Cole in My Stocking

by Jessi Gage

“Okay, Grip. What now?” Hands on hips, he scanned the shop for inspiration. Could Grip have gotten the combination wrong when he told it to Cole the night he’d died?

  No. Grip’s mind was there all the way to the end, a miracle considering he’d had brain tumors on top of everything else.

  Maybe he had another safe, one for business stuff and important documents. Wait. No. If he’d had a safe for documents up here, he would have kept the will in there.

  He muttered a curse. For shits and giggles, he tried the combination a fourth time. Still nothing.

  He was at an impasse. And he’d been up here twenty minutes. Any longer and he’d draw Waverly’s suspicion, if not Mandy’s. His saving grace was that Grip had never told Waverly about the will. It was as if even when he’d been determined to cut Mandy out of inheriting the business, which was the only thing he had worth anything, he hadn’t been fully committed to it.

  Cole was glad Gripper had changed his mind in the end. He just hoped Mandy didn’t catch any flack over the missing will. If she did, he’d be there to deflect it. Even if Gripper hadn’t asked, he’d have been there anyway. Wild horses couldn’t keep him away from Mandy. One pissed-off former cop who thought he was going to be the beneficiary of Gripper’s business certainly wasn’t going to scare him off.

  Locking the door behind him, he descended the stairs and headed for his truck, where he stowed the folder in the pocket of his door. Soon as he got home today, he’d burn it. That would leave him with one task left to do. As he went into the trailer, he determined to somehow find a way into that safe.

  Chapter 5

  If I’d been back home in Philly, I would have been having dinner with my best friend, Heather, or lost in a good story in a comfortable chair at the bookstore two blocks from my apartment. Instead, I was spending my Friday night staring at a spider.

  Dressed in sweats and rubber gloves, I clutched a can of wasp spray in one hand and a rolling pin in the other. The long-legged critter had taken up residence in a thick web spanning a corner of my old bedroom. How long had I been working up the courage to knock it down and either kill it or dispose of the long-dead corpse? Three minutes? Five?

  I hated spiders.

  Even if it was dead, I didn’t want to get close to it. What if I pulled down the web with the rolling pin and the spider fell free? I’d lose its creepy, empty exoskeleton in the weave of the brown carpet. Unacceptable.

  Where was an Oakley-wearing cop when a girl needed one?

  The thought made my neck flush with heat. I’d done an admirable job of not thinking about Cole today. No easy feat considering the little moment we’d had before Max showed up. We had had a moment. I was sure of it. I kept trying to talk myself out of it, but no. Our eyes had locked. He’d held onto my hand longer than necessary. When I’d touched his stomach, he’d shivered, and I was pretty sure it had been in a good way.

  But I wasn’t going to think about that. Or about how distracted Cole had seemed when he came back from checking Dad’s shop. Or how his sudden distance had left me feeling so painfully disappointed I couldn’t concentrate on anything Max said afterwards.

  Without a word, he’d leaned on the kitchen counter, arms folded, mouth turned down in a frown, while Max talked estate strategy. He hadn’t moved until Max wrapped things up and slid some papers in front of me for my signature. Cole crowded the back of my chair and leaned over my shoulder to read them, grunting his approval, as if I’d been waiting for it before signing. I’d tried to work up some offense at his butting in, but hadn’t been able to manage it past the rush of excitement his nearness brought.

  When Max left, Cole watched the lawyer back his Buick down the driveway and said, “The shop’s good. I locked it up for you. Keep the security system armed, even during the day. I’ll help you with funeral stuff tomorrow. Make more Dunkin’s.” Then he left too.

  I supposed that meant he would be by tomorrow morning. The thought of starting another day with Cole kept me sane through a few hours of poring over Dad’s accounts at Max’s instruction and an afternoon meeting with Gregory Hansen of Hansen’s Funeral Home.

  Hopefully, I wouldn’t obsess about tomorrow morning at the expense of a good night’s sleep. I really shouldn’t obsess. Obsessing would indicate more than friendly feelings toward Cole. Newburgh was not the place and days after my dad’s death was not the time to be entertaining such feelings.

