by Cara Colter
“Somehow I can’t imagine a big steak for Christmas dinner,” she said.
“I can.”
He got the thump again. Funny, the things that could make a man realize he was losing control.
He went out and did the chores. When he came back in, Jamey was awake and needing tending, and Amy was champing at the bit to get her gingerbread house made.
Then with her instructions, he was taking the sheets of gingerbread and cutting them.
“Now, we make a house.”
He did not want to think of making a house with Amy. It felt as if thoughts could make him weak instead of strong.
“We use this icing to glue it all together.”
Carefully, Ty cut the sheets of cookie into squares. Even being careful, a nice chunk broke off. It was a reminder that he could not be trusted to make any kind of a house with anyone.
He popped the broken piece into his mouth, passed some to the grasping baby.
“Hey, it’s not to eat,” she said, and he popped a piece into her open mouth to silence her.
Focused intently, he took the slabs of cookie and stood four of them up, leaning on each other to form rough walls. Then, pleased, he put another on top.
“Well?” He stood back and surveyed his house.
“It doesn’t look like a house, Ty.”
“What does it look like?”
“I don’t know. A box.”
“I’ll fix the roof.” He took another piece of gingerbread, took a bite out of it, and then made a slanted roof instead of a flat one.
“I told you, it’s not to eat! Did you have to take a bite out of the roof? It looks like—”
“Hansel and Gretel have been here,” he decided happily. It looked like the whole thing was leaning, ready to topple over. He slathered the joints liberally with the icing glue. It got all over the place, including his hands. He handed the wooden spoon to Jamey, who merrily chewed the end and then bashed the kitchen counter with it.
She eyed the house critically after he’d made the changes. “Now it looks like a shed.”
“Perfect. Just what I planned. A manger for Christmas.”
The thump again.
“Hey, I’m a cowboy, not a construction guy.”
And not anyone who could be trusted to make a house with her.
He made a few adjustments. “It will look fine once we add a few windows.”
But of course it didn’t look fine. Jamey had to “help” decorate, and the jelly beans and jujubes that didn’t make it into his mouth were rather mutilated by the time they made it onto the house.
She stepped back from it.
She surveyed the house: listing badly, part of the roof broken, misshapen candies on it, and then she looked at her baby, sticky with icing and gingerbread, and then she looked at Ty.
And it was as if that scent that filled his house and made it home was right inside of him when she looked at him like that.
She started to laugh. “It’s perfect,” she declared.
* * *
Amy stared at the house, and let the feeling it was giving her fill her up. Perfection.
It was not the kind of house Cynthia made—perfect miniatures from a Swiss village. In fact, it looked only remotely like a house.
It had a bite out of the roof. The candies were sliding in icing down the walls into a heap at the bottom. The whole thing was tilting quite badly to one side, and looked as if it might fall right over.
And for all that it looked wrong?
It had never felt so right. Christmas had never felt so right as it did in this moment, sharing a room with that big golden-haired cowboy, watching his eyes tilt with laughter as he used his finger to clean icing off Jamey’s nose.
Her other Christmas Eve activities were perfect, too. Ty dug an old sled out of the barn, so they went down the hill in front of his house, sinking in the deep snow, inching along, tumbling and laughing. The snow also was not quite right for making a snowman, not nearly sticky enough, and they ended up with a lumpy pile with an old cowboy hat sitting on top of it, two rocks for eyes and a carrot for a nose.
What the snow was perfect for was snow angels, and they soon covered that entire slope with the imprints of their bodies.
Her feeling of having the most perfect day ever solidified.
Darkness fell. The baby went to bed. She locked herself in her bedroom, door closed. She had not been able to find wrapping paper, but there had been a huge roll of butcher’s paper.
She had Christmas shopped a little for Jamey back in Calgary, so one-handed, she managed to get a chunky little train and some cars wrapped. Then she wrapped a few of his old toys, knowing full well he would not know the difference.
Now, what for Ty? She crept out of her room and retrieved his oven gloves. She cut her red toque, and a towel she had brought with her, and managed to patch the hole in the one. She wrapped it up. And then she went thought her suitcase, found the two books she had brought with her and wrapped those up for him.
Funny, humble little gifts.
That filled her with the Christmas spirit.
And when she came out, she had little brown paper wrapped packages, the wrapping lumpy and terrible, which she put under the tree with great and gleeful pride.
“Now,” she told Ty, who was stretched out on the living-room sofa, nearly asleep, “I’m going to make us some hot chocolate. And then we can sing Christmas carols.”
He snorted, but didn’t say no.
Amy was in the kitchen, stirring a vat of hot chocolate when the phone rang.
“Hey, can you get that?” he called from the living room.
She picked it up, was thrilled with the caller and the invitation.
“That was Beth,” Amy said, standing in the doorway. “She realized I was going to be here for Christmas Day. She invited us over for dinner. They have turkey.”
