by Anna Adams
“This.” She opened her hands to show him the landing, as wide and spacious as a small room in any other house. “Wouldn’t it be perfect with chairs and a table? You could read here or write.” She stared at him. “Letters, I mean. Something like that. Homework, if you were a kid.”
Her enthusiasm was like a new coat of paint and some sturdy joists beneath their feet. She saw possibilities despite the neglect. He saw only the anger that had caused it. He could use a change of scenery.
“Maybe you should make me an offer,” he said, and then rushed to clarify. “On the house.”
* * *
BY THE TIME Jason parked in front of Mainly Merry Christmas, it was dark, and Fleming had rebuilt the house in her head. She was glad they’d gotten beyond her suggestion to make it a vacation house. A guy like Jason didn’t need a summer place like his forgotten home in the Smokies.
He probably saw success as a mansion in the Hamptons or a villa somewhere in the Mediterranean, all completely outside the sphere of her imagination. She felt like an idiot. She had to focus on her store, not on his future.
“Thanks for letting me go along,” she said, reaching for the door handle.
“Thanks for coming.”
“I think I may have gotten overly excited about your place up there. You can tell I like to make things cozy.” She pointed at the store. “Every day is a lead-up to the holidays in my life.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I don’t mind talking.”
She smiled at him because he was lying. She was positive that every personal admission from him came at a price.
The car was feeling far too snug now, with the silence broken and his frustration liable to return at any moment. “I’ll see you at caroling practice,” Fleming said.
He nodded. “If I can make it.”
Great. He was so wary of being involved, he was pulling away from that, as well. “Good night.”
She climbed out of the car and went into the store without turning. Only lovesick schoolgirls looked back to see if the object of their fantasies was watching them walk away.
She seriously wanted to know, but she didn’t let herself check. She had to get her mind on her own business again and stay out of Jason’s. If he didn’t feel the same ready attachment she found toward his beautiful, neglected home, she couldn’t make him feel it.
She shouldn’t keep trying.
Turning over a more businesslike leaf, she set up stations for making the papier-mâché ornaments. One of the local schools was bringing in their second graders on a field trip the next day.
A few customers came in for cards and tinsel and lights, and to inquire about the special ornaments she and her mother ordered each year for the store. Fleming had put in this year’s order late, but they were due to arrive within the week.
At just after nine, she turned down the store lights so that the Christmas lights furnished a twinkling, joyous background as she opened her laptop on the counter. She promised herself she’d stay for only an hour to write a quick scene.
She had to be up early in the morning to start the workday over again.
She read through the last couple pages she’d written and then dived in. Time slipped past her. Swimming in the world inside her story, she noticed nothing outside it until a sound at the front of the store dragged her back to reality.
She looked up, feeling a little as if she were waking from a dream. A woman stood outside the plate glass window, tall, too slender, wearing an aqua uniform that Fleming recognized from one of the resorts up on the mountain.
The woman stared at the window display with a look of great sadness. For reasons she couldn’t explain, the hairs on the back of Fleming’s neck stood up, but she didn’t move. She didn’t blink.
After several unnerving seconds, the woman smiled, sadly, but sweetly, and looped her dark, wavy hair behind her ears. She wrapped her arms around her waist.
“Oh,” Fleming said out loud. Her unusual visitor wasn’t even wearing a coat.
She quickly saved her work and shut her laptop, but by the time she went to the front door, the woman had gone. Fleming opened the door and looked down the street, just in time to see the aqua uniform, glowing in moonlight, disappear into the nearest alley.
What to do? Should she call police? The woman might need help. But she seemed to have a job. That didn’t mean she was all right. That missing coat was worrisome.
Why had she been so interested in the store?
Fleming backed up and looked inside. All she could see was the counter where she’d been standing, and all the blinking lights making shadows of the trees and shelves.
Maybe the woman had been lonely. Or wanted to buy something she couldn’t afford. Fleming glanced toward the alley, wishing she could have caught her in time to offer her coffee or cocoa—or a cup of soup.
She shuddered all the same as she went back inside and turned the lock on the door. She might be worried about the woman, but the moment had been creepy.
* * *
THE MORNING AFTER he’d visited the house, Jason woke late and rolled out of bed. He opened his door to grab the newspaper Lyle Benjamin, the landlord, left daily in the hall.
It was there, but on top of it was a toy, a box containing a purple action figure, the villain in a kid’s animated show from back when Jason was a child. He stared at it, perplexed, and then glanced up and down the hall.
Still in its mint-condition packaging, the toy didn’t seem like a mistake, like something another guest’s child might have tired of and then set on top of Jason’s paper as he passed by.
He picked up the toy and the paper and went back into his room, turning the cardboard with its plastic-wrapped action figure over in his hand. He’d wanted one of these once, about a billion years ago.
His father had believed in a different kind of toy, something educational, or a book. A computer that had made Jason a hero among his friends, whose parents hadn’t believed them mature or responsible enough to have one.
