Christmas Surprises

by Jenn Faulk

  Madison

  Micah and Rachel's house was beautiful, of course.

  Even as Maddie sat on the floor next to the Christmas tree and played another round of Candyland with her nieces, she glanced around, marveling at how exquisite this home was. It was a lot like the home she'd owned back before when she'd been making a living on her writing, selling books that she'd be ashamed for her nieces to ever read. The house that she'd lived in then had vaulted ceilings like this house, wide open rooms just like it, and so much space.

  But her home hadn't really felt like home. Cold, unfeeling, and lonely. That's what it had been. That's what all of her life had been like before Grant, before his friendship, before God changed everything and brought her back to where she was meant to be. She'd sold the house and traded the life for God's best, and Grant had been part of the deal, a ring on her finger, purer fiction to write, a tiny apartment above Grant's restaurant to live in, and now, a child in her womb.

  She thought about space the more she grew with life. And she was appreciative of Rachel's house and all the space it offered, much like her old house. This one wasn't impersonal, though. Rachel and Micah were so happy that even the grandeur of their home couldn't feel cold or distant, not when they were constantly welcoming people in and being so warm and kind.

  "Aunt Maddie," Mia said, grinning up at her. "It's your turn."

  "Oh, that's right," Maddie said, smiling over at the small girl. "I got distracted." Even as she said it, she leaned across the floor to take a card, and her bulging midsection knocked over all three pieces on the board.

  Yes. Already, her pregnancy was making her clumsy, and the evidence of it was stretching all of her shirts thin. She wasn't even that far along, but she was tiny enough before that any change now was huge.

  She could well remember just a couple of months into the pregnancy, how she'd been in the bathroom, stepping around Grant as he brushed his teeth, both of them crowding into a space that could only fit one person comfortably, just as they had been all the days of their young marriage. Those early marriage traffic jams in the bathroom, with her fresh out of the shower, had always ended spectacularly, with Grant watching her quietly for a while as she ducked past him to try and get her clothes, then with Grant tossing away his toothbrush, picking her right up into his arms as she laughed at him, as he laid her down, as --

  Her mind had been on that, of all things, that morning as Grant had brushed his teeth. There hadn't been much of him grabbing her up and laying her down anymore, thanks to the morning sickness, which was bad, and the restaurant, which was even busier than normal. All of that had taken a backseat to life and her husband's busy schedule, and as she'd begun to get past the worst of the sickness, she'd found herself missing Grant in more than one way. So much so that she hadn't even pretended to care about modesty, dropping her towel as soon as she left the shower, hoping to grab his attention like she'd been so skilled at doing not so long ago.

  She'd gotten his attention, all right. He'd been standing there at the sink in his boxers and a T shirt, his toothbrush hanging out of his mouth and toothpaste foam lining his lips, staring at her body like he'd never seen her.

  Well, it had been a while, honestly.

  She'd prepared herself for the most amazing morning to end the most horrible drought, turning to face Grant with a smile and a simple question. "What?"

  He'd taken the toothbrush out then wiped his mouth on a towel. "You're already showing."

  She hadn't noticed until then, quite honestly. She'd lost weight, as sick as she was, and hadn't felt like looking at herself in the mirror long enough to even put on makeup, much less to mark her progress in this horrible, vomit-filled wonder called gestation.

  But she'd seen the horror in Grant's eyes and had chanced a look in the mirror.

  Well, then.

  It clearly wasn't the same body Grant had desired for so long and so often. Not the body of a woman who would even welcome his advances had he still had any desire left.

  Frail. Thinner than she'd ever been. And there it had been, a grotesque bulging that looked wrong somehow on her tiny frame.

  "Maddie," Grant had murmured, coming to her. For a split second, she'd thought that maybe his mood was changing with the way he was looking at her with something so deep in his eyes --

  "I can see your ribs," he'd said, putting his hand right to them. "I can literally count your ribs!"

  Skeletal. The word had come to mind. She'd had issues with that kind of thing before, with wasting away, with trying to be as tiny as possible, to protect herself, to be someone else. But this? Wasn't anything but morning sickness, gone now, likely soon to be replaced with pounds and cravings and roundness.

  "Have you been eating anything?," Grant had asked, concern in his eyes, suspicion in his tone.

  He knew her issues, of course. Which made it even more grating that he'd approach the topic this way, with her standing there completely bared to him.

  "I've been doing my best," she'd said. "I've been sick. Morning sickness. You know that."

  "You've got to eat, Maddie," he'd said again, his hand to her baby bump. "I mean, look at you."

  His touch. Missed for so long but not welcomed then, because it hadn't been about her. It had been about the baby.

  "You've got to take care of yourself for the baby's sake," he'd said, turning away from her, leaving her there wanting him less and less with every word he continued to say.

