The Perfect Christmas Gift

by Sarah Ettritch

  Emily smiled too broadly. “Hey, our bladders are bursting and we’ve been cooped up in this car for hours. Let’s talk about it another time, okay?”

  “Okay,” Casey said, even though it wasn’t. She slumped in her seat and folded her arms. She could tell when she was being put off. Another time could mean months, or never. Casey understood that Emily’s last relationship had burned her, and she’d agreed to take it slow, but after all this time… It was Emily’s apartment. Casey would just have to accept it. She wasn’t a jerk. But she couldn’t help but feel that she was seeing a future Emily wasn’t.

  They arrived at the Tim Hortons. Inside, tinsel hung from the counter and Christmas music was playing. Normally Casey would hum along, but her Christmas spirit had packed up and left for the season.

  *****

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Casey tightened a Christmas light and crossed her fingers. When Mid pounced at the string of lights, she shooed the black cat away. “Try it now.”

  Gran plugged in the lights. When they lit up, she clapped her hands. “Now we can put them on the tree.”

  Casey grunted.

  Gran unplugged the lights. “What’s wrong with you? You haven’t been yourself since you went to see Clara’s granddaughter.”

  That had been two days ago. “She hasn’t called back.”

  “It’s Christmas. People are busy.”

  “But all she had to do was call Clara and ask if I could have her phone number. She said she’d do it later that day, but I guess not.”

  Gran frowned. “I told you I’d pay you no matter what.”

  That wasn’t the point. “I want to give Lily more than, ‘she’s alive.’” When Gran loomed over her and held out her hand, Casey offered her one end of the string of lights.

  “From what you told me, she’ll know it’s Lily who’s trying to contact her.” Gran clipped a light onto one of the artificial branches and moved away a step. “If she doesn’t want to talk to her, Lily will have to accept that.”

  “That’s if her granddaughter called her. Clara could still be in the dark.”

  “Then you’ll have done all you can.” Gran attached another light. “That’s not what’s bothering you, anyway.”

  “I won’t have done all I can. I can try to get to Clara some other way, but it won’t be in time for Christmas.”

  “Lily’s been waiting for over fifty years. She can wait until after Christmas, if it comes to that. But that’s not what’s bothering you.”

  Casey pushed herself to her feet. “Yes, it is.”

  “Only a little. It’s Emily.”

  Casey moved to the other side of the tree, where Gran couldn’t see her. “Why do you think it’s Emily?”

  “Because she’s the only one who could make you so miserable. What’s wrong? If you’d broken up, I’d know it, so it’s not that.”

  Casey was about to ask Gran how she’d know, then clamped her mouth shut. If Emily had dumped her, she wouldn’t be here hanging Christmas lights on the tree. She’d be shut in her room, playing jilted love songs and crying into her pillow. “I still haven’t found her a gift.”

  “It’s not that,” Gran said.

  Casey let out an exasperated sigh. “Okay, all right. She won’t give me a key to her apartment.”

  Gran rounded the tree, almost stepping on Casey’s toe. “And that’s upset you.”

  Casey plunked into the nearest chair, giving up all pretense of hanging lights. She’d only done one, anyway. “I don’t understand why she doesn’t want to. It’s not that she doesn’t trust me in her apartment. I’m over there pretty often. She’s gone out for a couple of hours while I’m there. So what would be the big deal about giving me a key?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want you dropping in whenever you feel like it.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. I’d only go when we’d agreed. It would mainly be so I don’t have to rush out with her in the mornings.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want you making yourself at home.”

  That was pretty much the same reason as Gran’s first guess. Casey wouldn’t make herself at home. It would still be Emily’s apartment.

  Gran clipped on another light. “Maybe she’d see it as a commitment and she’s not ready for that yet.”

  Bingo. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “And that’s upset you.”

