A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  “We’re not talking about you and Dad, Mom,” Lily said dismissively. Deliberately. She tapped her knife against the cutting board on the table in front of her as if she couldn’t contain herself, and worse, she smirked at Abby. “We’re talking about Gray Everett, a man whose first wife hated him so much she slept with everything that moved and drove herself off a mountain road to get away from him. And let’s not kid ourselves. He married Abby because whether she loses it or not, it’s not like she’s going to find anyone to cheat with.” Her voice turned sharp and mocking. “Cowboy, take me away.”

  There wasn’t a sound in the kitchen. Abby heard a kind of roaring and understood only distantly that it was in her head. Next to her, Becca made a small, hurt sound that pierced Abby straight through. She didn’t wait for a response; she turned and slammed out of the kitchen.

  Abby didn’t watch her go because her eyes were on her mother.

  “Lillian—” Grandma began.

  “That was her father you were trashing,” Abby bit out, interrupting her grandmother and unable to feel sorry about it. “Her father. What is wrong with you?”

  Lily’s dark eyes glittered, and she opened her mouth—but Abby wasn’t done.

  “I’m used to you. I’m used to you rolling into town and wrecking everything you can get your hands on. You’re no different from any other storm. We weather you, we survive you, and we forget about you the minute you’re gone. But you leave that poor girl out of it. She deserves better in life than you.”

  “The angry lion mama thing looks great on you, Abby. Really. It’s been, what? A couple of weeks? Very convincing.”

  “Mock me all you want,” Abby said, her voice quiet and shaking with an emotion so violent she was afraid it would knock her over. “I stopped worrying about your approval when I was still in diapers. I’ve been waiting thirty years for you to stop embarrassing me, but I guess that’s not going to happen. And it doesn’t matter.” She leaned forward, her fingers clenched hard on the metal edge of the baking sheets she was still gripping to her chest. “I understand that you’re miserable. You’re an empty, angry, jealous woman who wants attention any way she can get it. And since you’ve burned every bridge you’ve ever been near, the only way you can get it around here is by spewing out your ugliness on every possible surface. I get it. But if you ever talk to Becca like that again, it’s not your own ugliness you’re going to have to worry about. It’s mine. And I should warn you, I have thirty years of it all saved up and ready to go.”

  She didn’t wait for Lily’s response. She turned on her heel and headed for the door.

  “Marriage is clearly doing wonders for you, Abby,” Lily said from behind her, a harsh edge in her voice. “Now you’re threatening your own mother.”

  “Hush, Lillian,” Grandma said, sounding tired and old. “You reap what you sow.”

  Abby didn’t pause to revel in that unexpected show of support, though she tucked it away inside. She pushed her way out the door and all but ran to the car, wrenching the door open and shoving the baking sheets into the back as she climbed in. She expected to be greeted with tears, at the very least.

  But Becca wasn’t crying. She wasn’t even breathing heavily. She was sitting with her hands folded, her spine rigid, staring straight ahead. Out into the dark, frozen fields that were only partly lit by the light from the farmhouse.

  “I am so, so—” Abby began.

  “Don’t apologize. It’s all true.”

  Abby sucked in a breath. “Nothing she says is true. It’s always some twisted, horrible shadow version of the truth that has nothing to do with anything. Don’t let her work her way inside you. She’s poison.”

  Becca turned slowly, her face pale even in the dark. “I know who my mother was. I know what she did. You don’t have to pretend.”

  Abby had never imagined she’d ever find herself called to defend Cristina Everett, but here she was, faced with Cristina’s daughter and that terrible look on her face. She swallowed.

  “Marriage is complicated, Becca. People don’t always do the things they should. They hurt each other without meaning to. What happened between your parents was between them. You must know that your mother loved you, no matter what. She would never have left you on purpose.”

  Becca’s mouth twisted into something much worse than a sob.

  “You’re wrong.” Her voice sounded thick, as if she were the sob. “My mother left me all the time. That night wasn’t anything special. She liked her boyfriends a whole lot more than she ever liked me.”

  “You were very young. You don’t—”

  “My grandfather.” Becca shook her head, her mouth still in that sad, vulnerable shape. “It was his favorite subject. He liked to flip the kitchen table and count all my mother’s boyfriends, right there in my father’s face. Why do you think the table is a door? It’s the only thing he couldn’t break.”

  Maybe every family had their own version of Lily. Abby didn’t know why that possibility hadn’t occurred to her before now.

  “You shouldn’t have had to hear any of that,” Abby said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” Becca fired back at her. “I’m fine. It’s my dad you should feel for. First, my mother did what she did. Then, he spent years listening to my grandfather throw it in his face. And people in this town still think he drove her to it when maybe, just maybe, she was nothing more than a terrible person.”

  Abby’s heart was beating so hard inside her chest, she was shocked it didn’t pound open her car door. She tried to shake it off.

  “She was confused, that’s all. She wasn’t a terrible person.”

  “She was disgusting.” Becca’s voice rose, and her eyes tipped over into tears that she jabbed at angrily when they hit her cheeks. “She was disgusting. I hate that I look like her. I hate that every time my dad looks at me, he sees her.”

