There was an awkward moment as he stood there, and then she remembered his present and invited him in. He hesitated for an instant and then followed her to the kitchen. She stopped in the living room, stooped down, picked up his gift from under the tree, and handed it to him. He looked surprised and touched and embarrassed as he took it from her. It felt strange to him being back in the house again.
“I don’t have anything for you,” he said guiltily.
“I didn’t expect anything. It just looked like something you’d use.” He opened it in front of her, and smiled broadly. He loved it, and he kissed her cheek to thank her, which embarrassed her. As he did, he looked over her shoulder and saw her bedroom through the open door. It looked like a summer garden, and he was startled.
“You changed our bedroom?” He said it like a child who discovered his parents had sold the house and didn’t tell him.
“Yes, I did. It was looking tired,” she said by way of excuse but didn’t need one. He knew why she had done it. They both did. It cut through him like a knife, and reminded him of how deeply he had hurt her. She couldn’t even live with their furniture after what he’d done.
“It looks very fancy.” He could see into the room and that there was a canopied bed, pretty fabrics, and entirely different furniture. “Very girly,” he commented, and she laughed. “What did you do with the old stuff? I liked it.”
“I got rid of it. It’s nice having a fresh look. I have a desk in my room now, so I can work and the kids don’t have to be quiet in the living room. And I had built-ins put in the closet.” She was proud of what she’d done. She’d used a closet expert, and consulted a mother from school who was a decorator. She had helped her get the fabrics at a discount. She’d done the rest herself.
“It’s nice,” he said, not knowing what else to say. It had dragged his transgression right up into their faces on Christmas morning. He wondered if she had just sent all their old furniture to the city dump. She had wanted to, and him along with it.
They went to find the children then, they had finished breakfast and were talking quietly, wondering what their parents were saying, and careful not to interrupt them.
“Mom got you a present,” Billy announced when they walked in.
“I know, it’s a gorgeous sweater. I can wear it in Tahoe.” He smiled at her and she looked relaxed. It was easier having Peter in the house than she’d expected. It felt almost normal.
“That was nice of her,” Billy added.
“Yes, it was,” Peter agreed, and both children stood up. “We’d better be going.” They went to get their backpacks, and he got their suitcases and carried them to the car. He noticed that their bedrooms hadn’t changed, only their mother’s.
They put on their jackets and she hugged them, and then Peter and Caroline looked at each other, and didn’t know what to say.
“Merry Christmas,” she said again, sounding cheerful.
“Thank you for the sweater,” he said, and kissed her cheek again, and then they walked out to his car, got in and she waved as they drove away. Caroline stood in the doorway with a lump in her throat, smiling and trying not to cry. She closed the door behind her, and felt as if someone had sucked the air out of the house. The life went out of it the minute they left. It was going to be a lonely Christmas Day without the children, but this was what they had agreed to. She went out to the kitchen and rinsed their dishes, and then she went to her desk in her new bedroom, pulled out her manuscript, and sat down to work, trying to see the words through her tears. It wasn’t a very merry Christmas. Suddenly all she could think of were the happy times she and Peter had shared for so many years, and for the first time in six months, she really missed him.
* * *
—
On Christmas Day, the cast and crew had been in Africa for ten days. They’d started shooting a week earlier, and agreed to take two days off for Christmas. They’d had a nice dinner the night before, and sang Christmas carols, and some of them had lovely voices. They admitted the next day that they’d had way too much to drink. Gemma tried to call Caroline and Kate on Skype, but couldn’t get through. The connection was terrible where they were. There had been years when she hadn’t bothered to call them on Christmas, but this year was different. There had been losses, and gains, and changes in their lives, and she felt a need to reach out to them and hear their voices. And she wanted to tell them about the wonders she’d seen since she’d been there. The animals were as amazing as Rufus had promised.
They all spent a lazy day, somewhat hung over, and that night, they all agreed to dress for dinner. They put on the best things they had brought, which in Gemma’s case was a slinky black knit dress that molded her spectacular figure, and Jimmy Choo black suede high-heeled sandals, and chandelier earrings.
“Okay, you win,” Rufus teased her, but he looked impressed. Her co-star had worn a silver dress that was just as sexy, but she looked a little like a Christmas angel on top of the Christmas tree. Gemma looked like a femme fatale. “How on earth have you escaped marriage?” he asked her, as they sat by the fireplace before dinner drinking the Cristal his crew had brought for the cast.
“I date unsuitable people,” she said proudly, smiling at him. “Married, confused, relationship-phobic, addicted to substances or bad habits, or my favorite, in love with someone else.”
“Do you do that on purpose?” he asked, and she laughed.
“Apparently. I’ve never placed a high value on marriage. And I never wanted kids unless it was a two-parent affair, and my partners have been even less suitable for that. I didn’t enjoy growing up without a mother, and only a father. I didn’t want to risk doing that to someone else. It doesn’t work so well. There’s no balance. I was lucky. I was my father’s favorite, but that’s not a pleasant role either, and it was hard on my sisters.”
