Home for the Holidays

by Leanne Banks

  She yawned, heard her ears pop and touched her throbbing temples. Flying had never agreed with her, especially on top of what her doctor called stress-related symptoms, which included insomnia and tension headaches.

  “So much to do, so little time,” she remembered joking after hearing the diagnosis. “Story of my life.”

  “Yes, well, it’s your choice, Ann Elise. You’re a doctor—you know the risks. Kick the habit before it kicks you even harder. Your blood pressure’s nothing to brag about, either.”

  After that she’d tried to ease up, she really had…when she wasn’t too busy. She probably could have squeezed in time to do her Christmas shopping before she’d left Dallas, but the thought of trying to get through security with a stack of gift-wrapped boxes seemed totally impractical when she would have a full day to shop in Mission Creek. She’d decided to make a list while en route, then set out first thing tomorrow morning and whip through the stores, getting everything done in short order. If there was one thing she was good at, it was organizing her time and using it to the best advantage.

  She yawned again and tried to remember where she’d left off. Definitely something pretty and feminine for Faith. Lord knows, she deserved it. And for the children… Baby gifts were easy—she always gave new babies savings bonds, but older children wanted something they could unwrap.

  Her head fell forward in a doze and she jerked upright again, then adjusted the seat back so that she could recline. As the plane droned steadily southward, Ann Elise drifted in and out of sleep, picking up threads of nearby conversations and weaving them into her strangely intense dreams.

  “—told him if he ever come near me again I’d—”

  “Lawsy, if it was me, I’d’a sicced the law on him.”

  She stood helplessly on a strange sidewalk watching Faith running down the middle of the street, two bulging suitcases beating against her legs. Looking up at the Christmas decorations on the streetlights while someone beat on a drum, Ann Elise kept calling her sister’s name, but no matter how hard she tried to make herself heard, she couldn’t seem to speak above a whisper.

  The drone of the engines melded with voices as she drifted deeper into a familiar dream, where a much younger Ann Elise appeared wearing her first formal…

  The whole thing had been an accident, her one and only date with Joe Halloran. Not that she hadn’t dreamed about him ever since the first time she’d watched him sauntering off the football field, his thick, chestnut hair damp with sweat. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen, but he was as tall for his age as she was for hers, only in his case, it all went together. The broad shoulders, the narrow hips, the long, muscular legs. Not to mention a smile that could light up a small city.

  Unlike so many of the Mission Creek kids whose families belonged to the Lone Star Country Club, Joe wasn’t snobbish. Later she’d learned that his dad wasn’t even a member of the club, not that that mattered at all to Ann Elise. Once when she’d stood behind him in line for a movie, she’d wanted to touch him so much her whole body tingled. When he’d smiled at her and said, “Hi,” she could only stare at him and stammer while her face turned fiery red.

  Of course, he’d been with another girl. He’d turned back to his little cheerleader and they’d gone on laughing and talking about football strategy, something she’d always found totally mystifying. She had envied the petite brunette with all her heart.

  Her fertile imagination fast-forwarded to the night of the senior prom. Too shy to ask anyone, she’d been resigned to staying home, but on a Wednesday before the big night, Billy Kiner from her math class had invited her to be his date. And although she hadn’t known him well she had recklessly said yes. Recklessly, because she didn’t date. An honor student, she’d rated a big fat F when it came to a social life.

  Still did, in fact, but back then she’d been painfully shy and insecure. Even after five years of living with the Bakers, she’d taken nothing for granted. No wonder she’d had so few dates. Lord, she must have been a mess. Afraid to make overtures in case they were rebuffed, she’d been called snooty, stuck-up and several less flattering things.

  When Billy had asked her to the prom, she’d surprised herself by saying yes and then tried to get Faith to call him and tell him she’d come down with the flu and couldn’t go.

  Faith refused, and Aunt Beth wouldn’t hear of letting her pay for her own prom dress with the baby-sitting money she’d been hoarding for emergencies. Instead, they’d gone shopping together, and Aunt Beth had insisted on buying her the most beautiful gown in all of Mission Creek. It had been blue-violet. “Exactly the color of your eyes,” her aunt had told her. “That gown was made for you, honey.”