Behind him, an antique clock chimed the hour from the mantelpiece, with a froufrou, girlie affectation that annoyed him every time it reminded him he was running late.
Something about this town was changing him. He never ran late for appointments.
He rushed through a shower and grabbed the toy on his way out of his room. Downstairs, he cornered Lyle, who was just bringing in firewood.
“I think some kid left this at my door by mistake.” Jason set the purple villain on the reception desk. What little boy carried around an unopened, newly bought, vintage toy?
Lyle glanced at it. “That doesn’t seem likely. I don’t think you can find these in stores anymore. I have a nephew your age, and he collects those.”
Jason didn’t know whether to laugh or pay attention to the pain that seemed to clench in his rib cage. If someone had meant this for him, he could imagine only one person bringing the toy to the hotel and then not staying to hand it to him.
He pretended to feel nothing. “You’re not suggesting it’s your grown nephew’s, and it got delivered to my room by mistake?”
“I’m saying it couldn’t have gotten to your room by accident. They’re not that easy to find, and they’re expensive when they’re mint, in the box.”
Jason stared at it. His mother. Had she still been around when he’d wanted this guy? When this toy had been the one that would have made him the happiest little about-to-be abandoned kid ever? How would she have found it?
It was a crazy thought, but it had to have been she who dropped this off for him. She had to have a motive, a plan. Was she asking him to remember the past? Was she asking for forgiveness?
His anger suddenly dissipated like air released from a balloon. Maybe he had no right to judge, or to withhold forgiveness. He wasn’t a child anymore,
a fact that might have escaped him until he held this toy, the object of his toddlerhood’s delight, in his hands.
His mother had known him. She had remembered. Even if she was just reiterating that she wanted the house, she’d done it with something that had mattered deeply to him back then.
Maybe Fleming hadn’t been completely wrong. She regretted holding a grudge against her father. Jason didn’t have to knock down the walls and invite his mother into his life, but maybe he could ease the door open and see what she really wanted.
He went to work, but the whole day—discussing loans with residents of Bliss who’d gotten behind in payments, talking to prospective new customers whom he needed to vet before he agreed the bank could give away more of its money—he was aware of snow floating in flurries outside his gothic office window. And of his mother’s cell phone number pulsing in the back of his head, unintentionally memorized.
By evening, when he walked out of the building, he was still uncertain about calling.
She’d left the toy at his doorstep. Possibly an effort to manipulate him—if she was the woman his father had described all Jason’s life. She wanted her house back. Maybe she didn’t think her son had a right to the home he didn’t remember. Maybe he didn’t.
And what had that hint of hers meant? That his father might have kept her away? That didn’t seem so unlikely.
Jason had been his dad’s weapon against his mom, but maybe she wanted to use him against Robert now.
But he’d learned young about snap decisions. From the day his mother had left. Snap decisions were never wise, and they’d almost always proved a source of regret to him.
He stopped at the coffee shop for a cup of their strongest brew and a sandwich of dry turkey on slightly stale bread. Seated at the counter along the window, he set down a sandwich half while he tried to chew.
“Their coffee is great,” said a voice behind him.
A voice he recognized because it haunted him. Since the moment she’d refused to leave him when an attacker sailed past her in his office.
“I’d be careful of the sandwiches, though,” she said, from closer now. “Technically, they’re fresh enough to sell, but they keep them overnight in a fridge. I’ve never been able to abide a sandwich from the fridge. Which is odd, because all the ingredients come from there. They just don’t taste as good when you take them out and put them together.”
“It’s the bread,” he said. “I’ve never liked bread from a fridge, either.”
She laughed. “Something in common. So, are you coming to caroling practice tonight?”
He glanced through the window, plate glass, oddly clean even though trucks had been splashing salt and chemicals all over the sidewalks every time the forecast included a hint of snow. “I may be busy,” he said.
She was silent a moment. “Okay.”
“Why does it matter to you?”
“You’re part of the group,” she said. After another few seconds, she nodded. “Except something about seeing your house and hanging out with me has put you out of sorts. You need your distance again.”
“You’re right. I’ve gotten myself more involved in this community than I meant to be. I like having someone to eat with. I was glad you came along to that house with me. I like caroling, because no one cares how badly I sing.”
“No one can tell who’s singing badly because we all sing heinously,” she said, but she couldn’t hide a small smile that made him feel guilty. He didn’t want her to think the house or enjoying the company of her and her friends made a difference to his plans.
“But I think my mother reminded me of my priorities.”
“Okay.” Fleming’s face fell. She looked confused.
He opened his briefcase to show her the toy. “See this?”
“A purple toy skeleton. That’s a funny thing to carry to work.”
“Did you watch TV when you were a kid?”
“Not much. Mom didn’t approve.” She stared at the figure. “I read a lot.”