  “Wouldn’t you be upset? We’ve been together for six months. It’s been good. I’m over there a lot. What difference would a key make? It wouldn’t mean she has to marry me.” Casey studied her fingernails. “I would have told her that, if she’d been willing to discuss it. But she wasn’t. She didn’t even say no. She said we’ll talk about it another time.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Gran,” Casey wailed. “Saying you’ll talk about it another time is like saying you’ll do lunch with someone. It rarely happens.”

  Gran stood back to survey the tree. “It’s a start,” she muttered. She turned to Casey. “So Emily doesn’t want to give you a key. Do you love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to be with her?”

  “Yes,” Casey said emphatically.

  “Then let it roll off your back.”

  “But—”

  “Emily’s a lovely woman, better than anyone else you ever brought round. I can see she loves you. You said yourself it’s been good. Do you want to spoil it over a key? Don’t blow this up into something it isn’t.”

  “But—”

  “If you stay together, you’ll eventually get a key. It might be to a home that’s both of yours, and not to her apartment, but you’ll get a key. Right now, you have the most important key.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The key to her heart.”

  Casey gaped at her. “That’s mushy. You’re not usually mushy.”

  “It’s Christmas. I’ll be back to my old self next week.” Gran clipped on another light, then stepped back again. “Do you want a coffee?”

  “Sure,” Casey mumbled, still smarting over Emily’s unwillingness to discuss the key. She saw Gran’s point. She did not want to lose Emily over this. If she did, she’d deserve the “cut off her nose to spite her face” trophy, and the “stupidest woman in the world” ribbon. So she’d smile through the hurt and try not to think about it every time Emily slipped her key into her apartment door lock.

  “I’ll put the coffee on,” Gran said. “You get off your ass and hang some decorations.”

  What had happened to Gran being her old self next week? Casey rose and went to the box that came out of storage once a year. Her phone rang. She snatched it up from the coffee table. “Hello.”

  “Hi, is this Casey?”

  Casey recognized the voice. She tried not to sound too eager. “Hi, Megan.”

  “Sorry it’s taken me a couple of days to call you,” Megan said. “My grandmother wanted some time to think.”

  “No problem,” Casey said faintly. She braced herself. “What did she say?”

  “She said she’ll talk to you.”

  Yes!

  “I’m not sure if she wants to meet the guy, though. I guess she’ll decide after seeing you.”

  Part of Clara’s reluctance could be Megan’s assumption that the mystery person in her past was a man. Could she tell her family it was a woman? Did she want to? “She doesn’t want to talk to me on the phone?”

  “She’s in a retirement home. They share a phone.”

  Ah, that would be why Casey couldn’t find a phone number for her under her maiden or married names.

  “I think she wants to see you to make sure she can trust you. Be gentle, okay? Whoever this guy is, he can still affect her. I could hear it in her voice. She wants to keep his name a secret, too. I offered to be with her when she sees you, but she insisted on doing it alone, I’m guessing because she wants to keep it hush-hush. She made me promise not to bring it up at the Christmas dinner table.”

  Casey
imagined the look on everyone’s faces if Megan mentioned it and Clara spilled the beans. They’d all remember it as one of those family Christmases. Was Clara determined to keep Lily’s name out of it because she intended to ask Casey to relay her regrets to Lily, or was she just being cautious? As Megan had said, there were a lot of sharks out there trying to make a fast buck off seniors.

  “If I can’t talk to her on the phone, how can I set up a time to see her?” Casey asked.

  “You can see her any afternoon this week. She’ll be leaving on Christmas Eve, but she’ll be back on the twenty-eighth, if you can’t see her before then.”

  “I’ll see her tomorrow. I can just drop in any time during the afternoon?”

  “Yes. Here’s the address.”

  Casey grabbed the notepad she’d learned to keep in the living room. She paused before writing down the city. “You mean she’s living here, in Weston?”

  “She lived alone for a few years after my grandfather died. When she decided to sell up and move into a retirement home, she chose the place she’s in now. She had to wait a couple of years to get in, but she insisted that it had to be that one. She moved there five years ago.”