  She’d felt like Cinderella. After the shopping spree, her aunt had steered her to the Texas Belle and instructed the hairdresser to trim her hair so that instead of hanging straight and heavy down her back it brushed her shoulders and feathered around her face.

  Staring at her image in the mirror afterward, she’d confronted a stranger whose blond hair shimmered, whose eyes, even with the hated glasses, looked impossibly large, incredibly blue, and whose mouth appeared full and vulnerable instead of merely too big.

  And then the night of the prom arrived. Faith and Marilou were so excited for her they could barely sit still. “Is he handsome? Is he taller than you?” That from Faith.

  Marilou had chimed in with her own string of questions, mostly regarding the car he drove, whether or not he had a horse and whether he smoked. Patiently, Ann Elise had said, “I don’t know what kind of car he drives, I don’t know if he has a horse, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t smoke.”

  Just because she’d never been close enough to smell it on him, that didn’t mean he didn’t. He probably did. Probably drank, too. Billy Kiner wouldn’t have been her choice for a first date, but she’d had to start somewhere, and he’d been the only one to ask her. It was as good a way to break in her social life as any. If the date turned out to be a dud, her heart wouldn’t be broken because it wasn’t involved.

  Billy was supposed to pick her up at seven-thirty. Dressed and ready a full half hour early, she’d had to race to the bathroom twice from sheer nerves, each time checking her image in the medicine cabinet mirror to be sure she hadn’t devolved into her old self. Was her lipstick too bright? So much for a dress to match her eyes. You couldn’t even see their color behind her round, gold-framed glasses. Aunt Beth had advised her to leave them at home, but she was blind as a bat without them.

  Oh, Lord, what if she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of a dance? What if he asked her to slow dance? She’d only done it with other girls, and she’d always had to lead because she was always the tallest. She should have practiced more.

  The hands on the grandfather clock brushed past seven-thirty and moved relentlessly toward eight. Gripping the edges of the seat with sweaty hands, she opened her mouth and took in a great gulp of air.

  He wasn’t coming. He’d only asked her on a dare, she just knew it. He was probably laughing his head off with all those wild boys he hung out with.

  “Stop gulping, Ann Elise,” Aunt Beth said. “You swallow air that way and you’ll be belching all over the dance floor. Boys don’t have any sense of time.”

  But she knew. She just knew in her bones that Billy was standing her up. And as it turned out, she was right.

  Headlights swept across the front of the house. Tires crunched on gravel of the circular drive. She gulped again. By that time she’d twisted her lace-edged handkerchief into a damp rope.

  The big brass knocker on the front door could be heard all the way to the back of the house. “I’ll get it,” squealed Marilou as she and Faith raced to see who would reach the door first.

  Instead of her date, there stood Joe Halloran in an obviously rented tux, his longish hair gleaming under the porch light. He beamed that slow, friendly grin at her and said, “Ann Elise, can I take Billy’s place? He’s been, uh—delayed.” Joe and Billy had b
een friends back then, even though Joe was a few years younger. She later learned that Billy’s father worked on the Halloran’s ranch.

  What Billy had been, was picked up for shoplifting, although she hadn’t known it at the time. Assuming she’d be meeting her real date at the school gymnasium where the prom was being held, Ann Elise had allowed Joe to assist her into his father’s pickup truck that he was too young to drive, but drove anyway. She scarcely dared breathe in case all that air she’d gulped came rushing back out.

  Just before they pulled into the school parking lot, Joe told her that Billy was tied up and wouldn’t be there at all, and would he do? He could dance pretty well, but if she would rather just dance with older guys, he would understand.

  She must have said something, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember what. They’d gone inside, and she would never forget the way the gym had looked, decorated with banners, balloons and streamers. They had drunk punch—rumors were that at least one of the huge bowls had been spiked, but Joe had dipped hers from the bowl in the middle. He’d told her that all the guys were drinking from the one on the end, so he was pretty sure the middle one was okay. He’d brought her samples of all the goodies, most of which were too sweet or too salty, but she’d thanked him and nibbled persistently, hoping she wasn’t eating off her lipstick or getting crumbs stuck between her teeth.