“We were just there,” he pointed out, something stubborn in the set of his jaw, a shield over his eyes.
“Surely you would have been joining them for Christmas dinner?” she asked.
He said nothing.
“You wouldn’t go and be with your own father on Christmas Day? You’d rather sit here by yourself?”
Again he said nothing.
“I want to go. I have Christmas presents for them.” She went and stood in front of him, folded her arms over her chest.
“How could you possibly have that?”
“I made them something. I already told her we would go.”
“You shouldn’t have done that. I’m not going there for Christmas.”
“But—”
“I’m not arguing with you. And it’s not open for discussion.”
“Oh! Now you sound just like Edwin!”
She could tell he didn’t like that one little bit.
“Look,” he said, his tone cool. “We are not husband and wife. We are not even a couple. So we don’t have to discuss decisions.”
Regardless of the truth in that, Amy was not going to be the woman she had been with Edwin. Never again. Just deferring to him, trying to make him happy, avoiding confrontation, even when the price of that avoidance had been the loss of her own identity and her own soul.
“You’re absolutely right. We don’t have to discuss decisions. I’ll go without you,” she decided.
His mouth formed a grim line. “And how are you going to do that?”
“I’ll take the little sled we used to toboggan with today. And I’ll follow the track we made with the horses.”
“With one hand?” he said with satisfied skepticism.
“That’s all I need to pull Jamey on the sleigh,” she said stubbornly.
His mouth fell open. “What happened to the gi
rl who was afraid of her own shadow?”
Her eyes went to his lips.
He had happened to her. And she was a girl no more. She was a woman, and she was one who knew her own mind.
And this is what her own mind knew, standing there on Christmas Eve having her first fight with Ty Halliday.
The woman she had become was in love with him. Enough to believe, even given the stubborn cast of his features, that a Christmas miracle could still happen.
She went and sat beside him on the couch, covered his hand with her good one.
“Tell me what’s wrong between you and your dad,” she said, again.
She needed desperately to know that he felt he could trust her. She was aware that it was the only gift she wanted from him. And she wanted to give him the gift of not being so alone. That’s what she had wanted to give him from the moment she had set up that tree for him.
And her hopes hung between them, in the silence, waiting for his answer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TY felt her weight settle on the sofa beside him. He was surprised. He had used anger to keep people away from him for a long, long time.
Maybe he had used anger because it felt so much more powerful than what lurked right beneath the anger.
Sadness. A well of sadness so deep and so profound a man could drown in it, if he let himself.
But now Amy was beside him, and he felt that if he went down into that sadness, and it seemed like it would drown him, she would throw him the rope.
Crazy to think this little speck of a woman could save him.
Crazy to think he needed saving at all.
But he was suddenly so aware that he did. That he was alone and that he was lonely and that it was going to stay that way forever if he didn’t take the risk of telling someone.
The old cowhands had a favorite expression that they had used liberally on him when he was growing up and made mistakes.
If ya always do what ya always did, y’all always git what ya always got.
And suddenly, Ty was aware of wanting something different. A new chance at his old life.
He was aware he was giving in to the temptation of wishing. He took a deep breath and hoped he wasn’t going to be sorry.
“I told you already my mom left. I was a little older than Jamey, eighteen months or so. I don’t remember it. My dad wouldn’t say anything about it. Then or now. He didn’t talk about her. It was pictures of his first wife, Ruth-Anne, who had died, in his wallet and on the mantel. Until I was four or five I thought the woman in the pictures must have been my mom.
“Then one day she phoned. My mother phoned. She said she wanted to take me to Disneyland but my dad wouldn’t let me go.
“And then I never heard another word from her, ever. And my dad would just get this look on his face whenever I tried to bring it up. And believe me, I tried to bring it up. Because I had a mother! She was out there, somewhere. She wanted to take me to Disneyland.
“I was convinced she’d just show up one day. That I’d come home from school and come in the door and there she’d be. With a tray full of chocolate chip cookies. Or the Christmas tree up and decorated.” He smiled a touch at that.
“My dad and I lived in this world that was pure guy. Horses and cattle, hard work and cowhands.
“But we were invited for dinner lots. And I’d see this other world. Where people had curtains on the windows, and there wasn’t a tractor engine in pieces on the kitchen table, and a newborn calf on a blanket in front of the stove. They had nice dishes and their houses smelled like good things cooking, not motor oil and horses.
“And then I went to school. There’s a thing called Mother’s Day that I had been blissfully unaware of. Everybody makes a little plaster cast of their hand for Mom, or sticks macaroni on a plate with glue and paints it silver to make a wall hanging.
“Sometimes, if it was slow season on the ranch, I’d go home on the school bus with one of the other kids. Their handprints and macaroni art were hung on the wall. I stuck mine in a box I put it under my bed to give to my mom when she showed up.
“My friends’ moms would fuss over me. Cut my hair if it was too long, mend my jeans, send me home with cookies.
