A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  A few generations ago, there might have been even less than that. And somehow, the world had kept on turning, through mail-ordered brides and all manner of strangers getting together and making the best of things. There were human beings scattered all over the earth, and surely some huge percentage of them had to come from marriages a lot worse than the one Abby planned to have.

  After all, she didn’t have to be Becca’s mother. She didn’t have to fill the shoes of a dead woman it seemed Becca had no intention of forgiving for her sins. Abby could relate.

  She could more than relate, especially when she made the turn off the county road and drove down the dirt lane to the farmhouse.

  Abby blew out a harsh breath and stared at the strange car parked in the yard. It didn’t matter that she’d never seen it before. That it was different from all the other cars she’d ever known her mother to drive, because the woman changed cars the way other people changed hairstyles.

  She turned off the ignition and sat there a minute, trying to ignore the way her heartbeat hit so hard and so fast her ribs felt tight. She could remember all the other times she’d come home to find a strange vehicle in the same spot out back, and had been forced to face the fact that Lily was here again.

  She remembered how excited she’d gotten when she was younger. How desperately she’d clung to the hope that her mother was back home to actually be a mother, for a change. As she’d gotten older, she got angrier—and more afraid that one of these times Lily might make Abby go away with her. She could remember, much too vividly, the time Lily had turned up for Christmas morning when Abby was just about Becca’s age. Abby hadn’t been able to control all the competing emotions that had buffeted her and her reward had been her own mother laughing and calling her a dumb country girl.

  Abby had never showed Lily any emotion again.

  “Not today, Satan,” Abby muttered out loud in the car’s interior.

  She told herself she was made entirely of steel, like Gray, and climbed out of the car. She took her time getting the grocery bags together, and then she started toward the back door. The trouble was, she never knew what to expect. Lily didn’t actually have to do anything to be the bogeyman. She just had to turn up.

  Abby shoved her way in the back door and was surprised to find the kitchen empty. She slung all the shopping bags up onto the counter, shrugged out of her coat, and hung it on a peg by the door, then told herself there was no point hiding back here. It would only put off the inevitable.

  She walked from the kitchen toward the front room, like she was headed toward her own execution. Which didn’t even feel melodramatic.

  When she got to the arched opening that separated the front room from the dining room, she stopped there. Grandma was sitting in her favorite chair, the way she always did. And Lily was perched where Gray had sat, there in Grandpa’s old armchair, which was just … wrong.

  But this was Lily. Wrong was probably the point.

  No one bothered saying hello or making any small talk. Lily gazed at the daughter she’d never wanted, and Abby stared right back. She didn’t dare look at her grandmother because she was afraid she would do something terrible if she did. Like burst into tears, when she’d vowed that she would never give her mother that kind of power over her again.

  “Your grandmother tells me you’re getting married,” Lily said as if that was something Abby had been deliberately keeping from her. As if they chatted every day on the phone and Abby had neglected to pass on that information. “To one of those Everetts, apparently.”

  Abby didn’t like the way she said that. One of those Everetts. As if Abby was a chip off the old block and scoured the earth for men to leech off of the way Lily did.

  “Yes,” she said. Because what else could she say?

  “You grew up with the Everetts yourself, Lillian,” Grandma said, in that particularly serene voice she used when she felt anything but.

  That almost made Abby lose it. She hated the fact that Lily got under Grandma’s skin so much it made her feel lightheaded.

  “Lily, Mom. I’ve asked you to call me Lily for years now.”

  “You can call yourself anything you like,” Grandma said in that same way. “But I’ll call you the name I gave you the day you were born, thank you.”

  Lily’s eyes were glittering with a fury she wasn’t trying that hard to repress when she looked back. “You’re very smart.”

  “Thank you.” Abby knew perfectly well it wasn’t a compliment. “That feels like an upgrade. Some people think of me more as a dumb country girl.”

  “My God.” Lily let out a tinkling little laugh and settled back in Grandpa’s chair as if she owned it. “Everything is so dire in this house. I don’t know how you can live here. Of course it’s smart to marry into that family with all the land they have. This is Colorado. Land is money.”

  “I’m pretty sure land is money everywhere,” Abby said stiffly. “That’s basically the entire history of the world in a nutshell.”

  “I knew you had to have a bit of me in there.” Lily delivered another one of those laughs. “I’m glad to see I was right.”

  Abby didn’t vomit right there on the carpet. She didn’t even scowl. Instead, she looked at her mother like the stranger she was.

  “I don’t have a single shred of you in me.”

  And because Grandma was right there, she didn’t add a hearty “hallelujah.”

  “If you say so,” Lily said idly, but Abby was sure there was malice in her eyes. “How convenient you found the only single man around with thousands of acres of prime Angus beef to his name.”

  “I’m marrying somebody who lives here in Cold River,” Abby retorted, something too thick and deep to be simple fury bubbling through her. “Someone who I’ve known for my entire life, because I also live here, and all that Everett land has been the view out my bedroom window since I graduated from a crib. I haven’t run off anywhere. I’m not imagining I’m going to find a better life somewhere, like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. We’re not similar at all, actually.”