  "I'm eating," she'd said, thinking that it was just going to get better and better now that she wasn't going to be sick as much, past the first trimester.

  "And you will today," he'd said, squeezing past her and making his way to their bedroom... which was only two steps away.

  Tight quarters, tight words, tight emotions.

  She'd picked up her towel and wrapped it around her body, her plans for the morning changing. "I know," she'd said, still thinking that the day could be salvaged. He'd taken the morning off to go and look at things for the baby. Who knew where they were going to put anything? She didn't care. She'd just wanted the morning with him, away from the restaurant. "What's the plan?"

  "The plan," he'd said, pulling on a pair of jeans, "is that I'm going down to the kitchen to make you something to eat."

  "The kitchen," she'd breathed, knowing that once he got down there to the restaurant's kitchen he'd find some catastrophe that only he could handle, some problem that only he could solve, some issue that couldn't be dealt with later. "But Grant --"

  "You're going to gain weight, Maddie," he'd said, looking up at her from where he'd been putting on his sneakers. "That's just a fact of life, so you need to get over yourself."

  Seriously. Had she said anything like that? Had he not heard anything she'd said? Had he not been here when she'd been throwing up everything she'd ever eaten over the last fourteen weeks?

  No. No, he hadn't been there. He'd been downstairs at the restaurant.

  She'd felt like screaming, and she would have... but she'd thought about her mother. Her mother, screeching at her father like she always had, until he'd gotten up, gone away, and left them all.

  Most children of divorce, of bitter, hard divorces, can probably still figure out how to rise above their parents' history and function well in a healthy, stable relationship. Those who are in Christ and are new creations are even better equipped to do this, likely, knowing that Jesus has healed them not only from their childhood wounds but from the lasting effects.

  Most children, that is.

  But Maddie wasn't most.

  Marriage had been like this. Happy, of course, but hard. Because when it came to wrongdoing or anything even remotely resembling it on Grant's behalf, Maddie kept her mouth shut, often to her detriment and his both, simply because she didn't want to be like her mother and didn't want her marriage to end like her parents' marriage had.

  So, she didn't say a word.

  No word except "okay," absolving Grant from everything he could ever do wr
ong.

  "Besides," he'd said, standing and running his hand through his hair, his eyes never meeting hers even as he made his way to the door, "you're beautiful just like you are. No matter what."

  She might have believed him if he'd looked at her when he said it, but he'd not even glanced her way.

  He'd already been gone.

  "Aunt Maddie, you moved all the pieces!"

  That's right. Candyland. Her nieces. Rachel's gorgeous house. Grant already making dinner in the immaculate kitchen. Micah, Rachel, Taylor, and Joy acting all secretive, going back and forth from the east wing on the house, the suite back there that was twice the size of the room she and Grant shared above the restaurant.

  "The baby wants to play, too," Zoe laughed at her twin as she giggled while putting the pieces back in place. "I'll bet the baby will love Candyland as much as we do."

  "He might," Maddie said, thinking that he'd probably prefer sitting in a quiet corner, buried in a book if he was like his mother. Or in a kitchen somewhere, banging pots and pans if he was like his father.

  A frightening image of the baby crawling around the restaurant kitchen, darting in and out of the legs of all the workers, barking orders like Grant always did, ran through her mind. Grant would probably put him to work, would tell him to comp his salary for the restaurant, to put his earnings towards the mortgage --

  "Daddy calls the baby Huck," Mia said.

  "And Mommy laughs about it," Zoe added.

  "But we don't get the joke," they said together.

  They were creepy like that sometimes. Identical copies of one another, as good looking as their parents but... creepy, with their twin talk and little looks and tiny hands...

  Maddie was worried about being a mother, obviously. She wasn't good with kids. She would likely be as bad at this mothering thing as her own mother had been.

  She was feeling insecure about almost everything these days, actually.

  "Huck Finn," she said, relieved to settle on a topic she did know. Books. "He's a character in a book."

  "Is the book about Huck Finn as good as all of your books?," Zoe asked.

  Ahh, innocence. Assuming that Aunt Maddie, who wrote books in a sub genre so tiny that no one had ever even heard of her, was on par with an American classic.

  "Even better," Maddie said.

  Yeah, her old books had sold better than Mark Twain's had in his lifetime, but she'd been done with that for quite a while now. She'd wondered at the wisdom of signing away all future royalty rights since then, but Grant had been supportive about it, telling her like he told her so often back then, with stars in his eyes and true love in his voice, "You're being just who Christ intends for you to be, Maddie."

  Christ intended for them to be poor, apparently. Which was fine. If they could only be poor and happy.

  They were excelling at the first. But the second was elusive.

  "It's your turn," Mia prompted, just as the doorbell rang.

