A Christmas Miracle

by Anna Adams

  Robert’s favorite method of manipulation had been comparing Jason to his mother, and that had usually bent him to his father’s will. So, which parent was lying?

  He put it out of his head, compartmentalizing so that the bank’s customers didn’t suffer for his distracted awareness of just how twisted his family could be.

  After the last customer left, smiling for a change because Jason had found a way to extend her loan, he opened his desk drawer and took out his phone.

  He dialed his father’s private number and got an answer on the first ring.

  “What’s wrong?” Robert asked.

  “My mother called me today. Apparently, she owns a house in Bliss and she thinks I have it.”

  “Your mother? How did she find you?”

  “She lives here. What about this house?”

  “Oh. That.”

  Jason’s hand went numb. She hadn’t lied. His father would say he hadn’t, either. He just hadn’t mentioned an ugly truth. Jason had to find a way to ask the right questions if he wanted an answer that included honesty. “What do you mean by ‘oh, that’? What did you do to her?”

  “After she left me to live with one of my best friends? I made her pay.”

  He’d never known the guy was a friend of his father’s. “I don’t care what she did twenty-eight years ago, Dad. How did you make her pay?”

  “She thought she could leave me and go back to my hometown. And live in my house, which I bought for her. The house we lived in, there in Bliss. For some reason, she felt she had a right to it. She had no rights after she cheated with my friend. I kept it in the divorce, and then you bought it from me with one dollar of your allowance when you were five.”

  “I bought it? I don’t even remember having an allowance.” Jason’s memories of the past and his father’s descriptions of it rarely matched. “You gave me the house to spite my mother.”

  “Genetics does not a mother make. Sticking around, showing up. That’s what a mother does.”

  “What about this house?”

  “It’s yours. The keys are in a safe deposit box in your name there in the bank, along with the title. I’ve paid the taxes all these years.”

  “You paid the taxes each year and never told me about it? You were trying to hide what you did.”

  “You might have given it back to her.”

  “Apparently I’m enough like you that I won’t do that.” It didn’t make him proud. “What number is the box?” He wanted to see the place. The house that had meant something to both his parents. He had no memory of Bliss, but he had to believe his parents had been happy here once. He wanted to see his home.

  “I’ll have my assistant send you the information.” His father must have turned his chair. The sounds of straining springs and leather were audible in the background. “But don’t you give that house back to Teresa.”

  “Was it hers, Dad?”

  “I told you it wasn’t. We bought it after we married. She forfeited all right to it when she left. I gave her every penny the court required in the divorce. Do not give her that house. Don’t even let her inside. I made sure it belonged only to you.”

  “And you never told me about it.”

  “It slipped my mind.”

  The man was a megalomaniac. This house had been his mother’s, just as every home belonged to both husband and wife when a married couple lived there together. “I’ll talk to you later, Dad.”

  “I’ve been meaning to call you. I owe you an ‘atta boy.’ You’re doing a good job down there.”

  Atta boy? Jason clenched his fist again. “If you’d said that before, Dad, it might have made a difference. But right now, all I can think about is the conversation I just had with my mother.”

  “Sometimes a man has to do the hard thing, son, for the benefit of the community, or of his children.”

  “Your children? You mean you kept my mother out of her home for my benefit? I’m not sure how that would work.”

  “If you think it over, you’ll understand. I can tell you know how to make hard decisions from the reports you’ve been sending us about your work there.”

  That cooled Jason’s temper. He wasn’t comfortable being compared favorably to his father just now. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  He suspected he might have to call his dad and ask for the safe deposit box info again, but just after five an email arrived from Robert’s assistant, containing the box number. Jason used the bank’s key to open it.

  He took the contents out, a long envelope holding legal papers and a set of keys. Aware of sidelong looks from his temporary colleagues, he didn’t explain. It was bad enough knowing the truth about his family. Their scandals were his own business.

  He tossed the envelope into his briefcase and exited the bank through the back door, meeting no one as he walked down the sidewalk. At the hotel, he went into the dining room, sat at the closest table and ordered coffee.

  He opened the long envelope and slid the contents onto the snowy tablecloth in front of him. He unfolded the document and paged through it. It was a deed, stating that he owned a home at 96 Oakwood Drive.

  He had no memory of that house. As far as he could remember, he might as well have been born in the penthouse in New York that his mother had left behind.

  He picked up the keys, two of them on a leather ring, with a still-shiny gold M in the middle of a leather disc.

  As the server arrived with his coffee, Jason glanced around the room and discovered he wasn’t the only one tucking into caffeine to drown his problems. Fleming, looking worried as she absently spooned sugar into her cup.

  She was looking through him as if he wasn’t actually there, but when she took a sip of her overly sweet coffee, she grimaced and focused. Seeing him, she blushed as if she were afraid he could read her troubled mind.

