A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  “And upset my dad’s beloved routine?” Becca asked, something a touch sharper in her tone than in her smile. “How will he survive?”

  “I like a routine myself.” Abby wasn’t sure if she was defending Gray or herself. Or both of them. Or why she felt that little prick inside her that urged her to do it in the first place. “My grandmother always says, ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ That goes for people, places, and things, in my opinion.”

  Becca flashed that smile that Abby wasn’t sure she still considered quite so self-possessed. It was too studied. Too deliberate. “That’s why you and my dad are so great together.”

  Abby didn’t quite believe that cheerful tone either. But what could she do? Demand that Becca tell her father’s brand new wife all her true thoughts and feelings? Abby was pretty sure that was a quick way to establish herself as the evil stepmother no one wanted.

  Still. She’d married Gray, and Becca was a part of the new family they were supposed to be building. She braced herself as they headed out the back of the coffeehouse together. She wasn’t Becca’s mother. They weren’t even friends, necessarily. But Abby spent the bulk of her days with people far younger than herself, including a handful of baristas who were still in high school. Surely she could handle one conversation with a fifteen-year-old.

  “You know,” she said, as carefully as possible once they’d climbed into the car and were letting the engine warm up. “It’s okay if everything isn’t great all the time. I know you’re disappointed about the Christmas situation. I’m disappointed about it myself. We can talk about that too. I mean, if you want.”

  “But everything is great,” Becca replied quickly, and when Abby glanced at her, she was frowning. “Isn’t it? Would you tell me if it wasn’t? I never should have brought up Christmas. I knew what my dad was going to say.”

  “Everything is fine,” Abby said with as much conviction as she could muster. Because it was. Her feelings weren’t supposed to be involved, so what did it matter if they’d gotten bruised? “I didn’t know your dad’s position on Christmas, so I’m glad it came up. I guess I’m trying to say that your dad and me being together is an adjustment. A big change. You might feel one way about it one day and another the next, and that’s fine.”

  She didn’t want to admit that she’d spent hours in Capricorn Books leafing through self-help volumes with names like The Complicated Family: How to Connect with Your Stepchildren. That had to be cheating. Surely everyone else was a natural. Or felt less like a fraud.

  Of course, Abby assumed that most people reading about their complicated families and stepchildren hadn’t actually gotten together for all those purely practical reasons she listed in her head. Like a prayer. Because it helped her remember the thing she kept forgetting—that she was the only one in love in her marriage.

  And that was okay. That was what she’d signed up for.

  It was her own fault if she found it hard to bear.

  That was the thing she hadn’t told Hope this morning. That was what she hadn’t told anyone. She carried it around instead, an anvil where her heart should have been, and it only seemed to shift when Gray was moving deep inside of her.

  You have no one to blame for your feelings but you, she reminded herself as she headed down Main Street, very deliberately not looking at all the bright and shining Christmas lights as she went.

  “I meant what I said before the wedding,” Becca said. With great fervor. “I’m happy my dad got married, and I’m even happier that it’s you.”

  “Well, I’m happy too,” Abby said, aware that she wasn’t really scratching beneath Becca’s deliberately cheerful surface with her attempt at this conversation. And might even be making things worse if Becca was now concerned about her father’s brand new marriage.

  She held her breath, but Becca only waited a moment, then bent her head to send out as many series of texts as she could before they lost service up on the mountain. And Abby couldn’t help wondering if she was as obviously not great to her friends as Becca was to her.

  It was clear to her the girl was not only wound too tight, she was deeply committed to staying that way. And there was nothing wrong with that. Abby didn’t really believe there was anything wrong with Becca, but she did wonder what was beneath all the forced cheer.

  And more, why Becca felt the need to act that way in the first place.

  Then again, Abby knew a whole lot about motherless girls and all the ways they had to parent themselves and find a way to explain the gaping hole right there in the center of their lives.