“Probably a better choice.” They couldn’t get through any conversation without learning more about each other, no matter how much he preferred their friendship remain on a surface level. “I wanted it when I was little. There was a time when only this guy would have made my Christmas perfect.”
She grinned, but slowly, as if still trying to piece the puzzle together. “Your family had so much money—you lived in a fancy apartment in New York. Your father couldn’t find one of those? He couldn’t have contacted the manufacturer and snapped one up for you?”
“We didn’t live like that.”
“He signed a house over to you when you were a toddler, but you lived like the common folk?”
“Don’t do this, Fleming. What makes you think I’m some rich guy, pretending not to be?”
“I didn’t mean that. But a banker’s son, and a business consultant whose career is soaring, piling success on top of success? You could have had a plastic toy anytime you put effort into finding it.”
“He didn’t think I needed one, and my mother didn’t argue. She finally found the courage to give me something my dad didn’t want me to have. She’s trying to manipulate me by reminding me of the past.”
Fleming glanced down at the purple toy illuminated by the stream of light from above the coffee shop counter. “She knows you grew up with your father, but she thinks she can buy you with that?” Fleming picked up his cup as if they were much closer than overly attracted acquaintances. She took a sip of the black coffee and made a face at its bitterness. “She’s counting on the idea that you might have changed.”
“You know how you said you regretted not giving your father a second chance?” Jason asked.
Fleming made another face, as if she’d overdosed on something more bitter than his coffee. “I gave him about a million chances. At least a million, but I am sorry I didn’t give him one last one.”
“That makes sense to me.” Jason took a bite of the other half of his sandwich. Most of the bread was still dry, but someone had slopped on some sort of sauce in the middle that made it soggy. He pushed the square white plate away.
“Are you sure she sent that? Did she include a note? What do you think she was trying to say? Give me my house, and I’ll give you your toy? “
“That she’s still my mother, and that she remembers when I was her son.”
“But she has to know there’s more to mothering than showing up decades later. I’m surprised.”
“Because?”
“Why now? She’s either really sorry about the past, in which case you’d think she would have tried to get in touch before now, or she’s horribly cruel, trying to manipulate you with a memory that matters so much to you.” Fleming picked up a package of crackers and crumbled them, as if she didn’t realize what she was doing. “I don’t like that idea.” She looked up, meeting his gaze with intensity. “I want you to be careful.”
He shut the briefcase. “You always surprise me, Fleming. I thought you’d say I should go for meeting her.”
She shut her mouth. “I might have before this, but she knew what you wanted the last time you saw her, and she brought it. That makes me nervous.” Fleming ducked her head. “For you. Because I wouldn’t want you to be hurt. I hope that doesn’t overstep any boundaries.”
He shook his head. “I asked what you thought. I appreciate your opinion. It turns out that the real question I want to ask is whether you’d agree to see her if you were in the same situation.”
Fleming looked up again. He could tell she was thinking, by the little frown wrinkling the skin just above her nose. “I guess I’d see my father. I’m still sorry I didn’t that one last time.”
“And if he’d left you hanging that one last time?”
“I wouldn’t feel guilty, as if I hadn’t done the b
est I could do. It wasn’t my responsibility. That’s what my mom told me. I wasn’t the adult, but I was close to adulthood by then, and I knew right from wrong. I was just tired of feeling like an idiot for always waiting for him.”
“I am an adult.” And his mother... The toy. The strange note and call. She seemed troubled. Jason couldn’t manage to say that out loud because then he’d be committed.
“You’ll do the right thing,” Fleming said. “I believe that about you.”
Her certainty didn’t make him feel better. It made him feel responsible. He found he didn’t want to disappoint this woman he hardly knew. “Why do you trust me?” he asked.
Her grin engaged him. He liked the curve of her mouth, the warmth she shared without thinking about what she could gain or lose.
“I didn’t say I trusted you.” Her tone teased. “I said you’d do the right thing. Look at how you’re handling this loan debacle. You may not enjoy coming to town and cutting Christmas to shreds for who knows how many people. But you’re doing it. Because you have to.”
Because it was the right thing. And she was correct. He hated it.
He’d have been wiser to stay objective. He’d managed it before. Why was Bliss different than all the other towns and cities he’d visited, where he’d had to handle uncomfortable business?
He glanced at Fleming, who’d turned to study the chalkboard menu on the wall above the counter as if she held out hope there was something tastier up there than the mess on his plate.
Fleming knew how to hold on to hope.
CHAPTER TEN
ABOUT A WEEK LATER, Jason left work early and found his way back to the home his parents had abandoned. Armed with an engineer’s report and battery powered hanging lights, he inspected, starting with the roof of his house.
His house.
Maybe he was being foolish, even thinking of restoring this ruin. There were structural problems. Joists in the basement. Obviously, the porch stairs. But the second floor was apparently structurally sound. And the place belonged to him.