“How do you know you were his favorite?” He was fascinated by her. She had given him some incredible performances that week and memorable moments on camera, she could pull nearly any emotion out of her gut and tear your heart out. She had even had him in tears twice, which almost never happened. And the cast was new to her. He couldn’t imagine what she would be capable of six months down the line. It couldn’t all be manufactured emotion. She was an actress, not a magician. There was someone very interesting in there, and he wanted to get to know her better.
“He told us,” she said about being her father’s favorite. “He never made a secret of it. He told all three of us that I was his girl, his favorite.”
“Did your sisters hate you for it?”
She shook her head. “No, we loved each other anyway. My younger sister hated him…or not hated, but didn’t like him, and resented him. I thought he was domineering. I battled with him constantly. My older sister just did whatever he wanted, to please him and win his praise, and never got it.”
“It’s amazing what we do to our children. I always worry about the influence I’ve had on mine, and the mistakes I made.”
“Being a parent seems very complicated to me. Being a human being is hard enough. My sister actually seems to be doing a good job with hers, though. It’s a full-time job. I like my job better,” she said, and he laughed. “It comes with better clothes. She’s looked like a housewife since the day she had them, and she’s a pretty woman. She just doesn’t care how she looks anymore. She’s about to get divorced.”
“How she looks is her husband’s fault. Women who feel loved are a lot more attractive than neglected wives. They stop caring about how they look. It always makes me sad for them.” Gemma nodded. She agreed.
They had dinner with the others, and they all played cards and parlor games and charades after dinner, which got hilariously funny. They were a clever crowd, and knew how to amuse each other. Gemma started a poker game and several of the men joined them, Rufus among them. She won fifty pounds from him, with glee.
>
“Where did you learn to play poker like that?”
“The ranch hands on my father’s ranch. Cowboys love to play poker. They taught me when I was about ten.”
“You’re a dangerous woman, Gemma Tucker.” And an irresistible one. He was reminding himself to be careful, and hoped it wasn’t too late. But one way and another, they managed to share a memorable Christmas, and Gemma didn’t mind being in Africa at all. She loved it.
* * *
—
Kate and Thad had followed all of their usual traditions on the ranch, but it was different this year without her father, and Juliette. She hadn’t had Christmas with her sisters in years. She thought Gemma would call on Skype, but she didn’t. She called Scarlett and they had a brief but loving conversation. Roberto was cooking pheasant for their Christmas dinner.
And she managed to talk to Caroline on Christmas Day. She sounded lonely and sad without the kids, but she was a good sport about it and didn’t complain. She said she had seen Peter when he came to pick them up. There was something odd in her voice. Something gentle, that hadn’t been there for months. Kate didn’t ask her about it. She didn’t want to upset her and make her feel worse.
They had a long talk about forgiveness, and she tried to explain why she couldn’t forgive Peter, and Kate understood. She’d had her own problems trying to forgive her father for hiding their mother for thirty-nine years.
She and Thad had dinner alone on Christmas Eve, and went to church, and then went back to her father’s house, where they lived now. They had just moved in. It didn’t feel like theirs yet, but there was more space. And it was familiar to her, since it was the house she had grown up in. She couldn’t believe how small her bedroom had been, and she had shared it with Gemma. Caroline had an even smaller one down the hall. It felt like a major luxury to have the house to themselves. Thad was building a much bigger house on his new land.
They went to look at the progress on the house on Christmas Day, and spent the rest of the time tucked into their home, talking and making love. At the end of the day, he looked at Kate, naked in his arms, and told her how much he loved her.
“This was the best Christmas of my life,” he said to her.
“Mine too.” She smiled at him. He had given her something no one else had before. When she looked into his eyes, she knew she was loved.
Chapter 16
When Peter and the kids woke up in Tahoe on the morning of New Year’s Eve, they looked out the window and saw that a blizzard had started. They could hear the dynamite being set off on the mountain to prevent avalanches. They were planning to go home that day, and Peter wondered if the roads were passable. And if so, he knew they wouldn’t be for much longer. He had promised to have them home to their mother by dinnertime.
“We’d better go,” he said, looking worried.
“Should we stay?” Morgan asked him. “Is it safe to go?”
“I think if we go now, we’ll get through. I don’t want to upset your mom and bring you home tomorrow. Get packed. I’ll go pay the bill.” He was back twenty minutes later and they were ready. The snow was swirling in the heavy winds outside. It was eight in the morning, and normally it would only take them four hours to get back to Marin.
They were about to get in their car when Morgan looked at him. “We should get something for Mom at the gift shop.” He was about to object to the delay, when Billy looked at him mournfully.
“You didn’t buy her a Christmas present, Dad, and you’ve been wearing the sweater from her a lot.”
“Okay, okay.” They rushed to the gift shop, and looked around. There was nothing she’d want, and everything had the hotel logo on it. Suddenly Morgan picked up a yellow teddy bear, and handed it to her father. It had a name tag that said Buttercup. “She won’t want that,” he objected.