  Lily smiled, and that was worse. “The difference between you and me, Abby, is that I know what I am. I’m not sneaky and deceitful. If it looks like you’re a gold digger, you might as well admit it, because you better believe that’s the only word anyone else is going to use.”

  “Lillian. That’s enough.”

  “I call it like I see it, Mom.” But Lily’s gaze was on Abby. Waiting for something Abby refused to give her. She flatly refused.

  “This is already a delight, as usual,” Abby said with fake brightness to the room, while the phrase “gold digger” ricocheted around inside her like a terrible bullet, punching holes wherever it touched. Or maybe she was talking to the little girl tucked away inside of her who still had it in her to be surprised that her own mother was always, always … this. “Happy Thanksgiving to us.”

  9

  Before it even started, Thanksgiving was not exactly the happy, carefree, and tensionless family gathering Gray had been imagining.

  He had been sure that things would be fine, mostly because he wanted them to be. But also because this was the first year they’d get to experience the holiday without taking part in the Amos Everett show the way they usually did, like it or not. Thanks to Amos’s usual behavior, Gray was fairly certain he and his brothers suffered from a kind of holiday-onset PTSD that started in late November and held on until well into the new year. Every year.

  Not that their aversion to holidays with their father had prevented them from gathering together anyway, year after grim year, so Gray and Brady could stare at each other across the table while Amos and Ty got drunk. And then drunker still while all four of them played an extended game of chicken to see who would be the first to admit that these expected, unmissable family gatherings were … terrible.

  All while Becca broke Gray’s heart more and more each year by trying her hardest to make it all come together anyway like one of those Hallmark movies
she sometimes insisted he watch with her. For the past few years she’d cooked the customary Thanksgiving dinner for the hands, then another dinner for family, and had focused on the whole production as if she expected to get graded on it.

  “This will be great!” she told him that morning as she and Gray did a last clean of the house before company turned up. “And this year we don’t need to worry about Grandad breaking anything!”

  If Gray had any regrets, it was the fact he’d subjected his daughter to Amos in the first place—but he hadn’t known how to avoid that.

  “No one better break anything,” he replied, and was startled when Becca came and put her hand on his arm.

  “It’s going to be perfect,” she told him with a ferocity that made him blink while he was wiping down the table in the dining room they used twice a year for meals and all the rest of the time as Becca’s desk for homework and her various projects. “Absolutely perfect.”

  He didn’t ask her why she was so invested. He nodded and thought, not for the first time, that raising a daughter wasn’t for the faint of heart. It was one more reason he was changing his life. He didn’t want Becca’s only family experiences to be his jackhole brothers and her drunk grandfather. He wanted to build a decent family life with someone as committed to that particular dream as he was. Someone who would, among other things, help him make sure a reign of terror like Amos’s couldn’t happen again.

  Someone like Abby, he thought with satisfaction when he saw Martha’s old red truck heading up his drive around three in the afternoon. He’d been out in the barn with the horses, but walked out and waited for the truck as it pulled up next to the house.

  “You remember my daughter, Lillian,” Martha said as she climbed to ground, as spry as if she were still in her fifties.

  “Lily,” corrected the woman who followed her—without offering her mother a helping hand, Gray noted. She was shorter than her mother and daughter, her eyes were already narrowed, and she was hollow-cheeked in that way they always were in places like Vail, where people’s goals included looking well-manicured in fur-trimmed jackets with ski pants on while porters tended to their boots before they hit the slopes. She made Gray want to roll around in the dirt. And when she smiled at him, it was only her lips that moved. Faintly. “And I remember you, of course.”

  There was something about the way she said of course that Gray didn’t like, but this was Thanksgiving and he had his own family issues, even without Amos’s dark presence. He didn’t need to involve himself in any Douglas family tensions.

  He tipped his hat to Lily without comment. But his eyes were on Abby as she came around the side of the truck, a huge platter in her arms with tinfoil stretched across the top of a sizeable turkey. She walked to him and stopped, almost as if it was a habit to come straight to him when he knew it wasn’t.

  Not yet, he told himself. But soon. Very soon.

  Gray took the platter from her without a word, and something warm moved inside him when she blinked at that, then smiled at him as if he’d given her something pretty instead of taken something heavy.

  All those practical reasons he’d chosen her faded away, because her face opened up when she smiled. Or it did when she smiled at him. And for a moment Gray forgot everything. His brothers. His cattle. The stack of paperwork on his desk he needed to get through before morning if he wanted to stay on top of it, and the endless fallout from Amos’s bad choices and debts that he was still uncovering.

  All of that just … went away.

  For a moment, Abby was a part of the great stillness he loved so much. The majestic sweep of quiet peaks to soft fields that were as much a part of Gray as his own bones.

  Like she was home.

  Gray was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of his own arousal—especially when his kid was standing in the doorway only a few yards behind him, exclaiming over Martha Douglas’s contributions to the meal and greeting the infamous Lily in a slightly more subdued tone.

  “You sure you’re up for this?” he asked Abby in a low voice, out there by the truck where it was only the two of them.