  Abby had certainly had her own struggles. Lily had been like a black cloud hanging over her no matter what. No matter if Lily came around or stayed away. But Abby couldn’t remember beating herself up worrying about being perfect and happy and fine with everything …

  But maybe she hadn’t called it that. She’d been so worried about acting out the way Lily had. The way she knew folks expected her to do, because like mother, like child. She’d heard all the stories. More than she’d wanted to know. What Lily had got up to in high school with all the boys who’d followed her around—and were now the fathers of people Abby had gone to school with, pastors and shopkeepers and gross. The implication had always been clear.

  Your mother liked the boys, Lucinda Early had told Abby years ago in church, and had made a great show of saying nothing more. As if saying anything to Lily’s abandoned fourteen-year-old daughter was her tactfully restraining herself.

  Abby had understood too much, even then. The way Lily talked about her “friends.” The lengths she was willing to go for them—like driving clear across the state to Grand Junction on Christmas Eve after a phone call—when she’d made it clear she wouldn’t cross a street to see her own kid.

  Abby couldn’t remember beating herself up about that and other unpleasant truths about her mother, but she’d had a remarkably conflict-free adolescence with her grandparents, hadn’t she? She’d even been smug about it. She’d chalked up her easy relationship with Grandma and Grandpa to simply being that much better as a person than her mother.

  Lily might have been beautiful. Everyone said so. But Abby was good.

  She’d gotten a lot of mileage out of that distinction. It had filled her with light, some dark seasons. It had made her feel right, no matter what horrible things Lily might have said to her.

  But as she sat next to Gray’s daughter, heading back to Gray’s house, where he would eat her food with appreciation, show her more of his paperwork so she could actually help him, and tear her up in his bed later but never, ever love her, something else occurred to her.

  Her stomach sank.

  Was it possible she’d been putting on an act all those years the way she was fairly certain Becca was now? She would never admit it to Hope or Rae, but she certainly could have gone to that dance with Tate Bishop way back when. She’d known he liked her. Or could. But Abby had been far too dedicated to her endless, impossible, unrequited crush on an older man who’d never given her the time of day.

  It had never crossed her mind that she might have chosen to love Gray because he was unattainable. That the high school boy who might have liked her was real and scary, but the dream of Gray was safe. That all this time, she hadn’t been following her own path as much as she’d been doing whatever she could to make sure she was different from her mother. In every possible way.

  Lily liked the boys, so Abby was a vestal virgin who loved only the man she couldn’t have.

  Lily fought with everyone, so Abby went out of her way to find the good even in those neighbors she didn’t much like. Like Amos Everett.

  Lily caused her parents nothing but sorrow, so Abby had dedicated herself to being a source of joy for her grandparents.

  Lily moved from place to place like a ping-pong ball, so Abby had stayed put.

  She’d prided herself on being nothing like her mother—but she’d never stopped to think that doing the opposite was nothing but a tw
isted way of proclaiming a person’s importance.

  That unpleasant notion sat in her belly like a hunk of the mountain itself as they climbed up the steep side of the hill. Becca messed around with the music, and Abby was fiercely glad when she turned it up too loud for conversation.

  Because she didn’t quite know how to sit with that. She preferred the image she carried around of herself. A good citizen, a conscientious granddaughter. A dependable worker. A great friend. And so selflessly devoted to Gray, all these years. Delighted to take any scrap of his attention. Honored to marry him when he’d made it clear love and affection weren’t anywhere on the menu.

  She hadn’t complained. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask for more.

  Because she’d spent her whole life making sure she was the anti-Lily. The one who made no waves. The one who was rational and easy about anything and everything. A thirty-year-old virgin. A practical appliance. The perfect wife for a man who didn’t want any emotional attachments.

  Not even to Christmas.