  I chalked up the heightened emotions to grief. Like I advised my counseling patients, it would be smart to ignore those feelings and focus on what had to be done. Like ridding my old room of eight-legged freeloaders.

  “I can do this.” I had nothing to be afraid of. It was probably dead. Just in case, I gave it a spritz of wasp spray, the only insecticide I’d been able to find under the kitchen sink.

  It moved!

  The mothereffing living spider scurried to another part of the web.

  I squealed like a little pig and did the dance of creeped-out arachnophobes everywhere, the one where heebie-jeebie shivers rack your body and you pump your knees like you’re fleeing for your life but you’re just running in place.

  I caught my breath in the center of the room, glad Dad wasn’t here to witness my cowardice. I could just imagine what he would say after stomping back to my room. “Jesus Christ, Mandy. It’s just a spider. It’s more afraid of you than you are of it.” Then he would have stood hands-on-hips and watched me deal with the spider. He wouldn’t have offered to help. No, he would have insisted I suck it up and get the hell over my irrational fear. And if I’d shown any sign of weakness, he would have mocked me. “Poor wittle Mandy, afraid of a big, bad spider. Jesus. I raised you to be tougher than this.”

  My chest felt cold. A strange numbness replaced my fear as I approached the spider and unloaded a stream of wasp spray on it. It didn’t take long before its legs curled under. I felt like a murderer. I felt like a coward.

  Holding a small wastepaper basket underneath, I used the rolling pin to knock down the web and its dead resident. With mechanical, detached efficiency, I began to clean my old room.

  An hour later, I’d dusted, Windexed, vacuumed, and changed the linens on my old twin bed. My room was starting to feel livable. It was starting to look like it had when I’d lived here.

  After opening the window to let the cold night air purge the stale smell of disuse, I looked around and let memory plow over me. I remembered the day I arranged the furniture into the configuration I saw before me now, the Wal-Mart daybed against the wall beneath the window, the tall antique dresser that used to be my mom’s against the wall opposite the sliding-panel closet, the full-length mirror screwed into the wall next to the door and the low table beside it where I used to plug in my hair dryer and flattening iron.

  I remembered dreading for days that Dad would notice I’d changed the furniture around and get mad. But he never did. At fifteen, I was still learning what would set my dad off and what wouldn’t. Usually things being out of place meant a temper tantrum. Apparently, Dad’s strange obsession with the location of objects didn’t apply to my room. I could be queen of my little domain. I’d felt empowered.

  The memories didn’t stop there. As I shook out the shirts and sweaters from my suitcase and hung them in the closet, I remembered the day I discovered I fit into my mother’s old clothes. I’d been fifteen then too.

  My mother died when I was seven. She’d been a beautiful woman with an amazing figure and shining, dark brown hair she always wore long and layered. She would never leave the house without fixing her hair and makeup just so. My mother had taken pride in her appearance, and she’d passed that trait on to me.

  I’d wanted to be just like her, even as a child. I used to sneak into Dad’s room and leaf through her hangers of sundresses, miniskirts, and tight tops. Playing dress-up, I would pose in front of the very mirror I stood before now, batting my eyelashes at myself, pretending I was as beautiful as she was. By my freshman year in high-sch
ool, I didn’t have to pretend any more. Except for inheriting my dad’s blockier chin, I was my mother’s spitting image, long brown hair and all.

  Even though mom’s clothes were on the mature side for a high-schooler and a decade out of style, I wore them with pride. But I feared Dad’s reaction. Would he yell at me? Would he tell me I couldn’t raid my mother’s side of his closet anymore? To be on the safe side, I wore her clothes in secret, changing into jeans and sweatshirts before Dad could see me when I got home from school.

  I remember the first time he saw me in one of my mother’s outfits. Most days, he was either still in bed or up in the shop when I got home from school. I wouldn’t see him until he came down to microwave himself something for dinner unless I went up to the shop to say hi or use his computer for an assignment. Hiding what I wore to school was a piece of cake. Until the day I let myself into the trailer to find him on the couch, lacing up a pair of work boots.