  “The question isn’t if I’m up for it,” Abby said, in that way he recognized from all those phone calls they’d been having. As if, left to her own devices, she would tip over into laughter in a moment but was holding it back to be polite. There was a dent in her cheek he hadn’t noticed before and now couldn’t look away from. “The question is whether you’re ready for the Lily Douglas holiday tornado. Highlights usually include people storming from rooms, vows never to repeat the experience, and her nastiest quotes ringing in your ears for the next five years like a hangover.”

  By the time she finished, she didn’t look as if she was on the verge of laughter any longer. And that clawed at Gray like it was something inside him, trying to get out. But he didn’t know what to say. And his hands were full or he’d—

  “Get a room, lovebirds,” Ty drawled at them as he ambled across the yard toward the back door, a whiskey bottle hanging from his fingers and that careless smile of his across his face.

  Abby’s cheeks flooded with color, and Gray wanted to hit something. Ty, preferably.

  But if he hit anyone as much as he thought about hitting his brothers, they’d all be pulverized by now. That was his father in him. That dark shadow deep in there he knew better than to let out, no matter how he sometimes daydreamed about giving into his violent impulses. He ignored it again now, following Abby into the kitchen and setting the platter on the counter next to the oven Becca had already fired up to Martha’s specifications, aware that she didn’t make eye contact with him again.

  This Thanksgiving he’d wanted was happening, like it or not.

  Gray watched Martha Douglas bustle around, taking over his kitchen with her usual brusque efficiency. He watched Lily look around his house with an expression that suggested she smelled something vaguely unpleasant, then settle herself next to Ty and his personal whiskey bottle out in the living room.

  Ty was already drunk, of course. The kind of drunk that made Gray wonder exactly how many days in a row he’d been drinking without coming up for air. And if this was the kind of problem Gray should jump in and try to solve.

  The fact that Ty was neither sloppy nor mean when drunk, like their father had been, didn’t make him feel better. Especially not when Ty and Lily started sharing that bottle. Gray found himself sitting in his own living room wondering why he kept imagining that if he could only arrange the right set of people around him, this family thing would work out the way he wanted it to. No drama. No whiskey raging down the length of the house. No whispering in corners over a bottle in a way that could only cause trouble.

  Abby and Becca walked into the living room from the far side some time later, suggesting that they’d been deeper in the house.

  “I gave Abby the grand tour,” Becca announced. She was talking too fast, too bright, the way she did when she was nervous, but Gray figured that was fair enough on a high pressure Thanksgiving with a brand new stepmother on the way. “I can’t believe you didn’t, Dad. Were you going to wait until she moved in?”

  Any tour Gray gave Abby would end in an extremely non-family-friendly manner, and it took a lot to keep from saying that.

  “I figured she could sleep outside for a while, until she got the hang of the routine here,” he said. “It’s not too cold in the barn.”

  Becca rolled her eyes at Abby. “I think he’s kidding. He always claims any dog we have will be an outside pet, and then they always end up inside living like kings. And usually sleep in his bed.”

  She didn’t wait for a response. She charged into the kitchen, leaving Abby standing there before Gray, her cheeks warm and those eyes of hers dancing as they both imagined sleeping in Gray’s bed. Or he hoped that’s what she was imagining because he sure was.

  “Here’s hoping I get treated as well as the average dog,” she said, her voice filled with the suppressed laughter that made Gray want to … do things.
/>   He didn’t do them. One more reason to rethink this whole Thanksgiving deal.

  “This was my dad’s house,” he told her instead, feeling nothing but awkward as he spoke. “He was responsible for how it looks. But you can do whatever you want to it.”

  Abby gazed around as if she hadn’t seen the living room before, with its comfortable old leather couches and the fireplace at one end. She looked as if she was about to say something, but then her attention landed on Ty and Lily. Ty was kicked back in his seat, his legs stretched out onto the ottoman, the picture of lazy ease. It was Lily who’d gone and perched on the leather footstool, her hip a scant inch from one of Ty’s legs. It was Lily who was leaning in much too close to a man who could be her son.

  And it was Abby who looked like someone had reached out and slapped her.

  “I can break that up,” Gray promised her in a low voice. “Right now, if you want.”

  Abby took a moment to focus on him, and when she did, the smile she aimed at him made something in him ache. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the holidays over the years with my mother, it’s that not every train wreck is mine to prevent.”

  She left Gray with that, following Becca into the kitchen.

  All he could see then were train wrecks. Whatever the hell was going on with Ty that left him deep in a bottle and impossible to pin down on any subject at all. Abby’s mother, who clearly had her own agenda. Then there was Brady, who was pissed about everything and happy to let everyone around him know it however he could. From his unsolicited critiques of the Broncos’ performance this football season to comments about the weather over in all those famous ski resorts no one in Cold River cared about, Brady was prepared to dig in and argue everything to the death.

  Gray’s death, apparently.

  But then, Gray had expected Brady and all his nonsense. If he didn’t feel the need to throw in a comment about what a drag ranch life was every three minutes, Gray might have even found it … nostalgic, almost.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” Brady demanded at the end of another rant about … something.