by Неизвестный
“Santa! Santa!” cries came from the littlest children as they rushed toward the red-figure.
Jake found a chair and sat down so he could gather the youngest ones onto his lap.
Alison was amazed that Jake had thought to learn the names of the children. He must have done that as he drove them over in his car earlier. The children were wiggling in excitement when he called them by name and asked them if they wanted a present from Santa. He had the box beside him and told them that Mrs. Claus had knitted something special for them this Christmas. Then he would ask the child to hold up their hands and he would find a pair of mittens to fit them.
The children had lined up by age so the smallest ones were finished first, clutching their mittens in their hands as they ran back to their parents.
Alison didn’t understand the additional screams of surprise until she looked around and saw that the children were pulling individual sticks of spearmint gun out of each finger in their mittens. She suspected some of the children had never had gum before either.
She looked up and met Jake’s eyes. So that’s what he’d gone out to buy.
When the last child had received their mittens, the diner quieted down. Alison was almost going to stand and thank everyone for coming when she noticed one of the older men stood and come forward with a pretty cloth bag in his hands.
The man turned to face the rest of the diner and then looked especially at Alison. “We can’t thank you enough for making Christmas for us and our families. You have been our friend long before today though. We know about the bank foreclosing and we want you to have this.”
He held out the bag to Alison and waited for her to take it and open it.
She gasped when she saw it contained coins. Quarters. Dimes. Nickles.
“There’s so many,” she said as she looked up.
“Seventy-five dollars and thirteen cents,” the man said proudly. We’ve been working on this for months. My wife sold a quilt she made. I sold my best pocket knife. Others did the same.”
Alison started to weep. “I never expected — ”
Jake came and put his arm around her.
“You have always helped us. We want to save your diner for you,” the older man said and walked back to his chair.
Alison stood up and looked over the faces of her friends. “I can never thank you enough. I am so very touched. Thank you.”
Alison sat down and Jake stood beside her, giving her shoulder an approving squeeze. She looked up at him then. He was the only one there that knew the money wasn’t nearly enough to save her diner. Everyone around her seemed so proud and pleased to be helping though that she couldn’t tell them the truth. She would wait until after Christmas and find a way to quietly give each person their money back.
By the time Alison’s tears dried, everyone was up and getting dressed to walk home. Jake insisted on driving the women and children again so he set out with a loaded car while the men and older boys began the cold walk home.
The women and girls who remained helped Alison stack and wash the dishes she’d used tonight. Alison had several old lard containers and she packed leftovers into them. In addition, she fixed tin plates for those who were home ill.
Before long, everyone was gone. Jake was making his last trip to the cottages. Alison sat down and looked around her. She still loved this diner, but she realized tonight that she loved Jake so much more. He was a good man.
Right then, she heard the sound of his car returning. She met him at the door as he stepped inside the diner, snowflakes on his hat and coat.
She didn’t wait for him to brush the snow off. She reached up and pulled his head down to kiss him.
Afterwards, he looked at her in delighted surprise. “Does this mean — ”
She nodded before he could finish. “If you’re fool enough to still love me and want to take me along to some big city, I’m fool enough to go with you.”
“I’ll give you a good home, I promise,” Jake said as he hugged her tight to him. “A place to raise our children. To make them happy.”
“I know you will,” Alison said, and with those words, put her future in his hands.
They waited in the diner until the candles all burned down, both reluctant to leave the place where they’d had such a tender Christmas Eve. Jake drove her home and offered to cook her a proper Christmas dinner the following day at the diner.
Alison agreed, believing he wanted to give her the engagement ring he’d bought for her last year before her mother got so ill.
Christmas Day was sunny and the new snow sparkling so Alison wasn’t surprised when Jake arrived at her door with the suggestion that they walk the few blocks to the diner.
When they opened the diner door, Alison saw the bouquet of red roses sitting on the counter.
“How’d you ever?” she asked.
Fresh flowers were as rare as fresh fruit around here this time of year.
“I have my ways,” Jake said with an elaborate flourish as he indicated the table he’d set in the middle of the diner. Covered with a white linen cloth, the table for two had lit candles burning. The silver was polished and napkins sat beside the plates.
“Oh,” Alison said as she breathed out. “It’s beautiful.”
They ate their roast beef dinner with leftover mashed potatoes and green Jell-O while holding hands and grinning at each other.
“There’s still some apple pie left for dessert,” Jake said, looking suddenly serious. “Bit before we do that — ”
He paused and Alison almost closed her eyes. This was it. The big moment. He hadn’t even let her see the ring he’d bought before, saying the timing wasn’t right yet.
Her heart sank when he pulled out a wide envelope. She imagined he was going to have a treasure hunt or something, making her search for the ring. Since she had kept him waiting so long, she supposed he was entitled, but she was just eager to have it.
Trying to be a good sport, she graciously accepted the envelope when he gave it to her and pulled out the papers.
Then she saw them.
“What?” she looked up in astonishment. “What’s this?”
