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Snowbound with the Single Dad
by Cara Colter
CHAPTER ONE
“THERE’S MY LITTLE Christmas star!”
Noelle felt a swell of joy as she watched her grandfather, Rufus, shut down the tractor and climb down off it. He paused to lift the old black Lab, Smiley, out of the cab. Then he turned and came through the snow toward her, Smiley shuffling behind him with his happy grin in place, despite the dog’s pained gait.
She was relieved to see that, unlike Smiley, her grandpa was agile, surprisingly strong-looking for a man of seventy-eight years. He was dressed for cold, in a thick woolen toque, mittens and a lined plaid lumber jacket.
His embrace, too, was powerful as he came and hugged her tight, lifting her right off her feet.
He put her down and regarded her. “You haven’t been losing weight, have you?”
“No,” she said quickly, although she wasn’t at all certain. She had always been a slight girl, but she hadn’t been near a weigh scale since the abrupt end of her engagement. Noelle was fairly certain you could not lose weight eating chocolate ice cream for supper. And also, sometimes, for breakfast.
Their worry was mutual. It was to be their first Christmas without Grandma McGregor. In those months after Grandma had died, there had been something in her grandpa’s voice on the phone, which Noelle had not heard before—a weariness, a disconnect, as if he was not quite there. Sometimes he had made mistakes about what day it was, and seemed confused about other small details of daily life. Other times he had reminisced so obsessively about the past that Noelle had been convinced he was declining, too, dying of a broken heart.
Then, a few weeks ago, she had noticed an improvement. To her great surprise and relief, he’d actually seemed excited about Christmas. It had always been such a magical time of year in her family, partly because it was her birthday, too. Would it be too much to expect a Christmas miracle that would begin to heal their losses this year?
But when Noelle had driven into the yard and seen her grandpa had not put up a single decoration, she had felt her heart fall. Then, when she had noticed the tractor tracks, heading off into nowhere, she’d been frightened. He didn’t have cattle anymore. Where was he going? She’d followed along the tracks with great trepidation.
“Grandpa.” She sighed, feeling that sense of coming home. She got down on her knees and gave Smiley a long hug and an ear scratching before she got up and surveyed her grandfather’s project.
He seemed to be clearing snow in a large square in the middle of what used to be a cow pasture. “What on earth are you doing?”
His arm looped over her shoulder, he turned and looked with pleasure at his handiwork.
“I’m building me a helicopter landing pad,” he said, and her sense of well-being plummeted.
“A what?” she stammered.
“You heard me. Don’t go giving me that have-you-lost-your-mind look. Come on, we’ll go to the house and have coffee. You brought everything you need for a nice Christmas at the ranch?”
She thought he might want to take the tractor back to the house, but instead he turned with her and walked the pounded-down snow of the tractor track, Smiley dogging their heels.
“Yes.” Noelle hesitated, and then asked, “I wondered why you didn’t have any decorations up yet?”
“I thought it would be good to do it together.”
Even though she had never helped with things like putting the outside lights up, she loved the idea of them working together to re-create Christmases like the ones they had always enjoyed.
“That sounds fun. I’m so looking forward to the break. I’ll be here now until just after New Year’s.”
“Ah, good. Good. Everybody else will leave Boxing Day, so we’ll have a bit of time for just you and me.”
“What do you mean everybody?” she asked, surprised.
“Oh, my goodness, Ellie,” he said, calling her by his pet name for her, “wait until I show you what I’ve gone and done. Have you ever heard of Me-Sell?”
She cocked her head at him quizzically.
“You know, the place on the interstate where you put the ads up?”
“The internet? Oh, you mean I-Sell? That huge online classified ad site?”
“That’s it!”
The thought of her grandpa on I-Sell gave her pause. He still heated his house with wood. He received two channels on his old television set—if he fiddled with the rabbit ears on top of it long enough. He did not own a cell phone, not that there was signal anywhere near here. He and Grandma had never had a computer, never mind the internet.
“I go down to the library in the village and use the interstate,” he said.
“Internet,” she corrected him weakly.
“Whatever. I decided to sell some of my old machines out in the barn. Just taking up space. Ed down the road got a pretty penny for his. He did it all on I-Sell.”
“Do you need money?” she asked, appalled that somehow this had passed her by in their weekly telephone conversations. She got out here to visit him at least once a month. Why hadn’t she noticed he was pinching his pennies? Had her own double heartbreak made her that self-involved?
“Good grief, no! Got more money than I know what to do with since I sold off most of the land except for this little parcel around the home place.”
Another of the recent heartbreaking losses had been that decision to sell off most of the land that had been in the McGregor family for generations. There was no one left to work it. In her fantasies, Noelle had hoped one day she and Mitchell would buy it back.
They came over a little rise, and both of them paused. There it sat, the home place, prettier than a Christmas card. Surrounded by mounds of white snow was a large two-story house, pale yellow with deep indigo shutters, a porch wrapping around the whole lower floor, smoke chugging out the rock chimney.
If her grandmother had been alive, the house would have been decorated by now, December 21. There would have been lights along the roofline and a huge wreath on the front door, the word HOPE peeking out from under a big red bow. The huge blue spruce in the front yard would have been dripping with lights. But this year there was not a single decoration, and it made Noelle’s eyes smart, even if her grandfather had waited for her to do it.
Behind the house was a barn, once red, now mostly gray. In the near distance the foothills, snow dusted, rolled away from them, and in the far distance the peaks of the Rockies were jagged and white against a bright blue sky.
They passed the barn on the way to the house, and two large gray horses with feathered feet and dappled rumps came running out of a paddock behind it.
“Hello, Fred, hello, Ned,” she said affectionately.
Noelle went over to the fence and held out her hand. Fred blew a warm cloud of moist air onto her hand. She reached up to touch his nose, but just as she did, a tiny little horse, as black as Smiley, exploded through the snow from behind the barn, and the other two took off, snorting and blowing.
The tiny horse, having successfully chased away the competition, strained its neck to reach over the fence, and nipped at where her fingers dangled.
She snatched them away, and the pony gave an indignant shake of its scruffy black mane and charged off in the direction it had come.
“Who—or what—is that?” she asked.
“That’s Gidget,” her grandfather said. “She seems like a nasty little piece of work, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to find a po
ny close to Christmas.”
“A pony for Christmas?”
Noelle shot her grandfather a look. Again, she had the terrifying thought her grandfather might be slipping, that maybe he thought she was a little girl again.
“She’s a Christmas surprise.”
“Oh! You’re keeping someone’s surprise pony until Christmas?”
“Something like that. Look at you shivering. City gal.”
He took his toque off, revealing a head of very thick silver hair. He placed it on her own head and pulled it tenderly over her ears, as if she was, indeed, twelve again and not twenty-three. This time, instead of terrifying her, the casual gesture made her feel deeply loved.