  He hesitated for a second, not sure he was ready to share his newly discovered secret, but then gathered up the items and his briefcase and went to join her.

  “Rough day?” he asked, settling across the table from her.

  “Sort of. I’m just worried, about things.” Clearly shaking off her anxiety, she took a closer look at the keys and papers. “Don’t tell me you took someone’s house?”

  “Actually, the house seems to be mine,” he said, and they were both silent.

  He hadn’t meant to tell her. He didn’t want to talk about it. How could anyone with even the semblance of a normal family understand the way his worked?

  Her mother had waited quite a while to marry her new husband, for the sake of Fleming’s happiness, apparently. Why hadn’t Katherine taken her daughter to live with them, instead of putting her life and her husband’s on hold? Remembering his own blended family, Jason could understand her possible reluctance to think her daughter and her new husband would mix.

  Whatever her mother’s motivation had been, she clearly loved Fleming. Jason’s mom had driven away and barely ever looked back. His father believed in ruling by the most spectacular unkindness.

  “Wait. Are you saying you didn’t know you owned a house here in town?” Fleming asked.

  He shook his head. It sounded ludicrous to him, too.

  “So you’ve never seen it?”

  Again he shook his head, but then noticed her curious expression. “I’m on my way to look for it now.” He scooped up the papers and keys. “Do you know where Oakwood Drive is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to show me the way?”

  She measured him with her gaze as if she wasn’t sure he was serious. “Heck, yeah.” She grabbed her purse and stood. “Let’s go. I can’t imagine suddenly discovering you own a house.”

  She weaved through the tables to the hotel’s entrance hall, where she paused, her slender fingers flexed against the woo
d of the heavy door. She had such graceful hands. “You don’t, by chance, owe a mortgage on that place?”

  He grinned. “That I haven’t been paying? No, but I’m happy to offer you a moment of joy at the thought of my misery.”

  Her laughter made him want to put his hands on her shoulders and pull her closer. He craved her easy warmth, the kindness in the way she forgot her own troubles long enough to be concerned about his.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, but I did, for just a second, sort of hope you might be forced to give everyone a break if you were losing your family’s home.” She pushed through the door. “How does a person have a family home they don’t even know about?”

  “You start with a family that defines dysfunctional.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FLEMING DIDN’T KNOW what to say as they walked down the sidewalk and around the hotel to his car, parked in a white-pebbled lot. How dysfunctional could one family be?

  “I am curious about this place. Apparently Dad just closed it up with everything still inside,” Jason said. “But I never knew what I was missing because I didn’t know about the house until today.”

  The car lights flashed and the doors unlocked automatically as Jason reached the driver’s side. Fleming opened the passenger door, flummoxed by his situation.

  “I can’t believe no one in your family ever mentioned it.”

  “We’re not really a sharing kind of family. My mother hardly spoke to me after the day she left, and my dad keeps his personal business...well, personal. It’s a power thing. I try to stay in touch with my brother and two sisters, but they only respond if they’re on the outs with my dad.”

  “I don’t understand. You have a dad and a brother and sisters? And a mother? And you’ve never mentioned any of them? Even when I told you about my father?”

  “I do, Fleming, but I wasn’t about to try to top your story with my own. You’re not an amateur psychologist, are you?”

  His gentle teasing embarrassed her. “Just inappropriately curious,” she said with a rueful grin. “And when you say you’re not in touch, do you mean that you really don’t speak to each other—very often?” She added the last because the question sounded harsher than she meant to be.

  Jason took a deep breath. “Look. My family isn’t like everyone else’s. I can’t explain.”

  He didn’t want to try. Fleming got that loud and clear. She turned her face to the window, not laughing any longer. What right did she have to drill to the bottom of his soul?

  “The leaves are mostly off the trees now,” she said, changing the subject, tritely grabbing at the first thing in her head. “I think it might snow again.”

  “I thought this was the South. What’s with all the sleet and snow?”

  “We’re Southerners who live at higher elevations. What makes you so grumpy about it? You come from New York. Besides, you’re not staying.” She touched his fine wool sleeve. “And while you’re here, you have a nice coat. You won’t have any trouble staying warm.”

  “Sorry.” He glanced her way with a gentle, apologetic smile. “I’m not complaining. It’s just been a strange day.”

  Her pulse ratcheted up. They might have been any couple, arguing a little and making up on a drive they wanted to share. “I understand the power of a bad day.”

  They climbed farther up the mountain on roads that twisted back on themselves.

  “I know where Oakwood is.” Fleming kept an eye out for an old soda advertisement. “There’s a big rusted sign that was on the side of a barn at the corner where it meets this road, but sometime while I was in high school the barn fell down. Mr. Potter, who owned the barn, posted it on a fence to show where to turn.”

  “Do you remember the house my parents owned?”

  “No. I rode my bike up here when I was a kid, but I don’t think I knew anyone down your road.”

  “My road,” he said, with a sense of surprise.