“The deed for your diner,” he said. “I got the bank president out of bed this morning.”
“But,” she struggled to understand. “Did he change his mind?”
“He did when I paid off the mortgage,” Jake said.
“But where did you get the money?” she asked and then suddenly she understood why they had walked. “Not your car. Your beautiful car.”
Jake shrugged. “There will be other cars. But I thought about what I promised last night. About giving you and our children a home where we’ll be happy. I think that home is right here. We won’t know people in Chicago or New York like we know them in Rosebud. Some of those children who sat on my lap last night will be here while our children grow up. I like the thought of that.”
“We’re going to stay?” Alison could scarcely believe it. “I was ready to go anywhere. I still will if — ”
Jake put his fingers to her lips. “Your willingness to go with me makes me want to stay for you. I love you Alison Norris and I always will.”
And to prove his point, he leaned across the table and kissed her.
Persephone’s Granddaughter by Alyssa Day
Alyssa Day is the New York Times bestselling author of the Warriors of Poseidon and the League of the Black Swan paranormal romance/urban fantasy novels. She also writes comedy as Alesia Holliday and contemporary novels for teens as Lucy Connors. Please visit her online at www.alyssaday.com.
As a military family, we are always very aware of the precious nature of life and the chance that we might lose someone close to us in the line of duty. As the mother of a teen daughter, I’m going through the age-old struggles over independence and boundaries that all mothers and daughters face. My “what if” for this story began with: What if I never saw my daughter again? What if my mother never saw me? And the iconic mother-daughter separation
in the Persephone myth called out to me as the stage on which to set my players.
Even in Harris County, it was outside the ballpark of normal that a shiny black carriage, complete with four gleaming black horses, sat parked at the city bus stop. Wagons, sure. The not-so-rare sight of a long-bearded Amish farmer driving his buggy wherever it was that Amish farmers went, yeah. We now lived in the uncivilized wilderness of Ohio, after all.
A black carriage? Not so much.
As I got closer, wiping my sweaty forehead with one sleeve and shifting the straps on my overstuffed backpack, I saw that a gold gilt letter P swirled its fancy font on the door. P for parade? Pompous? Pretentious?
“Penelope,” said the man sitting on the bench seat, holding the horses’ reins.
Hadn’t expected that, either.
“Everybody calls me Penny,” I said, my mouth on auto-pilot, because my brain was so not down with the idea of giving out my name to a weirdly pale man dressed all in black like a Goth reject. Except, he’d already known my name.
Almost as if he’d been expecting me.
Which was ridiculous on many, many levels, because I’d only made the final decision to run away from home today at 8:06 this morning, a couple of hours ago and exactly seven minutes after my mom had left for work. Our screaming match was still ringing in my head.
“How could you drag me to this horrible place? I hate it here! I’ll never get into a good college with this rat hole on my transcript!”
“Penny, if you give it a chance — ”
“No! I hate it! I hate you!”
The man was still staring at me. “Are you Penelope?”
“Maybe you could move along, so the bus has room to stop,” I suggested, avoiding the question. “Like, far along. Like, to somebody else’s geographical moment of epiphany.”
The realization that I was stuck here, in a town that didn’t have a Starbucks, in a high school where football players were treated like gods and there wasn’t even an Advanced Placement program for academics, had hit me so hard the night before, after two weeks in a daze of despair, that I’d made plans to escape — not even sure that I’d carry them out. Not sure that I could bring myself to leave my mom, no matter how misguided she’d been on this decision, but our fight this morning had driven me over the edge.
Misguided. There was an understatement. She was wrong. Totally wrong. Absolutely wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Maybe leaving her was better for both of us. She could relax if she didn’t have to support a teenager, and I could live a life in one place, instead of being uprooted and dragged from town to town every year or so.
“We’re leaving now,” the man said, yanking me off my feet and out of my self-pity.
I hadn’t even seen him move.
He threw me and my backpack in the carriage, slammed the door, and we took off before I could blink, let alone fight back. I wrenched the door open, only to realize that escape was going to be a problem, because we were twenty feet off the ground.
Flying.
That’s when I started to scream.
The fun was only beginning, though, because the horses — the flying horses, oh, holy crap, was I in some kind of Ohio-induced nightmare of insanity? There were flying horses — dove straight for the road and then blew through it like it was tissue paper instead of asphalt.
Heading down. Down and down and down. The flying horses had turned into tunneling horses, and we were apparently digging straight through to the center of the earth, so I did what any normal girl would do on her sixteenth birthday when she was running away from home and a man with flying horses kidnapped her.
I screamed until I passed out.
##
“I never thought I’d see you again.”
I woke up to these words and the sight of a vaguely familiar woman staring down at me like she knew me, or at least liked me, so I knew we weren’t in Ohio anymore, because there weren’t any people like that there.
She wore a black lace and velvet floor-length gown that fit her like she’d had it designer-made and specially tailored, and it was so gorgeous on her that it took me a few seconds to wonder why she was dressed like that at ten o’clock in the morning.
