Blessings of the Season

by Annie Jones

  The door opened. She jumped a little and hurried to cover the gifts. But they were all wrapped. Lizzie laughed.

  “What are you so jumpy for, the letters or the presents you’re trying to hide?” The cheeky kid stepped into the room, eyeing the gifts.

  “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “It’s six o’clock, time to be home and have dinner with my mom. Are we having soup?”

  “No, I thought I’d order pizza.”

  “Wow, a special occasion?”

  “No, a guilty mom who didn’t get dinner cooked.”

  “So, you’re going to read the letters?” Lizzie sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing the patchwork quilt that an older lady in church had made. One for Isabelle, and one for Lizzie.

  “I have to order pizza.”

  “I’ll order it in thirty minutes. That gives you time to read the letters.” Lizzie kissed her cheek. “He’s a pretty neat guy, Mom.”

  Isabelle nodded, because she already knew that. Lizzie slipped out of the room, closing the door behind her. For twelve she was too grown up. Of course, she was nearly thirteen. Lizzie liked to remind her of that. As if Isabelle could forget.

  She slid the letter out of the first envelope. She skimmed it, knowing she’d have to read between the lines because a lot of the letter seemed to answer questions that Lizzie had asked. She started at the top, sitting on the edge of her bed as she read.

  Lizzie must have asked him if he was a Christian. Isabelle smiled, because her daughter would do that. He answered that he was a new Christian. He hadn’t been raised in church, but had attended on holidays. He explained that when he started attending services, some of his buddies accused him of turning to God because he was afraid. He didn’t care that they thought faith made him weak. He thought that faith made him stronger. He started to take a good look at the men of faith he knew. They were all strong and courageous. And then he read the Bible and saw that the men in the Bible who called on God were anything but weak.

  He signed the letter telling her that it was nearly Easter and he would someday send her sand from Iraq, because it was the land where Bible history happened.

  He had given Isabelle that sand the day he showed up on her doorstep.

  Isabelle slipped the letter back into the envelope and pulled out the next, and the next, and the next. And through the letters she saw the man her daughter had seen. He was strong. He poured out thoughts about the younger people in his unit and wanting to get them home safe. He talked about not having children, but he had always thought, well, someday.

  He told her that he would love to meet Lizzie, because she was the type of girl any parent would be proud of.

  Isabelle stared at the closed door, the door that girl had walked through thirty minutes earlier. She was proud of her daughter. Aggravated with her, because she had brought Chad here without him knowing the truth about them, about her. But still, it had been a sweet thing to do.

  It had been what a girl would do if she wanted a dad.

  Isabelle rubbed her eyes and leaned back against her pillows. Her daughter wanted a dad. Downloadable music, dance camp and ballet, too, but the real deal, the real thing Lizzie wanted, was a family.

  At twelve, Isabelle had wanted the same thing.

  But she couldn’t welcome Chad in the role of dad just because. They weren’t paper dolls, where you just grabbed a male figure, dressed him up and gave him the role of husband and dad.

  Lizzie needed to understand that there was more to it than that. She put the letters together and slid the rubber band back in place to hold them. When she walked out of her room, she didn’t see her daughter.

  “Lizzie, are you out here?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.” She walked out of the utility room, folding a towel. “The pizza will be ready in fifteen minutes.”

  “Good. Lizzie, sit down.” They were in the dining room. Isabelle flipped on the light, and they sat down at the small dinette with the fake wood top, scarred and nicked from years of use. “Honey, I know that you want a dad. I get it, because I know how much I wanted a real dad. But we can’t pick a guy out of a hat and stick him in our lives this way. There’s more to relationships than that. A man and woman…”

  Lizzie giggled and covered her face. “Oh, Mom, please don’t do ‘the talk.’ Not now, right before pizza. I know that I can’t pick the guy for you. But you don’t pick guys at all. You don’t even seem to see them. So I thought if I put one on your doorstep…”

  “He’d be Prince Charming and I’d be Cinderella?”