  "Hold up," Maddie said, noting that Rachel, Micah, Joy, and Taylor were all still wherever they'd run off to in the east wing, while Grant continued on in the kitchen. "I've gotta get the door."

  But first, she had to get up, which was a real struggle. Not even into the third trimester yet and already gigantic. Well, as gigantic as a woman who was naturally as small as she was could get. Grant had been feeding her around the clock.

  "Hey."

  Speaking of, there he was, looking down at her with concern as she continued to try and get to her feet.

  "Are you going to get the door?," he asked, wiping his brow with his forearm, his hands covered in flour.

  "Yes," she said. "If I can get up."

  "Here," he said, putting his arm out. "Let me help."

  So, she put her hands to his arm, the same arm that even now, even all these years after they'd first fallen in love, he put her hand on as they walked together, almost always leaning down to kiss her with the contact, even if his attention was divided at times and his tone was critical.

  Or at least she heard it that way.

  With her on her feet now, he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. "I made you a snack," he said softly. "You need to eat."

  There it was again.

  "I already ate," she said. "You made a huge breakfast for me."

  "But you need to snack, too."

  "What's the snack?," she asked, imagining any number of healthy, organic things he was constantly whipping up these days in between rushes at the restaurant, setting them aside for her because it's good for the baby.

  What vile, disgusting thing had he created for her now that she'd have to pretend to like? Oh, I see what you did there with the kale and quinoa, Grant. Mmmm. Delicious.

  But that wasn't it.

  "I made you tiramisu," he said softly.

  She looked at him with surprise. He'd made that for her every day back when they'd been falling in love...

  "A whole pan of tiramisu?," Mia squealed, even as they all began making their way to the front door.

  "I want some!," Zoe trilled.

  "You two are just like your mother," Grant muttered, his arm around Maddie, his flour covered fingers swiping war paint onto his nieces' faces. "And where is your mother?"

  "Who knows," the two girls sighed together.

  Grant raised his eyebrows at Maddie. Freaky. She could hear him say it. Because he usually said it at least once every time they were around the girls.

  They understood each other on some things, at least. Maybe that was enough.

  Maybe. She managed a soft laugh as he continued to shake his head at his nieces, and he looked over at her, a smile on his lips.

  You have the greatest laugh.

  He'd said that more than once, but her mind went back to the last time she could remember him saying it, a few years ago when the debt was nowhere near being paid off, she was still hopeful that her writing career in her new genre would take off, and they'd been newlyweds.

  She'd helped him in the restaurant until closing, like she'd done until the pregnancy and the morning sickness, afternoon sickness, evening sickness, all the time sickness started in, and like he had been helping her with her writing, like he always had, much later on back in their room.

  "Okay, read that new part to me," she'd said, her hands in his hair, his head in her lap, both of their eyes on her laptop and the story she'd been working on.

  "You love my voice that much?," he'd asked, kissing her knee even as his hand trailed up her thigh.

  "I do, but any voice will do. Besides my own, that is. I've got to hear this little section of dialogue outside of my own head."

  "Where do I need to start?," he'd asked.

  "Right here," she'd pointed.

  He'd taken a breath and begun. "He put his hand to her face, looking down at her. 'I was intending forever.' Oh, the very thought. Amazing. He was just as eager as she was. And just as certain." Then, in a different voice, a higher falsetto, "'I'm going to be happy with you,' she said softly, rising up on her toes to kiss him again. 'Happier than I thought I could be.'"

  And her heroine, sounding like a screechy Grant while delivering (she could admit it) cheesy lines had been enough to make her begin to giggle.

  "'Mmm,' he murmured, bringing her even closer, kissing her --" Grant had stopped reading and looked up at her. "Will you stop laughing? Good grief, Maddie, you keep jostling my head around with your giggling --"

  This had made her laugh outright, loud and clear, a sound that even then was so strange to her, given how little she'd had to laugh about and love before Grant had come into her life.

  He'd just smiled at her, turning over onto his back so that he could look up at her, even as she'd held his face in her hands and leaned forward to kiss his lips.

  "You make a great hero, Grant," she'd said. "Even the cheesy lines sound good coming from you. But the heroine's voice?"

  "I don't sound pretty enough, do I?," he'd asked.

  "No," she'd laughed again.
r />   "You have the greatest laugh," he'd murmured. "It's my favorite sound."

  "More than the credit card machine downstairs?," she'd asked, joking with him. "Or the sound of the door from the kitchen to the dining room opening up again and again? More even than the sound of the plates being put onto tables?"

  He'd loved those sounds, too. She could tell when he was at work, when he'd smile at his success.

  "Oh, easily," he'd said, sitting up and pulling her into his arms. "But maybe I mis-spoke before. Maybe your laugh isn't my favorite sound."