  Congratulations, Abby, she told herself with a surprising slap of bitterness as she made it over the mountain and coasted down into the dark, cold fields. You’ve done everything perfectly.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised when she pulled in to the farmhouse drive and saw that newly familiar sedan parked next to Grandma’s red truck. Had she known? Had it been there in Grandma’s voice when Abby had called earlier to say she’d be swinging by? Was that why she’d spent this whole drive turning herself inside out and exposing things she’d never, ever wanted to look at straight on?

  She was reeling from too many revelations that she really hadn’t wanted, so it made sense that Lily would be here. Of course, she was here.

  “What’s the matter?” Becca asked worriedly when Abby parked the car but didn’t get out.

  “Nothing at all,” Abby said, trying to sound upbeat. And realizing the instant she did that she sounded a lot like Becca always did. She assumed that made her about as convincing. “It looks like my grandmother has a visitor, that’s all.”

  “A visitor?” Becca echoed, but Abby didn’t answer her.

  She was too busy lecturing herself instead as she climbed out of the car. She would not react. She would not sink to Lily’s level. She would not let her mother get to her, no matter what she said or did. She would not engage. She would not play this same old sad game that she’d imagined she’d outgrown years ago—until she’d had to walk out of another Thanksgiving dinner.

  Abby let herself in the side door that led into the kitchen, Becca at her heels. Maybe too close on her heels, but Abby wasn’t about to complain about having backup, even if it was in the form of a fifteen-year-old. It was always possible something might shame Lily into holding her tongue.

  Possible, but not likely.

  This time, Lily was sitting in Abby’s usual seat at the kitchen table, cutting up vegetables the way Abby would have been doing herself a few weeks ago. And all the things Abby had been telling herself disappeared.

  Because it felt sharp and hot and nearly crippling. It felt like a betrayal.

  It was as if Grandma had used that sharp paring knife of hers. As if she’d picked it up, hurled it across the kitchen, and hit Abby square in her gut.

  Abby knew she wasn’t being fair. Lily had lived in this house long before Abby ever had. Lily had her own relationship with her own mother, no matter how Abby felt about it. She knew all that.

  But knowing it didn’t take away from the thick, painful kick in her stomach or the sudden prickle of tears she refused to let fall.

  “I came to borrow those baking sheets,” Abby said instead, and she could hear her own stiffness in her voice. Her much-too-loud voice. She knew she was probably standing there the same way, formal and awkward, here in this kitchen that still felt like her real home.

  A home that Lily was invading. Again.

  And the fact Abby had a different home now didn’t seem to help.

  “Help yourself to as many baking sheets as you like,” Grandma said in her mildest possible voice.

  Normally, when faced with an unexpected repeat of a visit from Lily—especially when it came so soon on the heels of the unpleasant one before—Abby would have marched in, done what she needed to do, and then cleared out as quickly as possible without acknowledging that Lily was back.

  But today she wasn’t alone. Becca was standing there at her side, and Abby was sure she could feel the girl vibrating with tension. Which meant Abby had to decide, then and there, if she was going to do the same damn thing she always had, which had never resulted in anything but more of Lily’s same behavior. Or if she was going to be the person she wanted to be regardless of what her mother did.

  Abby didn’t want to give Lily the satisfaction of ignoring her. That only gave her power. And Abby had learned a few things about power these last weeks in Gray’s bed. What it felt like to make a hard man shudder. What it meant to surrender to someone she knew without a doubt would hurt himself to keep her safe. How different the world felt around her when he ran his hands and mouth all over her body as if she were spun sugar and pretty straight through.

  She didn’t owe Lily a thing. Especially not her emotions.

  “You’re back so soon,” she said. She even managed a smile and didn’t have to look in a mirror to confirm it looked a whole lot like the one Becca was always using on her. “I wasn’t sure we’d see you again this year.”

  Polite. Easy. The way she would talk to anyone who came into the coffeehouse.