  Lizzie shrugged. “It was worth a try. I think I kind of hoped a Christmas letter would turn into a Christmas miracle.”

  “Let’s leave these things up to God.” Isabelle stood and leaned to kiss her daughter’s smooth, dark head. “I’ll run and get the pizza.”

  “Okay. Mom, I am sorry.”

  “I know you are. I love you.” Isabelle grabbed her jacket and walked out the front door. It was cold, and the sky had the heavy gray look of winter and snow. Chad loved snow, and he’d never had a home, not a real home.

  She had learned from his letters that home was the place they moved into on base after the last officer left. His mom had always turned it into a home, though. Isabelle thought his mother was probably a strong woman.

  And his dad—an honorable man who didn’t want to miss the programs at school; but all too often, he had. But that explained why Chad had attended Lizzie’s dance recital and why he’d clapped longer and louder than anyone. Because a kid should know that someone was in the audience cheering them on.

  And that moment, when she read those words and remembered him that night, cheering for her daughter, that’s when her heart had shifted in an unexpected direction and her brain had told her it was too late to deny what she felt for him.

  Chapter Eight

  “Is, you have a call from Blane at the flea market.” Jolynn held out the phone.

  “Could you take a message?” Isabelle nodded at her customers, tourists who’d come to the area to shop at flea markets in the smaller towns. She didn’t want to walk away when they were about to order their lunch.

  “Can do.” Jolynn held the phone with her shoulder and wrote something on a piece of paper.

  Isabelle finished taking the order and headed for the kitchen. Jolynn met her in the back and handed her the note. “He has something for you to pick up.”

  “For me to pick up?” Isabelle clipped the order to the holder above the grill and smiled at Mary, the afternoon cook.

  “Yes, for you. Go on over and see what it is. I’ll hold down the fort.”

  “But my customers…”

  “I’ll take care of them and earn you a good tip.”

  Isabelle shrugged and grabbed her jacket off the hook. “I guess I’ll be right back.”

  As she crossed the street and headed up the block to the flea market, she got the impression that Jolynn knew exactly what was waiting for her there. But that was okay; it was a pretty day to be outside. The weather had warmed to an almost balmy forty-five degrees, and the sun was out. Christmas was just a few days away.

  It should have felt good. Christmas always felt good. So why not this year? She didn’t want to think about the reason. Or maybe wanted to tell herself that it couldn’t be because Chad Daniels had left town, on his way to a base to talk about reenlisting.

  Someone had told her that he would lease the farm for a few years if he did reenlist. It seemed a shame to buy a place that was his dream and then walk away from it.

  A bell dinged as she walked through the door of the flea market. She smiled at the owner, a man in his fifties who sometimes went to their church. He walked behind the counter and returned with a guitar case.

  “I have a gift that was left here for you.” He held it out, smiling big, like he was a part of the surprise. “Here’s a note.”

  “This can’t be for me.” She didn’t want to take it, for fear it wouldn’t be true. She knew what was in th
at case. She had picked it up once before, strumming the strings and then putting it down because she wouldn’t let herself dream.

  “It’s yours.” He pushed it at her, forcing her to take it. And then she took the note.

  She set the guitar case down, leaning it against a dusty old sofa with gold velvet upholstery. The shop was a mixture of other people’s junk and antiques. She sometimes found good stuff in this place: clothes, dishes, even books.

  The envelope held a Christmas card. There was a picture of a dog with a Rudolph nose on the front, and she knew that someone had been thinking of Gibson’s own Santa when they bought that card. She opened it, her fingers trembling.

  Because you do so much for everyone else. You deserve to have your dreams come true.

  Love, Chad and Lizzie.

  She whispered the two names signed together on the bottom of the card. She wouldn’t cry. She wasn’t going to cry. She slipped the card back into the envelope and picked up the guitar, holding it for a minute and not sure what to do with it, with a gift like that.