  That morning, I’d chosen one of my mother’s more conservative ensembles, a denim miniskirt with a gauzy peasant blouse just sheer enough to hint at the bustier tank top beneath. The suede boots with fringe down the sides came up to just below my knees and had a three-inch heel. A woven suede belt the same shade as the boots completed the look. Even though I was just a kid, I knew I looked twenty in that outfit.

  Dad looked up at me and blinked.

  I’m pretty sure my heart stopped while I waited for his reaction.

  After a few seconds where we stared at each other in silence, he returned to lacing up his boots. When he finished, he said, “You wear that to school today?”

  I nodded.

  Without a word, he walked by me and left to go up to the shop. He never said anything to me about my new look, so I kept wearing my mother’s clothes, almost exclusively, all through high school.

  Now that my suitcase was empty, I stood before my closet and looked at the two very different wardrobes hanging within. The wild clothing of my past hung to the left. The much more conservative clothing of my present hung to the right. Once, looking at my mother’s stuff in my closet had filled me with happiness. Dressing like her had helped me feel closer to her.

  Everything changed after the assault.

  Until that night, I had reveled in the attention my wardrobe brought me. Despite the names people called me—Trailer Trash, Mandy Homerun, Miniskirt Mandy, and my personal favorite, Biker Barbie, I never lacked for friends and boyfriends. Because I was generally happy, if not exactly popular, it was easy to let those nicknames roll off my back.

  By the time I turned eighteen, a few months from graduation, I felt invincible. I felt attractive. I discovered that if I was willing to perform certain sexual favors, boyfriends didn’t mind that I wouldn’t go all the way. At least they wouldn’t mind much.

  I learned that a hand job or blow job would buy me one more phone call, one more date, one more week of being able to call myself someone’s girlfriend. There was a certain power in the dynamic, even if in hindsight I knew it wasn’t a healthy one.

  Then three men assaulted me and took away all my power. Suddenly, those unflattering names stopped rolling off my back. Each one was a direct hit. Right to my heart.

  I couldn’t bring myself to wear my mother’s old clothes any more. I could barely force myself to go to school. The only reason I got out of bed each day and faced the judgmental looks of my peers, who seemed to assume I’d left the party with those men by choice, was the acceptance letter from Arcadia University that had appeared in the mail a week later. I’d applied to the summer program after a particularly painful breakup, but to actually enroll required a final GPA of 3.5 or higher.

  I finished with a 3.56 and hit the road to Philadelphia, relieved to leave Newburgh and the painful memories behind. I also left my high school wardrobe behind. Now here it was, demanding my attention.

  I shivered, realizing the room had grown too cold for comfort. After closing the window, I started pulling the clothes off their hangers. Lovingly, I folded them and placed them in boxes. I didn’t blame the clothes for what happened to me. I didn’t regret wearing them all through high school. I didn’t regret that they’d helped shape me into a girl who had done some things she wasn’t proud of in order to secure the affection of boys I now knew hadn’t been worth the effort. It was only through embracing the girl I had been that I could be secure in the woman I had become.

  My only regret was that I let the assault steal my joy in wearing clothes that used to make me so happy. I allowed those men to take a part of my mother from me.

  It was getting late, but I kept at the task until the last of my mother’s outfits had been packed away. I knelt with a Sharpie in hand to label the boxes but couldn’t decide what to write. Donate? Storage? My address in Philly?

  I capped the marker and got ready for bed. I would figure it out later.

  * * * *

  Did Mandy like donuts? Cole hoped so, since he was carrying a dozen up to her door to go with the coffee he hoped she made. He lifted his hand to knock on the storm door, but Mandy beat him to the punch. She opened the trailer door and bounded across the porch to unlock the storm door and let him in. She had a radiant smile on her face that shined a light into his heart.