“My beautiful granddaughter,” the woman said, and I looked around to see who she was talking about.
“She looks kind of skinny to me,” a voice said from behind my head.
I looked back to see a totally hot guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older, frowning at me.
“Caine, if you insult my granddaughter again, I’ll fry your bones in olive oil and serve them as canapés.” She made the threat calmly, but with steel in her tone. Either she was nuts or a gourmet cannibal.
Besides, there was that word again.
“Granddaughter? Lady, you are seriously mistaken,” I said, sitting up so I didn’t feel quite so vulnerable.
She started laughing, and it was then that I saw it. The resemblance. She looked like she could be my mom’s sister, especially if Mom liked to dress up for medieval fairs on a daily basis. Same glossy black curls, except this woman’s were hanging down to her hips, not cut short for convenience, like Mom’s. Same clear blue eyes.
I had straight hair, but the eyes? They were mine, too.
“Who are you?” I looked around, my eyes widening. “Where am I?”
The room I was in wasn’t actually a room. It was more like a cave, if caves were ever made of translucent, multifaceted, black crystal.
“A geode? Are we inside a geode?” I had one in my room. Quartz. It fit in my hand. This one would hold the entire high school football stadium, with room left over for the café where my mom slaved away as a short-order cook.
“She’s not stupid, at least, Your Highness,” Caine offered.
I swung my legs down off the velvet couch I’d been lying on and stared back and forth between the two of them. “Your Highness? What?”
Caine sighed. “I could have been wrong.”
“Out!” The woman who thought she was my grandmother, or possibly a queen, raised herself to her full height of maybe five feet nothing and pointed at the wall.
Caine glared at me, as if his big mouth was my fault, and then he bowed and strode off through the wall. Through the wall.
“He just walked through a wall,” I said, wondering if I’d hit my head really hard and this was all a concussion-induced hallucination. Or a coma. Or maybe the bus had actually run me down and … I didn’t make it.
“Am I dead? Um, Your Highness?” Maybe she was the queen of hell, and I should be polite. I didn’t think I’d had time in my short life to do anything bad enough to deserve hell, but I had run away from home, or at least tried to, before the carriage guy showed up.
She sat next to me and shocked me by hugging me.
“No, you are not dead,” she said. “How is your mother?”
Before I could begin to think of a response, the scariest man I’d ever seen, wearing black leather pants and boots, a black shirt, and what appeared to be actual flames coating his body from head to toe, marched through the same wall through which Caine had left. The newcomer was pretty clearly pissed off at somebody.
“Persephone,” he roared.
The queen/grandmother/crazy woman ignored him and smiled at me. “I’m Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, but I’m also your grandmother.”
I nodded slowly, careful not to jar my clearly-brain-damaged skull.
“Of course you are.”
##
It took three or four hours, a lot of talking, and a few magical demonstrations before I started to believe any of it, so Persephone finally dragged me down a silver corridor.
“Here’s a place you’ll soon be very familiar with, Penny,” she said.
She threw open a door that looked like it had been carved from an enormous diamond, and gestured for me to precede her into the room. I shook my head.
“I don’t think so. If you really are the queen of the Underworld, an
d that was Hades bellowing for you, I can’t imagine there’s anyplace here that I want to see enough to be the first one in the room. After you, Grandma.”
She gave me an exasperated glance that was identical to the way my mother looked at me most nights over dinner, and I felt a sharp pang of homesickness stab through me. Not for a place, though; our New York apartment was long gone and I hated the rented house in Ohio. No, I was homesick for Mom and her hugs, and the way she’d sneak into my room and kiss my forehead and fuss with my blankets every night when she thought I was asleep.
How was it possible to miss her so much, when I’d only been gone for a few hours?
“This is the Well of Souls.”
I started to back away from the doorway, but she caught my wrist and pulled me forward. The place was terrifyingly beautiful, or beautifully hideous — my mind almost couldn’t comprehend the reality. Enormous, pyramid-shaped crystal panels lined the walls, and the ceiling was a stained glass dome depicting images of hell — the Underworld — that told me the artist had either been clinically insane or had been the victim of some seriously horrific nightmares.
My resolutely firm denial of the truth shattered into shards of terror when I saw the inhabitants of the room. Gran pointed down, and I realized we were standing on a kind of wrap-around balcony and, on the floor about a dozen feet below us, wraith-like beings milled aimlessly around the arena-sized space in ominous silence.
“Are those — spirits?” I whispered the question, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“Souls. The souls of the dead, Penelope. This is a very temporary holding area for them, until they get called to the light.”
“Penny. Call me Penny.” I turned to her; anything to look away from the souls beneath us. “And what should I call you? Your Highness? Grandma? Psycho kidnapper?”
She tightened her lips. “Persephone will be fine. You are so much like your mother that I find myself wanting to send you to your room already, and I’ve known you for only a few hours.”
I was interested, almost in spite of myself. “You knew my mother?”
“I told you this was a bad idea,” Caine said, suddenly appearing behind us. “She’s an idiot.”