  She was used to socks and body lotion for Christmas, sometimes a sweater. Not a guitar that had cost hundreds of dollars, money she could have used for Lizzie’s camp.

  “Enjoy it, Isabelle.”

  She looked up, remembering she wasn’t alone.

  “I will, thank you.” She walked out, this time not hearing the bell, not hearing anything. She walked down the street, feeling numb, and then hurt, and then warm, because two people had done this for her.

  She walked through the doors of the Hash-it-Out and back to the kitchen, to the storage room in the back of the building. Jolynn followed her.

  “Are you okay?”

  A motherly hand on her back. Isabelle nodded, but she didn’t turn around, not with tears flooding her vision and her heart trying to find its rhythm again.

  “I’m not sure why he did this,” Isabelle whispered.

  “It was Lizzie’s idea.”

  Isabelle turned, knowing there was an explanation and that it might not be one she wanted to hear. “Okay, I can see it being her idea. She is the idea girl. But the money…”

  “Is, the money came from working at my place. She told you she was saving the money for camp. The truth is, she wanted you to have this gift. She wanted you to have something you’ve always wanted. So she worked for me. And Chad pitched in because he was touched by the fact that she was willing to work for this gift when she wants to go to camp so much.”

  “But camp. She really wanted to save money for camp. I want her to have camp more than I want this guitar.”

  “And she wants you to be happy. So don’t take that sweetness away from her. Don’t lecture her for this, thank her for it. You have a wonderful child who is loving and giving. That’s the greatest gift I think a parent could ever receive.”

  “I think so, too.” But this was another way that Lizzie was taking care of her mother. “But I think this shows me something important, too.”

  Jolynn wiped tears from beneath her eyes, smudging her mascara in the process. “What’s that, sweetie?”

  “I need to get a life so my daughter will stop thinking she needs to take care of me.”

  Her thoughts turned, traitorously, to Chad Daniels. She didn’t want to think about the fact that she missed a man who had left town a few days ago and had probably already reenlisted in the military.

  “Mom, you like the guitar, right?” Lizzie stood in the center of the living room the day before Christmas Eve, the day before the big Gibson parade. And it was big. People came from all over to view the evening parade. It was the one tourist event the small town could lay claim to.

  Isabelle sat on the floor touching up the lace on her daughter’s costume for the dance at the end of the parade. The girls who attended DanceTastic would participate in the parade, doing small routines to taped music, but at the end of the parade route, they would do a longer dance.

  “Of course I love it.” She snipped the thread from the last seam. “And I love you.”

  “Don’t you think it was sweet of Chad to help me buy it?”

  Isabelle looked up, meeting the hopeful smile of her daughter. “Yes, it was sweet. It was a kind thing for him to do. Lizzie, you know he’s gone, right? He went to talk to people about reenlisting.”

  “Yeah, I know, but he’ll be back. He bought the Berman farm. He wants to raise cattle and have horses.”

  “I know.” Isabelle stood up. “And you look beautiful.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Of course I am.” Because she wanted Lizzie to be the child, and Isabelle would be the grown-up who took care of her. She wasn’t going to tell her daughter how much her heart hurt because Chad was gone, and that she hadn’t expected it to hurt.

  She flipped on the television, hoping to change the subject, maybe back to Christmas. “Hey, this is a good movie. Let’s make popcorn and watch it.”

  “It’s pretty sad at the end,” Lizzie said with certain knowledge because it was a movie they watched every year.

  “It has a happy ending.”

  “Yeah, but it always makes you cry. Why do happy endings do that?”

  Isabelle didn’t have an answer to that. Maybe because of the hope of dreams coming true? Maybe because everyone wanted to cheer for someone to get the wonderful things they deserved?

  A truck rumbled into their driveway. They both hurried to the window, and Isabelle knew they were both thinking of Chad. But it was a delivery van. The guy got out of the truck and carried an envelope to the door.