“Christmas was the worst time to be a kid with no mom. Every other house looked the way this house looks tonight and never has before.
“Everybody had trees up, and socks hanging by the fire and stacks of presents. Kids talked about Santa. Sheesh! Santa? My dad told me that was a bunch of baloney when I was two.
“My dad’s idea of a present? New leather work gloves. I got all the clothes I needed every year for Christmas—a pair of jeans, a couple of new shirts, and a new pair of boots.
“I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t appreciate it, but I wanted something else—a new book, or some music or a game. Something fun. Maybe even frivolous.
“In my mind, I was inventing a fantasy mother. She was a little bit of everybody’s mom. Pretty like Mrs. Campbell, could make lemon meringue pie from scratch like Jody Wentworth’s ma, she thought long and hard about just the right gifts, like Julia Farnstead. When I snitched my dad’s whiskey, she’d ground me, like Mrs. Holmes, not make me clean stalls. And then after a couple of days of being grounded, she’d forget all about it, not have me up to my ass in crap for the next hundred years.
“I guess I was building kind of a head of steam against my dad even before it happened. We were butting heads. I was drinking and smoking and carousing, and he was pretty damn unhappy about it.
“Then, when I was seventeen, I came in one day, and he was at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, and this pack of letters in front of him.
“And he looked at me and said word had just got to him that my mother had passed.
“And he handed me these letters, said he had been waiting on the right time to give them to me, and it had just never seemed like it was it.
“I’ve never been so mad in my whole life. Killing mad. But he got up and left, and I took those letters and read them, and the fury just built.
“My mom loved me. She’d written me letters. And he’d never given them to me. Not a single one. Not even when he saw me pining away on Mother’s Day, and on my birthday and at Christmas.”
Ty thought he should stop then. His fury felt fresh and dangerous.
“Then what happened?” Amy’s soft voice prodded him to go on.
“I packed my bags that night and left.”
“At seventeen?” She was aghast.
“Quit school. Slept under a bridge the first couple of nights. Got hungry. But never hungry enough to come back. Finally, I found work on a ranch. I ended up riding a bit on the rodeo circuit.
“Wild years,” he said with a shake of his head. “An angry young man taking out his anger on the world.
“And losing myself a little more every day. Taking stupid risks with broncs and bulls and life in general.
“Then I got a call my dad’s been hurt bad in an accident. And I came home. We didn’t really speak. He gave me the deed to the ranch, said it was mine now and he expected me to man up and look after it.
“And I did. End of story.”
He waited now. For her to do the wrong thing. To prove to him his trust had been totally misplaced, that it had been a mistake to tell her.
He waited for her to give him some Pollyanna advice. To make him hate her by giving him sympathy.
But she did nothing at all. She sat there, and after a while she leaned her head against his chest.
And she whispered, “Oh, Ty. Oh, Ty.”
Quite frankly, it made him feel as if he wanted to bawl his damned eyes out, which was what he’d been scared of all along.
But he put his hand to her hair and stroked it, and that sensation of fury disappeared,
and so did the feeling he might lose control of his emotions.
Instead, a sweet sense of not being alone filled him.
She was absolutely silent, and yet he could sense her feeling for him. They stayed together like that in a wordless place of being utterly and beautifully joined, until his eyes felt heavy. He gave in to something. And he slept.
When he awoke, his heart felt tender. He carefully shifted out from under the weight of Amy’s resting head, let her down gently on the sofa. Then he went to the back door and put on his jacket and went outside into the cold night air. It had stopped snowing, finally. He could see the great expanse of stars over his head.
He went to the barn and into the tack room, and got down the little saddle he had used as a small child. It seemed impossibly tiny now.
He wanted to give something to Jamey. And something to her. He didn’t want them to wake up in the morning to no gifts from him, when clearly she’d been busy all day making sure everyone was getting something from her.
So in the cold of the tack room, under a bare lightbulb he worked long into the night cleaning and oiling the old, old saddle.
And when he was done, he went up to the house. Amy had got up off the sofa and gone to bed. It was past midnight—Christmas morning actually—and he was glad she had not waited up for him. He felt fragile. Some untouched part of him bruised.
He set the saddle aside and then took his most precious possession and wrapped it for her.
He put the saddle with a clumsy bow and the carefully wrapped copy of Lonesome Dove under the tree.
He realized he was giving away things that really mattered to him.
And that he didn’t feel sad. Still, fragile, almost raw, but not sad.
He felt lighter than he had in years.
In the morning, she cried when she saw the saddle for Jamey. And cried even harder when she unwrapped the book.
He felt a little lump in his throat, too, when he found his oven mitts had been repaired. He squinted at the repair job. If he was not mistaken, the repair had been executed at the expense of her little red toque. And she had surrendered the two books she had brought with her to him. He hadn’t read either of the authors before, but she promised him the books were not chick lit.