  Damn, but he had feelings for her. It was all kinds of wrong, but that didn’t make it untrue. He wanted his dead buddy’s daughter. He’d wanted her for years. He would probably always want her. Which sucked big time, because he couldn’t have her.

  Not only was he too old for her, but she was going through a difficult time. She didn’t need some idiot drooling over her when her father wasn’t even in the ground yet.

  He could be her friend, though. Considering she was stuck in a town she’d left in a hurry and hadn’t been back to since, she was probably dealing with more than just Gripper’s death. She could probably use a friend.

  Being friends with her meant he couldn’t drag her into his arms and bury his nose in her hair and inhale that warm, vanilla scent wafting off her, no matter how badly he wanted to. “Morning,” he greeted.

  She held the door so he could slide past her. She made an adorable show of inhaling over the box of donuts. “Thank God you brought breakfast. All I have is cereal and frozen omelets.”

  “I aim to please,” he said as he strolled into the living room. Gripper’s shop had been an immaculate tribute to his passion for fixing guns. His house had been a pigsty. It was still cluttered, but much improved since yesterday. Mandy had done some cleaning.

  He nodded at the eating nook. Who knew the thing had a faux-wood-grain finish? He’d never actually seen the surface before. “Looks good in here,” he said while Mandy poured him some coffee. She’d cleared the space so a person could actually use it for its intended purpose. She also had some brochures from the funeral home laid out, ready for them to look at together.

  It gave him a thrill to know she’d prepared for his arrival, though he didn’t kid himself it meant anything other than she was ready to plan her father’s funeral.

  “Thanks,” she said, setting a mug on the eating nook. She put down some paper plates and napkins and helped herself to a donut. “So, what did you do yesterday? Were you off duty?”

  “Yeah,” he said, settling into a chair with a patterned cushion that harkened back to the autumn-toned seventies. He sipped the coffee. Heaven. Just as good as it had been yesterday. He had a sinking suspicion it wasn’t because of the beans or the run-of-the-mill coffee maker on Gripper’s counter, but because of the hands that had made and served it. Who would have ever thought something as simple as a cup of coffee could weaken his resolve?

  Friends, dammit.

  He cleared his throat. “I don’t go back until Monday. Get a long weekend every other. It’s pretty sweet.” One of the perks of being a statie. “Did some Christmas shopping and some other errands.” Including talking to an acquaintance who knew how to crack safes. But he didn’t mention that. “What did you do?”r />
  She inclined her head toward the eating nook. “Cleaned. And made some calls to start on Dad’s estate stuff.” She took a bite out of a jelly donut and neatly licked a bit of filling that clung to the corner of her mouth. It was going to be a long frigging morning. “Thanks for offering to help with all this. I’ve never actually been to a funeral before. Well, not since Mom’s, but I don’t remember much about that one. I have no idea what’s expected.”

  Cole had been to more than a few. “We’ll sort it out. Let’s start with the casket, yeah?” He picked up the brochure and they were off, planning Grip’s final farewell.

  A couple hours in, they started on the form that recorded the deceased’s military honors, if any. Seeing as he and Grip had met in the National Guard before Grip’s wife had died, Cole knew first-hand his buddy had some military experience. From snippets of conversation they’d had, he knew Grip had been in the Army too. Served as an eighteen-year-old kid in the tail end of Vietnam. There were two kinds of soldiers who served in Vietnam: the ones who talked about it after and the ones who didn’t. Grip had never talked about it, which probably meant he’d seen some pretty intense action.

  “I’ll make some phone calls on Monday and get these details for you,” he offered. “You got a copy of the death certificate I can take with me? Might need to fax it in before they’ll hand over the info.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to.” He knew exactly who to call. He’d done this before. For his own father.

  “No, I mean you don’t have to because I have all the info.” She pushed away from the table. “Dad kept records of all his military stuff. It’s all in the safe.”

  At the mention of the safe, Cole’s ears perked up.

  Mandy strode from the kitchen, and he followed, expecting her to slip into her coat to go up to the shop. Maybe she knew the real combination. He’d have to watch her carefully and figure out where he’d gone wrong.