  “You get it.” Isabelle patted Lizzie on the back. “I’ll make the popcorn.”

  She was in the kitchen when Lizzie screamed.

  Isabelle dropped the bag of popcorn onto the counter and hurried into the living room. Her daughter was standing in the center of the room, tears streaming down her cheeks. The delivery van was backing out of the driveway, and a letter was in Lizzie’s trembling hands.

  “What is it?” Isabelle took the letter as Lizzie sobbed.

  Someone had paid for Lizzie to attend one month of dance camp. That someone was Chad Daniels. The letter was signed with a scrawled Merry Christmas.

  Chapter Nine

  Chad parked his truck and got out. The streets were crowded, lined with people. It was nearly dark. He glanced at his watch. The parade would start in five minutes. That meant he had minutes to find Isabelle. He hurried down the sidewalk, away from Jolynn’s, and hopefully in the direction of what he’d been looking for his entire life.

  It had taken a dotted line, a signature he had almost signed, before he had realized that he wanted to stay in Gibson. He missed the military and the relationships, the bonds of serving with other men and women.

  But if he went back, he’d miss Isabelle and, of course, Lizzie. And he didn’t want to miss them. He already missed them.

  He hurried down the sidewalk, his step light, his heart hammering in his chest like a man about to go into the danger zone, facing the unknown. On his way home—home, he liked the way that sounded—he had thought of all the right things to say. At the hotel last night he’d even watched a few of those sappy movies she liked so much. He wouldn’t admit that to a single person.

  But a guy had to know what to say when he faced the woman he loved and wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Especially a woman like Isabelle, a woman who was strong, tender, vulnerable and beautiful.

  A woman with a daughter. That would make him a stepdad, if Isabelle ever agreed to marry him. He had bought a half-dozen books on the subject yesterday. In the end he had left them in the hotel. He didn’t need to know how to be a stepdad. What Lizzie needed was a dad.

  He practically ran down Main Street, because he could hear band music in the distance. He glanced at his watch, knowing the parade had just started.

  A few hundred feet away he thought he saw her, a woman with dark hair, wearing a plaid jacket. She turned, and it wasn’t Isabelle.

  Her
cell phone. He pushed in her number, and as he waited for her to answer, he kept walking and kept running through his mind what he wanted to say when he saw her. He slipped his left hand into his pocket and smiled.

  “Hello.” Isabelle stepped away from the crowd that waited at the end of the parade route. She hadn’t expected Chad’s voice on the other end of the phone, or his number on the caller ID.

  She had hoped he would be here for this performance. She wanted to thank him for the guitar. Lizzie wanted to thank him for dance camp.

  Even now her eyes flooded with tears when she thought about his kindness. And how much she hadn’t planned on missing him.

  “What are you doing?” His voice was soft, and she closed her eyes. She hadn’t planned on this feeling. It felt like falling in love for the first time.

  “I’m at the parade.” She listened, knowing it would only be five minutes before the dancers reached them. Gibson packed a lot into a parade that was a mere one mile long. They had three school bands, the dancers, saddle club, a dozen church floats and the Boy Scouts.

  “I thought you might be there.” His voice crackled a little as his signal cut out. “Have you seen Lizzie yet?”

  “No, I’m at the end of the route, waiting.” She peered down Main Street, and she could see the flashing lights of the town police car. “I think they’re almost to me. So, did you reenlist?”

  “No. I couldn’t reenlist.”

  “Really? Why?” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

  “Because I realized that as much as I love the military, there’s something I love more.”

  “What?” Was that her voice, sounding breathless?

  “You.” And he was no longer on the phone. She opened her eyes, and he was standing in front of her, tall and strong, his smile flashing in a face so handsome, so familiar, it felt like she’d known him forever.

  “Oh.” Yes, that was breathless. And happy endings always made her cry. But she didn’t realize that would include her own. “But you hardly know me.”