  “It seems I can’t stay away,” Lily murmured, in that overly suggestive way she said everything, with a hundred pointed knives bound up in every syllable. It made Abby want to scream. But she didn’t. “I wanted to try out a homespun, country Christmas for a change.”

  Abby would usually snap back at that, even if she’d been trying to pretend Lily wasn’t there. She’d pick a statement like that apart for all the disparagement she knew was bound up in it. She’d do her best to hurt Lily in return, even though, as long as she’d been alive, she couldn’t remember a single time she’d managed to get beneath her mother’s skin at all.

  Maybe it was time to stop slamming her head against walls that were never going to break. Or even bend.

  That resonated inside her like she’d gone and turned the music up way too high.

  “You must be happy about that,” she said to Grandma, and she tried her best to mean it. Not for Lily’s sake, but because she knew her grandmother loved her daughter. Of course she did. “I hated imagining you alone on Christmas.”

  Grandma’s steady gaze met hers and held, and Abby felt it like the hug she was pretending she didn’t need.

  “Your mother thinks she might stay a while,” Grandma said in that same mild, serene way that told Abby she was conflicted. But possibly also hopeful, as little as Abby wanted to admit that. “Give Cold River another chance.”

  Abby felt all the usual emotions boiling up in her. She wanted to scream that Lily had given up her right to live here. She wanted to demand that once, just once, her grandmother stand up for herself and tell Lily exactly how her behavior had hurt her over the years.

  Or if Grandma couldn’t stand up for herself, stand up for Abby. And tell Lily she wasn’t welcome here. Just this one time.

  But Abby didn’t live here anymore. She had no right to that hollow, scraped-raw feeling inside of her.

  “That sounds great,” she made herself say. She moved then, walking stiff-legged over to the cupboard beside the stove where Grandma kept her baking things. She pulled out her favorite cookie sheets and hugged them to her chest.

  “It’s nice to see you, Becca,” Grandma said in that way of hers that had always made Abby feel better. Yet didn’t tonight. “We appreciated you sharing your Thanksgiving with us.”

  “Of course.” Becca’s voice was strained. “Any time, Mrs. Douglas.”

  “You should watch our Abby carefully,” Lily chimed in then, that usual mal
ice spiking her voice. “Learn how to cook and clean and run around pretending that’s all you want from life. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

  “Grandma, I’ll talk to you later,” Abby said instead of replying to her mother, still keeping her voice even. “Come on, Becca, we need to get—”

  “I’d rather be like Abby than like you,” Becca threw out into the kitchen, not moving an inch. She was frowning at Lily, but Abby was much more concerned with the way she was shaking. “Any day of the week.”

  “Would you?” Lily asked huskily. Abby knew that tone. And its danger. “That doesn’t exactly shock me. You’re the kind of pretty that disappears completely by the time you’re twenty. You better lock down that high school boyfriend while you still can, little girl.”

  “Leave her alone.” Abby didn’t recognize her own voice. Or the way she was holding the baking sheets before her like a shield.

  “This is the place to do it,” Lily continued, almost merrily. But Abby could see her face. “Teenage marriage is a crime some places, but not here. There’s nothing more to a happy life in Cold River than imprisoning yourself, barefoot and pregnant, in some cowboy’s kitchen.” Her cold gaze moved from Becca to Abby. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Is the alternative abandoning your family to chase after a parade of men who never want to keep you once they get to know you?” Abby retorted, because she could have ignored it if it was directed at her. But not when Lily aimed it at Becca. “I’ll pass on that, thanks.”

  “I’ll remind you that I was a teenage bride, Lillian,” Grandma said, in that sedate way of hers that nevertheless sounded shot through with steel. “And I never spent my time barefoot in this kitchen when there was work to be done in the fields. It seems to me that the point of progress is so all women can make their own choices. None of the rest of us have to like them.”

  Lily laughed. And Abby knew that laugh. She knew it boded nothing but ill, but she couldn’t seem to move. She felt frozen solid.