  They had line-danced and slow danced, and she hadn’t once stumbled, tripped or belched. Joe was even taller than she was, which made it heavenly. He’d smelled faintly of Old Spice and he hadn’t once sneaked outside for a drink like most of the other boys had done.

  By the end of the evening she was head over heels in love. Serious, grown-up love, never mind that he was only fifteen and she was going on eighteen.

  Between dances Joe told her his dream of becoming a veterinarian. “See, there’s no money in ranching these days unless you’re one of the big guys, and my dad’s not, but he loves it. It’s all he’s ever done. So I thought if I could be a vet, I could stay there on the ranch and help him and have a practice on the side. I’m planning on getting a football scholarship—leastwise, I’m hoping I can. I guess that doesn’t sound like much to you, you being a Wainwright and all.”

  “I’m not a Wainwright, and Uncle Lloyd’s ranch is even smaller than your daddy’s. In fact, it’s not even a ranch anymore, mostly just the house, the outbuildings and some trees.”

  It had to have been the sparkling lights and the noisy, mind-numbing music. They had talked nonstop, even while they were dancing. Breathless bursts of chatter whenever they were close enough. She’d forgotten all about her shyness, her plainness—about being stood up and having a junior high school substitute date. They’d been as different as two people could be, yet for one magic night they had been best friends…and more.

  Now, as the DeHavilland’s twin engines changed pitch, Ann Elise’s dream segued into a collage of pompom-waving cheerleaders and yapping miniature poodles wearing rhinestone collars. The pilot came on to report “a spot of turbulence” up ahead and she opened her eyes, shards of her dream still clinging as she looked out the window to see lightning streak down from the dark clouds ahead.

  It wasn’t the fact that both her parents had been killed in a crash that made her uneasy. Rationally, she knew that far more people died in automobile accidents every year. All the same…

  She fastened her seat belt, shut her eyes again and tried to pick up her dream where she’d left off.

  Chapter 2

  In her dream, the prom was a kaleidoscope of laughter and loud music—mostly just a pounding beat surrounded by hoards of young voices all vying to be heard in a swirling rainbow of colorful gowns and tuxedoes that ran the gamut from traditional to wildly nontraditional.

  Spilled punch. “Oh, wow, sorry! Here, lemme mop you off.”

  Someone screaming, “Bobbie, stop that! Oh, gawd, you broke my strap,” was followed by screams and giggles.

  No one took offense. No one appeared to notice when the boys—not Joe, but most of the others—would slip outside and come in several minutes later smelling of whisky or beer and cigarettes. On that one memorable night, people who had never even bothered to speak to her before had stopped by their table to talk—mostly to Joe, granted, but she hadn’t been excluded.

  And wonder of wonders, she’d talked right back. Probably nothing brilliant, but she’d felt like a butterfly freshly emerged from her chrysalis. Showing up with a younger date hadn’t hurt her image at all, especially when that date was Joe Halloran.

  Oh, how she’d hated to see the evening end. Back to the pumpkin, she remembered thinking as Joe helped her into the old red pickup truck. He’d talked on the way home. About football and his science teacher’s attempts to get his father’s breeding program underway again. She’d mostly listened, afraid if she opened her mouth she might say something gauche and break the spell. Either that or burst into tears.

  And then he’d kissed her good-night. Out beside the truck, because Aunt Beth had left the porch light on. Joe had opened the passenger-side door and held out his hand, and when she’d stepped down from the high running board in her barely-there sandals, he’d slipped his arms around her.

  She hadn’t even tried to resist. Even then, as her magic night came to an end, she’d still been drifting in a dream world. Joe had spoken her name, “Ann Elise,” sort of quiet and raspy, and then he’d kissed her.

  Seventeen and a half years old, and it had been her first real kiss.