“It’ll look nice in her bedroom,” Morgan insisted. They paid for it and rushed back to the car. Their skis were on the rack on top of the car, their bags in the trunk. The kids had bought candy and snacks in the gift shop, and they were on the road ten minutes later, heading toward the highway. The snowplows were ahead of them, and the roads were still relatively clear. It took them an hour and a half in spite of that to get over the mountain, and the snow was still falling steadily. His GPS told him the roads were passable, so they kept going and didn’t turn back. By noon, they had made little progress. Peter said nothing to them, and kept driving and focusing on the road, while Morgan manned the radio, and Billy watched a movie on his iPad with earphones. They were perfectly happy. At one o’clock they stopped for lunch. They were starving. They had been on the road for four and a half hours and were halfway there. He figured they’d make it by five if they were lucky.
They bought sandwiches at a truck stop, and took them back to the car and kept driving. The trip seemed to go on for hours. They finally got to Sacramento at five o’clock and hit heavy fog, and had to slow down to a snail’s pace.
“Call your mom and tell her we’ll be a little late, so she doesn’t worry,” he told Morgan. She took out her phone and it was dead.
“I forgot my charger in Tahoe,” she said, and so had Billy, and his phone was dead too. Peter took his out of his pocket and handed it to Morgan, and she laughed. “Yours is dead too, Dad.”
“Okay, we’ll get there when we get there.” It was nearly seven by the time the fog cleared, and they kept going and finally picked up speed.
Caroline was at the house in Marin, watching the Weather Channel. She could see that there was a blizzard in Tahoe. There had been a record snowfall, the roads were closed by then, and there had been an avalanche in Tahoe that morning. She’d been trying to call her children all day, and their phones were off, and so was Peter’s. She could imagine them under an avalanche, or buried in a snowdrift somewhere, or freezing in a car that had run out of gas or crashed into something. Only the worst possible scenarios crossed her mind, all of them involving death from hypothermia, carbon monoxide, or suffocation.
At seven o’clock, she was panicked. It was New Year’s Eve and Peter was never late. If he was going to be ten minutes late, he called her. She called the hotel and they had checked out at eight A.M. She wondered if a drunk had hit them and killed them all instantly, or they were in comas in a hospital somewhere and didn’t have her number on them. She was watching the news with tears running down her cheeks when the doorbell rang at eight o’clock. She ran to the door, and there they were, tired, rumpled, hungry. Peter could hardly see from driving in snow all day. They stumbled into the house and she hugged them.
“Twelve hours! Twelve hours from Tahoe. We left at eight-thirty this morning,” he said, exhausted. He was wearing the sweater from her. He loved it.
“That’s only eleven and a half hours, Dad,” Billy corrected him. It was eight P.M.
“I thought you were all dead,” Caroline said, wiping the tears off her cheeks, and hugged Peter. “Thank you for bringing them home.”
“We left early because I didn’t want to disappoint you. I know you wanted them home tonight, and I didn’t want you to be alone.” He hugged her back, and Morgan handed her the bag from the gift shop, and she pulled out the yellow bear.
“I love it!” she said. “It’ll look great in my bedroom.”
“Told you, Dad,” Morgan said smugly, and he rolled his eyes.
“The alternate was a pack of golf tees with the hotel logo on them.”
“Are you starving?” They all nodded and left their parkas on the floor and went to their rooms to leave their backpacks. Peter left his parka in the front hall.
“I should be going,” he said politely.
“You must be wiped out.” And then she realized he probably had a date. “Do you have plans?”
“Yes, wiped out. No plans. I don’t want to horn in on your dinner with the kids.”
“Stay,” she said a
nd meant it. The blizzard in Tahoe had transformed into sheets of rain in Marin. They had been through every kind of bad weather in the last twelve hours, and he had brought them home to her so she wouldn’t be alone. “Stay for dinner.”
“You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Not at all. It’s New Year’s Eve,” she said, and poured him a glass of wine. He had earned it, and it would wear off by the time he left after dinner.
She added another place to the table she had set in the kitchen, and had dinner ready in half an hour. She had steaks, salad, baked potatoes, and she had a spare, she always did. They ate ravenously, and then the kids disappeared to their rooms to call their friends. Their suitcases were still in the front hall, and he carried them in for her, and came back to the living room. The rain had gotten worse. It looked dangerous.
“Why don’t you stay till it lets up?”
“I don’t think it’s going to.” He looked exhausted, and then she startled him by what she said next. It was almost ten o’clock.
“Why don’t you spend the night?”
He looked confused for a minute as he thought about it. “Would that be too weird?”
“What difference does it make? We’re still married, and you just drove twelve hours to bring my children home safely. You’re so tired you’ll fall asleep on the bridge.”
“You don’t mind?” He was stunned by the invitation. “I’ll sleep in the guest room.”
“Actually, you can’t.” She laughed. “I decided to redo that too, or at least get a new bed. They took the old one, and the new one isn’t here yet. We can sleep in the same bed, it won’t kill us.”
“What will the kids think?”
“I don’t know. You’re tired, it’s late, the weather’s awful, you’ve been driving all day. Do we need their permission?” He smiled at her answer.
“No. Only yours,” he said gently.
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