. And the crutches she’d used one year when she’d broken her leg.
Since this stuff wasn’t in her parents’ room, Jillian had assumed he’d given or thrown it all away. Why hadn’t he? That question carried too heavy of an emotional burden for her to unpack in this dim and dusty place. Maybe he thought she would return and want some of it someday. Would she? If so, that day was not today.
Stacked in the corner, she located the boxes she was looking for. Yep, they were all here; the memories
that time hadn’t erased. All perfectly intact. All like chards of glass ready to cut through her skin and spill her blood on the floor. Her hands shook as she opened the first carton. As if she’d instinctively known which one to select, she’d opened the one that contained ‘her’ ornaments, the ones she’d made in school and the ones her mother had collected for her in specialty stores and craft fairs. Her eyes misted with tears as the memories spilled out.
She closed the box, replaced it in the corner, and reached for the next one. Her mother’s gifts from under the tree that year. The ones to her and from her. Nope, she slammed the lid shut. She wasn’t ready to go there.
The next one contained strands of lights, which Liam didn’t need. There was a box of generic overflow ornaments, in round and oval and tear-dropped shapes. Shiny colors. No special memories at all. They’d used them as needed to fill in the holes or to add to wreaths or other greenery. And there was enough garland to trim the giant tree in Rockefeller Center. She’d take these two boxes to Liam’s. She’d deal with the rest of them later.
Liam had told her she didn’t have to help them. She said she would, but he half-expected her to cancel. When she showed up ready to decorate, he knew what it had cost her. She didn’t do Christmas lightly. She’d brought homemade sugar cookies and made hot chocolate and sang carols with determined cheer as they wound garland around the tree.
After he built a fire in the fireplace, he fetched and carried as requested. Adam behaved with typical eleven-year-old behavior, which was at once goofy and helpful, sincere and irreverent.
After Jillian placed the star on the very tippy top of the tree, she turned wrong or twisted something or somehow managed to step off-balance off the stepladder and straight onto Shelby who’d been underfoot all night. She pitched in one direction and Shelby streaked in another. Liam grabbed for Jillian, but she landed hands first with a shout on a tray of glass ornaments. They shattered on contact and shards of glass sliced into her palms.
Liam hauled her into the kitchen to stand under the bright overhead light. With a pair of tweezers, he retrieved the bigger pieces, but others were too small and painful for him to get.