  Casey stared at the address again. If she was thinking of the right street, Clara had been living three blocks away from Lily for the past five years.

  *****

  Casey pasted a smile on her face and knocked on the open door to Clara’s unit. The woman inside looked up from the book she was reading and studied Casey with shrewd eyes. “You must be the private investigator,” she said in a thin voice.

  “Casey Cook.” She whipped out her licence and held it up.

  Clara closed her book and rested it on her lap. “Come in, dear. I can’t see it from here.”

  “Sorry.” Casey stood in front of Clara and handed her the licence. The elderly woman had less hair than she did in the black-and-white photo Lily treasured.

  Clara adjusted her glasses. “Thank you.” She looked up at Casey. “You look young for a private investigator.”

  “I get that a lot.” Casey slipped the licence back into her pocket.

  “Would you mind shutting the door, dear?”

  Casey closed the door. Clara folded her hands on her book. “You’re here about Lily.”

  “Yes, I am.” There was only one chair in the room, the one Clara was sitting in, so Casey remained standing. “She—well, my gran hired me to look for you, as a Christmas present for Lily.”

  Clara’s brows shot up. “A Christmas present?”

  Casey nodded. “Lily wants to know how you are. I think she’d like to see you.”

  “She isn’t still angry with me, then?”

  “No,” Casey said, pondering how much to tell Clara. She’d found her. She could pass Clara’s address along to Lily and let her decide what to do. But she was curious, and she liked happy endings. “She thinks about you a lot—in a good way.”

  “Oh, my.” Clara rubbed an imaginary smudge off the book’s cover. “What do you think of that, dear? Lily thinking about me…” She gave Casey a coy look. “In a good way?”

  Casey answered what she thought Clara was asking. “I think it’s great. I have a girlfriend. We’ve been together for six months.”

  Clara’s answering smile was tinged with sadness. “You’re very lucky. How times have changed! I wish…well, it’s all water under the bridge now. We can’t choose when we’re born. We do the best we can.”

  “You didn’t show up when you and Lily were going to go away together. Was it because of how it was back then? That it wasn’t accepted?”

  “I like to tell myself it was, dear, but Lily was waiting, wasn’t she? She didn’t worry about what everyone would think.” Clara met Casey’s eyes. “That’s a trap, dear. Worrying about everyone else. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t worry about what others think, or how difficult life would be. I ended up living a different sort of difficult life because I married the wrong person.” She gazed past Casey’s shoulder.

  Casey twisted to look behind her. She was standing in front of a bureau loaded with photographs, some black-and-white, others bursting with colour. She recognized Megan in a couple of them, and a younger Clara with a man who must have been her husband. Everyone was beaming.

  “Charlie was a perfectly decent and interesting man,” Clara said, when Casey turned back to her, “but he was a man. I was content. I can’t say I was happy, especially knowing what could have been. But I made my choice, and I have my beautiful children and grandchildren. I don’t regret them at all. I regret denying myself and Charlie true happiness.”

  “So if you could do it all over again…”

  “I’d choose Lily,” Clara said quietly. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that I live so close to her, dear? I always kept up with where she was and what she was doing. Early on, I wished she’d marry, but later, I realized I only wanted that because I’d feel less guilty.” Clara swallowed. “And she thinks about me a lot, you said.”

  “She does.”

  “She should have forgotten about me. And I feel terrible, because part of me is glad she didn’t. A big part of me. More than half,” she added, making Casey chuckle.

  Casey shifted her weight. “It’s not too late. She wants to see you.”

  “You think it’s not too late for two old ladies like us, dear?”

  “It’s never too late for love.”

  Clara sighed. “Spoken like the young woman you are.” She looked down at the book and rubbed its cover again. “And perhaps a wise woman, too. It would be silly of me not to see her. Though I have seen her, dear, several times, but from a distance. I was too afraid to speak to her, especially since I wasn’t sure what I’d do if she wanted to speak to me.” Clara laughed. “Isn’t that silly?”