  And oh, my mercy, had it ever been real! To this day she didn’t know how she’d managed to make her way up the front walk to the house. She was fairly certain her feet hadn’t touched the ground.

  On Monday morning she’d spent a full hour getting dressed for the next-to-the-last day of school. Over breakfast, which she hadn’t been able to force down, Aunt Beth had offered to buy her a secondhand car for graduation. She was practically the only senior in the entire school who rode the school bus.

  Deeply touched, she had nevertheless declined, asking for the money instead to go toward her college fund. No matter how hard she’d worked, she’d only been able to get a partial scholarship. Ann Elise had insisted the insurance money from her parents be set aside for her younger sisters’ education.

  She still remembered climbing down from the school bus that bright spring morning and casually lingering outside, searching without appearing to, for a glimpse of a certain shaggy chestnut-brown head. She’d been half afraid he wouldn’t be there waiting for her, half afraid he would.

  Joe had been there, but he hadn’t been waiting for her. Clinging to his arm was the petite brunette sophomore he’d been dating all year. Feeling as if she’d just slammed into a wall of ice, Ann Elise had hurried over to where a group of seniors were rehashing the prom. One or two of them had smiled. She didn’t know if she’d smiled back or not but she’d managed to look vitally interested in what they were saying, nodding at the appropriate times so that no one would think she’d been looking for Joe.

  The next time she’d seen him was when they happened to meet outside the school library. “Hey, Ann Elise,” he said, sounding almost shy, that melt-your-bones smile in full evidence.

  Pretending she hadn’t seen him, she’d lifted her nose in the air and marched off to the girls’ bathroom, where she’d locked herself inside a stall and cried herself sick.

  Fool, fool, fool! What did you expect—a genie to burst from a bottle and change you into a beautiful princess? “Get real,” she remembered muttering. The phrase had been new then, and she’d told herself that if she couldn’t be beautiful, at least she could be cool.

  The plane rocked in the turbulent air as they descended through the low cloud layer. The attendant touched her shoulder, reminding her to put her seat in the upright position, then hurried forward to take her own seat. “Won’t be long now,” she assured her passengers.

  Ann Elise pressed the seat release, then closed her eyes again. Behind her someon
e said, “Mumble, mumble—got another raise. That makes…mumble, mumble. But man, this IPO, I mean, I made a killing on it, I kid you not.”

  Money.

  The last thing she remembered thinking before she drifted off to sleep again was that no amount of money was worth what one had to give up in exchange. Even after her sisters had no longer needed her, she’d been driven to succeed. Force of habit. She’d paid a small fortune for her practice when the vet she’d worked for decided to retire. By then she’d finished paying off her student loan. Now that she was no longer in debt, she was still putting in more hours than most other companion-animal veterinarians, and on top of that she did pro bono work for a local shelter in her free time.

  And what did she have to show for her driving ambition? A thriving practice, certainly. A professionally decorated suite of offices in an upscale section of Dallas. The satisfaction of having helped scores of animals that would otherwise have been euthanized.

  A few friends, but no lovers. Without quite realizing how it had happened, she’d turned into a lonely, isolated workaholic in pursuit of riches she wouldn’t know how to spend even if she’d had the time.

  “On a clear night you’d be able to see the lights of Mission Creek by now, folks. Town’s all gussied up for Christmas.” The pilot’s voice, sounding chipper, but somewhat tired, resonated through the cabin. “Air temperature on the ground is a balmy forty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, with more rain in the forecast. Sorry I can’t promise you snow, but on behalf of first officer Sara Shoemaker and myself, I’d like to wish you all a merry Christmas and thank you for flying TTAir. And now, if you’ll fasten your seat belts we’ll have you on the ground shortly.”

  Shortly couldn’t come soon enough for Ann Elise. Dallas-Fort Worth airport had been a madhouse, with rain delays and security jams combining to create thousands of angry, frustrated travelers. Even the small feeder line that served the Mission Creek area had been overbooked with home-for-the-holiday travelers, plus those returning after a Dallas shopping trip.