  “I think we’re getting close.” She pointed to a collection of old boards barely clinging to a gray wooden frame, and a mostly missing, rusted tin roof. “I remember that old chicken house.”

  “Chicken house? That’s a relief. I thought it was someone’s shack.”

  “Very funny. Like no one up here has ever heard jokes like that. The Frosts used to keep chickens here and sell their eggs at the market on the square, but the market’s only open now for a few weekends in the summer. In the winter, they hook up with some sort of organic delivery service, and they built a bigger house closer to town a few years ago. Do you remember a family named Frost?”

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  “How old were you when your family left Bliss?”

  “Too young to remember ever being here.”

  The edge in his voice touched her, but she had no idea what to say to make it better. “See that sign?” Hanging by one side now. Someone had been using it for target practice. “Turn left there.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What do you think you’ll do with the house?” He wouldn’t be staying in it. He didn’t have to remind her of that.

  “I don’t have a clue. It’s probably a mess. Who knows? It might even be condemned by now. I just want to see it.”

  Would he remember anything? What was it like going back to a past that was a total mystery? “So you don’t think your family—your father—maintained it?”

  “I’m positive he didn’t. He paid the taxes, but only gave it to me to keep it away from my mother.”

  “He did what?” Even her father hadn’t taken active steps to leave them destitute—other than abandoning them.

  “My mother left my father, and he held a grudge.”

  “You say that so calmly, but he punished you both. He didn’t tell you about the home, and he somehow knew your mother wouldn’t, either.” Jason’s stillness was a palpable force that energized the car, like lightning building up to strike. “None of which is my business,” Fleming said.

  “I know what you mean. They were unkind to each other.”

  His voice had deepened.

  “I just can’t believe she never tried to contact you.” It was hard to grasp. Fleming’s own mother would never have let her go like that.

  “She was busy with her own life. I’m wondering now if my dad made it hard for her to see me. After a while I stopped hoping she’d come.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that. I never stopped wishing my dad would come back, and every time he said he would come see me, I believed him—or at least I hoped he’d finally show up.”

  Jason’s quick glance was concerned enough to make her feel his warmth.

  “Have you ever asked your father what went wrong?” Fleming murmured.

  “I never had to. My mother told him she loved someone else, and believe me, I remember that scene between them. I begged her to stay while she packed, but she wouldn’t even speak to me. Later, I watched her drive away with the other guy. Her actions spoke louder than any words.”

  Fleming couldn’t find words to fill the terrible silence. She hurt for him.

  “I owe you for coming with me, Fleming.”

  “No. I should tend to my own problems and stay out of yours. I don’t want you to see this place on your own. No one should have to deal with such a strange thing alone, finding you own a house that was used as a weapon. But I’m curious, too.”

  Her family seemed straightforward when she compared her childhood to Jason’s. No secrets. Just horrible regret.

  Jason’s past seemed to be a closed book that no one ever opened. He hadn’t been allowed answers. What was odd to her was that he’d just acquiesced with the silence.

  The car’s atmosphere seemed to thicken, just like the trees around them. No businesses and few homes had ever thinned out this fo
rest. But the narrow roads remained to hint at settlers who’d made this climb back when the land was new and farming demanded larger properties.

  “I can’t read that street sign ahead,” she said, realizing the sky was growing darker.

  “I can’t believe the county even bothers with signs up here.”

  “Maybe they knew your father better than you did. They guessed someone would finally come home.”

  Jason grinned at her and pressed a quick, capable hand to hers, making her breathing constrict. “That’s a hopeful thought. Not sure it’s worth thinking, though. Maybe one of my sisters or my brother will want it. My grandparents owned a place here somewhere, too. They sold it when they moved to New York with us.”

  “I wonder why I didn’t know about any of this. I’m a country kid. I’ve run over these mountains and played in these fields. Abandoned homes were like clubhouses to us.”

  “Us?”

  “My friends and me when we were growing up. This is a town without a lot of future unless the tourism industry inspires you. People move out. Families lose their homes, or they try to sell, until they realize they can’t, but they have to live elsewhere.”

  “So other troubled families left, too. Sounds pretty bleak.” He peered through the windshield at a forest gone wild. “Maybe that’s why no one talked about us.”

  “Yeah. It would have been like borrowing bad karma.” She leaned her head against the side window, peering out. “I’m guessing we’ll find a driveway. Maybe a mailbox post.”

  “Good enough. We’ll search all the abandoned driveways we come across.”

  They had to search only one. After several feet, they reached cracked concrete with brown weeds growing up through the breaks in it. At the top of the drive they found a two-story blue house.

  “That doesn’t look so bad. The paint’s in good shape,” Fleming observed. Only a few of the shutters were hanging. “That’s a huge garage.”

  “This must be it. My dad always had several cars he was restoring.”

  She was surprised. “Odd hobby for the guy you describe.”