  “When he looks at you, he sees you.”

  “In a couple of weeks I’m going to have to go to my grandparents’ house. They have pictures of her everywhere, and they want me to sit with them and pray for her, and I hate her. Every year they tell me I need to forgive her. Everyone tells me I need to forgive her, but she’s like your mother. She doesn’t deserve forgiveness. She doesn’t deserve anything.”

  Abby didn’t know what the books would suggest she do at a time like this. She didn’t care. The pain in Becca’s voice ate at her, and not only because it was so raw. But because she recognized it.

  She reached over and grabbed her stepdaughter in a hug, holding Becca tight as she finally broke down and sobbed. And sobbed. Abby rocked her. She smoothed her hand over Becca’s hair.

  And when the storm subsided, a long while later, Abby wiped at the moisture in her own eyes.

  “I’m never going to sit here and tell you that you need to forgive someone just because,” she said, low and fierce in the chilly dark of the car. “I’ve never figured out how to do it myself.”

  If this was a preview of what mothering felt like, this unbearable ache for someone else’s pain and the knowledge she’d dig it out with her own hands and carry it inside her if she could, if it would make Becca feel better, Abby felt something like seasick. Except far more humbled.

  “But, Becca,” she whispered. “Sweetheart. You’re going to have to find a way to forgive yourself, because nothing that happened was ever or could ever be your fault.”

  “I don’t know how.” Her voice was a ragged, muffled wail into Abby’s shoulder. “I don’t know how.”

  “Me neither,” Abby confessed, holding her tighter. If she had to, she would hold her forever. Two motherless daughters bound together now into something better. Something much, much brighter. “We’ll figure it out together, Becca. You and me. I promise.”

  They sat there like that for a long, long time. Until they were both shivering from the cold. And when Abby finally started the car, they were both red-eyed and blotchy-faced. They sniffled at each other, and even
laughed too, as if to wash themselves clean.

  Then Abby drove them home.

  17

  When he heard the back door in the kitchen slap open, Gray assumed it was Abby and Becca back from town.

  At last.

  He’d expected them much earlier, but not, he’d assured himself every time he’d looked at the clock, because he needed them. He wasn’t helpless. He’d been cooking for himself and others for years, and he was used to sitting in his office and eating there while Becca did her homework on the rug. That had kept them both away from Amos’s drunken rampages or, worse, those nights when Amos seemed almost normal and cheerful. Until he lured you close so he could really stick the knife in.

  Gray had discovered tonight that he much preferred the new life he was living in this house. It made the old house itself feel new.

  His childhood had been marked by the turmoil here, all of his father’s making. Divorces and all the messiness that went along with relationships imploding when the adults in question didn’t much care about collateral damage. Then, he’d done his part and brought his own bad marriage home, adding to the chaos. Gray knew that was on him. But he’d had ten years since Cristina’s accident to get used to setting himself apart from the drama that his father could kick up in an empty room.

  It was funny looking back on it from the perspective of these weeks with Abby. Because he hadn’t considered his life bad at any point. It had been his life with a few complications he couldn’t do much about. There’d been no changing it that he could see, so he hadn’t tried. He’d let Amos do what he liked even if that meant the old man did his worst—because it had been Amos’s house and Amos’s land, like it or not—and he’d done what he could to minimize the damage to Becca.

  He’d focused on the land and his daughter, because they were the only things that were his, or would be eventually, once Amos finally kicked off.

  Gray couldn’t say he’d paid much attention to the house itself. His ancestors had built various structures here to take advantage of the well water. His great-great-grandfather had built the oldest part of the house that still stood and was now the living room Gray was sitting in tonight. And every successive generation of Everetts had built onto the ranch house, making it a sprawling, rambling place that had seemed to go on forever and yet had never been big enough to avoid Amos entirely.

  But now even the house felt different, as if Abby had moved in and changed it from its foundation on up.

  When he came in from the cold these days, even if Abby wasn’t there, it was as if the rooms were altered now that she lived here.

  Maybe it was Gray who was altered.

  Abby was the most extraordinary woman. She hummed when she cooked, though Gray didn’t think she knew it. He found himself lingering there in the door to the kitchen more often than he wanted to admit when she thought he was still in the shower, listening to her as she moved around getting dinner ready.

  She hadn’t changed much around here, so it didn’t make sense that it felt as if she’d overhauled the whole ranch the way women sometimes did. He remembered one of Amos’s short-lived live-in girlfriends who’d moved in, thrown out furniture and started repainting rooms—only to move back out long before the painting was done, leaving paint cans and oil cloths everywhere. The only visible change Abby had made was that she’d set up her own craft projects on the far end of the dining room table Becca used as her desk. And last weekend, she and Becca had sat there together, working on what Abby had called “neighbor gifts.”

  Gray didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t like gifts because he didn’t want the obligation or all the intensity that came with the giving and the receiving, much less having to remember all the occasions people thought were important enough to merit gifts in the first place. And meanwhile, Abby clearly believed not only that there were different levels of gifts for different people, but that it was worth spending her free time making things to give them.

