Mom shakes flour off her fingers and reaches for a baking dish.
“So you brought her in,” she says. “Gave her a bed.”
I tense, waiting for the lecture about boundaries, about my heart, about gossip. It doesn’t come. Instead, she sets the dish down with just a little more emphasis than necessary and looks at me square.
“You did the right thing,” she says. “Can’t leave anybody in a ditch on Christmas Eve.”
Some of the tension in my shoulders eases. “I figured Jesus wouldn’t approve.”
She snorts. “Jesus definitely wouldn’t approve of anyone leaving a girl in a wedding dress out to freeze, no matter what history there is.”
There it is. The out loud acknowledgement of the thing that has been pulsing under every word.
“She’s staying for now,” I say. “Just today. Until we can figure out the car and the roads. After that… I don’t know. That’s her business.”
Mom studies me for a long moment, weighing how much to say. Finally, she nods.
“All right. We’ll deal with today when today gets here. First order of business is Christmas morning with the kids. We’ll worry about runaways and broken hearts after the presents are opened.”
“Kids’ll lose their minds if there’s a stranger in the kitchen before stockings,” I mutter.
“Exactly,” she says. “Let them have their morning first. We’ll tell them… later. After I have more coffee.”
That’s as close as she’s going to get toI’m worried about you, but I’m not going to say it yet.
We move through the next half hour on autopilot. I help her with the stockings, make sure the tree lights are still working, and check the fire in the living room. Rusty follows me the whole time, nails clicking, giving me expectant looks, as if trying to say,It’s present time, right? I get a present, right?
“You’ll get your present when the girls get theirs,” I tell him. “You’re not special.”
He wags his stump of a tail anyway.
By the time the sky outside the kitchen windows shifts from black to gunmetal gray, I hear the first stirrings from down the hall.
Small bare feet on wood. A door creaks open.
“Daddy?”
I turn. Lila stands at the hall entrance, hair a rumpled halo, rubbing sleep from her eyes with the back of one fist. Her pinkpajamas bunch at one ankle, one sleeve pushed up past her elbow.
“Merry Christmas, Beanpole.”
She blinks up at me, then at the tree in the living room, and suddenly she’s wide awake.
“Santa came,” she breathes.
“Oh, did he?” I say. “How can you tell?”
She points at the stockings, now fuller, and the pile under the tree that wasn’t there when she went to bed.
“He left footprints,” she whispers.
Mom comes around the corner, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
“He sure did,” she says. “And he ate the cookie you left out, too. Rusty almost did, but I warned him Santa would know.”
Rusty flops dramatically by the hearth, as if to say he’s been railroaded.
Lila giggles and runs to check the plate. Only crumbs and a chocolate smear remain.