  Casey grinned. “I have to say, you seem pretty calm about it all. I wasn’t sure how you’d react to hearing about Lily after all these years, but I didn’t know you were…” Stalking her? “Keeping track of her.”

  Clara’s eyes widened. “You should have seen me after Megan phoned on Sunday. It’s one thing to wonder about someone and catch a glimpse every now and then. It’s quite another to find out they’ve been thinking about you, too. I was in quite the tizzy. I didn’t sleep a wink for two nights. But then I told myself that it was Lily, and she may be angry but she must still care in some way, and that I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.”

  “You’ll see her, then?”

  “Yes, dear. I want to.”

  Casey would pump her fist into the air later. She didn’t want to accidentally punch Clara in the nose. “Will you tell your family about her? I’m sure Megan will ask.”

  “I’m going to do what I should have done all those years ago. Not worry about what they’ll think. In this day and age, if they love me, they’ll wish me happiness. Now, when can I see her?”

  Casey wasn’t sure how Lily would react if they showed up without any notice. “I’ll take you to see her tomorrow afternoon.” There was no way Casey would miss witnessing this reunion. She’d stay for five minutes, then let them have their privacy. “Unless you’d rather wait until after Christmas.”

  “Tomorrow, dear. At my age, you don’t put things off. You tell Lily tomorrow. If there’s a problem, call here and leave me a message, but I hope you’ll be here tomorrow at two.”

  “Me, too.”

  Clara pointed to a cane leaning against the wall, next to her chair. “Give me my cane, dear. I’ll walk you out.”

  Casey handed Clara her cane and put the book on her bed. She supported Clara’s elbow as the elderly woman slowly rose. “You said you have a girlfriend,” Clara said, as they walked down the corridor to the elevator.

  “Yes.”

  “Never worry about what anyone thinks. Especially your family.”

  Casey nodded. When it came to Emily, she wasn’t worried about her family. She worried that Emily wasn’t seeing the same future she was. Perhaps Emily was content with
their relationship, but not truly happy.

  *****

  In her bedroom, Casey stuck the last piece of tape onto Emily’s wrapped present and pressed a red bow on top of it. She surveyed her handiwork. The gift looked like a mess. Wrapping a mug wasn’t easy. She should have forgotten about giving it to her and put the spa gift card into something else. Yeah, a spa gift card. She’d admitted defeat when it came to finding the perfect gift. She’d still had time. Christmas Eve was two days away. But she’d conceded that wandering a crowded mall for another five hours would be futile. A spa day wasn’t bad. Emily could use a massage after supervising all those exams and marking stacks of papers. She’d enjoy being pampered. Casey shook her head. Hopefully Emily wouldn’t need as much convincing about her gift as she did.

  She jumped when the apartment buzzer sounded, even though she was expecting it. She quickly hid Emily’s gift in a dresser drawer and went into the living room. Gran already had her coat on. “Isn’t this exciting? I can’t wait to see Lily’s face.” She pulled Casey into a hug and squeezed her. “You did good. Worth every penny.”

  “Thanks, Gran,” Casey squeaked. When Gran let go, Casey gulped down air and opened the apartment door. Emily strode from the elevator and smiled. “You ready?”

  “Yep.” Casey gave her a peck on the cheek and grabbed her jacket. She hadn’t protested when Emily had offered to drive them all to Lily’s. Emily wanted and deserved to be there. She’d helped find Clara.

  Twenty minutes later, they’d picked up Clara and were driving the three blocks to Lily’s place. Clara and Gran were in the backseat, but they weren’t chatting. Anticipation and a touch of apprehension were in the air. Lily must be waiting for them, with butterflies in her stomach. Casey wondered if she was in her best clothes, like Clara. In her dress, makeup, and shined shoes, Clara looked as if she was off to church.

  “What’s your name again, dear?” Clara said.