  It baffled him. He thought maybe that should have annoyed him more than it did. Instead, Gray found it cute.

  She was cute. More than that, she was determined. Ever since that talk about Christmas, which still left a bad taste in his mouth when Gray wasn’t the kind of man who suffered from indecision over judgments he’d already made, Abby had come into the office every night after dinner to learn about the ranch and help him with the paperwork.

  He hadn’t had to cajole her. Or even remind her.

  It made him feel like an ass for suggesting she was anything like Cristina, because she wasn’t. On any level. In case he’d been harboring any doubts on that score, she hadn’t been lying about her affinity for office work either. She obviously enjoyed it. She was good with numbers. And she had a flair for organization that made Gray’s head spin, because who liked filing?

  “I do,” Abby had said when he’d asked that very question a few nights back. She’d looked up from where she’d been sitting cross-legged on the rug, papers spread all around her as she sorted years of ranch life into appropriate piles. And she’d grinned at him, making it impossible not to grin right back. “How can you ever really relax if you know things aren’t in order?”

  Gray maybe hadn’t relaxed much. In years. And he wasn’t a man given to unruly optimism, but with every day that passed, it was clear that having Abby in his life really might take a huge burden off his shoulders.

  Another burden, that was, besides the office stuff.

  She hadn’t wanted to give up her job at the coffeehouse, and Gray hadn’t seen any reason why she should.

  “I guess that’s something we should talk about,” she had said. Very seriously, that first morning they’d woken up together here at the ranch. Together. Meaning, she hadn’t stayed in bed half the morning and then staggered around acting as if it was early when Gray had been up and done half a day’s work by the time she rolled out from under the covers. She gotten up with him before dawn, watched the way he fixed his coffee, and had then made sure it was programmed and waiting for him every morning thereafter.

  “You mean like birth control?” he’d asked her, so he could see her flush bright red, there in the kitchen with nothing but the surly dark outside.

  Her cheeks had heated up, and he’d liked that as much as he’d imagined he would.

  “It’s what married couples do, isn’t it? Discuss how they want to order their lives together? Communicate, even?”

  “Are you asking me my permission to keep your job, Abby?” he’d asked. “Or do you want me to throw out my opinion so you can react to it?”

  Maybe he’d sounded too cranky. And he couldn’t have said if that was because it was early and he wasn’t used to company at that hour, or if he had already been defensive about a marriage he wasn’t in any longer. Thank God.

  But Abby hadn’t gotten mad. She’d actually considered the question, her hands wrapped around her own coffee cup as she leaned there against the counter in the thick, flannel pajama pants she’d pulled on, a thick wool sweater wrapped around her like he’d been the night before, and her hair up in that messy ponytail that made him want to get his mouth on her neck again.

  “I wouldn’t like it very much if you made sweeping announcements about what I should do or not,” she had said after a moment. Almost shyly, which had lodged inside him. Like a splinter he couldn’t work out. “But I want your input, of course. We’re supposed to be in this together, aren’t we?”

  The memory felt more pointed, now. She’d wanted a conversation about Christmas, and he’d come down on her like he was … Amos.

  But the ways he was like that bitter, angry old man haunted him enough as it was. He’d told her he didn’t see any reason why they should talk about her job until and unless there was childcare to consider, and that had been that.

  Then it had made more sense, she had pointed out, for her to drive Becca because she was already going back and forth to town, freeing up a few more hours of Gray’s day. He almost didn’t know what to do with himse
lf.

  It was a weird thing when a man actually got what he wanted.

  “Is it okay with you if Abby takes you to school and picks you up after?” he had asked Becca out in the barn one evening while they were tending to the horses.

  “I would love that!” Becca had cried, as if she’d never wanted anything more than a woman in her life to drive her around.

  As if the fate of the world depended on her enthusiasm.

  Gray had blinked at that. “You don’t have to prove anything. I expect you to treat Abby politely and with respect, the way you’d treat anyone, but you don’t have to pretend you’re best friends.” He’d frowned into the stall where Becca was leaning against her favorite horse. “I know this is new. And fast.”

  “You worry too much, Dad,” Becca had said dismissively. And then had been all smiles when she’d realized he was frowning at her. “Abby and I are going to get along great.”

  And they had.

  That was what Abby had already done for his life. She fit into it so easily and so fully, it was hard for Gray to remember what it had been like before. He already couldn’t imagine this house or this life without her.

  Which was why he scowled when the person who walked through his back door, across the kitchen, and into the doorway that led into his living room was Brady.

  “To what do I owe this honor?” Gray drawled, and he didn’t work real hard at keeping that dark edge out of his voice. He was kicked back on his couch, waiting for his wife and kid to come home, which was as relaxed as Gray ever got. Brady, however, was not relaxing. “It’s the middle of the week, little brother. Don’t you have important things to be doing down in Denver?”

  “Nice to see you too.”

  “I see you all the time. More in the last month than in the previous year.”

  “Not that you’re counting.”

  Brady stayed where he was in the doorway, and Gray watched as he shifted the duffel bag—a fancy leather duffel bag, naturally, because that was Brady—from his shoulder to drop it on the floor. With a thunk that struck Gray as ominous.