AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Marigold throws the door open wide and leaps into the arms of the man standing on her doormat. “Elijah!” she shouts, her arms so tight around his neck that he’s forced to lift her off the ground.
“Hi, Mum,” he says. His words are tinged with the slightest British lilt, and Marigold loves it when her thirty-year-old son calls herMum.
She slowly loosens her grasp on Elijah and he sets her back on her feet. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” Her eyes are shining as she looks up at her boy, who is six-foot-four.
Elijah takes off the newsboy cap he’s wearing over his brown hair, holding it in one hand. “Because,” he says impishly, “I wanted to surprise you.”
Marigold reaches up to hug him again, noticing for the first time that he’s got a huge, overstuffed duffel bag sitting on the porch at his feet, and behind him is a gorgeous Christmas tree wrapped in a thick, clear plastic bag.
“Did you bring me a tree?” she asks, laughing as she looks back and forth between her son and the five-foot tree that’s laying on its side on her porch.
Elijah turns and looks back at it. “In fact I did.” He lifts up his duffel bag. “I know you, and I figured you’d skip the tree and just put a few candles and angels out if you were doing Christmas alone.”
“Are you staying for Christmas?” Marigold’s chest fills with and excitement that nearly bubbles over.
“If you’ll have me.” Elijah ducks his head shyly.
He’s always been like this, her boy, just a bit shy and uncertain, though he’s gotten height and good looks and charm from both parents, and wherever he goes, women eye him with interest. But the best part of Elijah is the way that he’s blissfully unaware of his own magnetic pull.
“Get in here,” Marigold nearly yells, yanking the sleeve of her baby boy’s sweater and tugging him over the threshold.
“Thanks, mum,” he says with a genuine laugh. “I’ll just grab the tree and drag it inside, then maybe we can decorate it together.”
“Buddy,” Marigold says, using the nickname she’s called him since he was just a tiny boy, “we can do absolutely anything you want. I’m so happy you’re here.”
“Aw, don’t cry.” Elijah grins at her happily, clearly pleased that his surprise is going over so well. “I missed you, and I thought it was crazy for both of us to spend Christmas alone when we could spend it together.”
Marigold wraps her arms around her son’s midsection, her cheek brushing against the front of his sweater as she hugs him one more time, inhaling the smell of his laundry detergent, his long journey, and the open water over which he’s traveled with a plastic-wrapped pine tree in tow. For her. Just to see her.
With a smile, Marigold looks up at her son. “We’re going to have the best Christmas ever,” she says, pulling away from Elijah. “But the very first thing we’re going to have iscoffee.”
She pours them each a mug and brings out the cream, setting it on the table as they settle in.
“So how’s your dad?” Marigold asks, pouring cream into her mug and keeping her eyes on the swirl of white as it mixes in with the rich coffee. She stirs it and passes the cream to her son.
“Dad is alright,” Elijah says, keeping his eyes on Marigold’s face. He’s been through a lot with his parents over the years, and Marigold likes to keep things light when talking about Cobb with their son. No matter what’s gone on between her and her ex-husband, they’d made a deal years ago never to let their words about one another be hurtful. And they’ve stuck to that religiously, but now that Elijah is a grown man, he must know from observing them that there’s plenty more emotion running beneath the surface of their placid inquiries about one another. “He’s got cows.”
Marigold’s eyebrows shoot up over the rim of her coffee cup. “Cows? Pardon me?”
Elijah shrugs, like nothing his parents do can shock him. “Yeah. Apparently all landed gentry need cows and milkmaids.”
“Milkmaids?” Marigold’s voice goes higher than her eyebrows.
“I’m kidding about that part, Mum. No milkmaids. Dad is single and refuses to go into London for much of anything these days. He’s discovered the magic of ordering everything online, and most days he wanders the house with a book in one hand, looking for his reading glasses.”
“Which are on top of his head,” they say in unison, nodding and laughing as they do.
“He never changes, does he?” Marigold asks mildly, sipping her coffee and going quiet as the music changes to Christmas jazz.
“No, not too much,” Elijah says noncommittally. He’s avoiding her gaze.
Marigold loves holidays and family. She always has. Growing up in Vermont with a Mexican mother and a Dutch father was never boring. It was all maple syrup and changing leaves, combined with the smell of spices and albondigas soup. It was homemade tamales at Christmas, an ofrenda for Dia de los Muertos full of offerings for departed ancestors, and her mother shouting up the stairs in Spanish for Marigold and her sister to hurry up and get to the bus stop in the mornings. It was little wooden tulips and windmills sent from her grandparents in Holland for the Feast of Sinterklaas, and the way her dad never yelled or seemed ruffled by anything. It was her mother’s fiery temper and easy laugh combined with her father’s reserved, stoic attitude. It had been a perfect small town life for a girl who got pulled into a much bigger life, and all of it had informed the way she raised Elijah and showed him the world.
“Well,” Marigold says, setting her mug on the table. “We need to make a list of all the Christmas things we want to do while you’re here.” The kitchen is warm and cozy, with small pieces of stained glass hanging in front of the windows to catch the light, and a hodgepodge of coffee mugs in every color and design resting on the drying rack next to the sink.
“I’m too late for Sinterklaas,” Elijah says, looking disappointed. “Don’t tell Santa, but I always loved Sinterklaas more.” He smiles at Marigold through his long lashes, and she watches his face, remembering Elijah as a sweet little boy who loved his grandparents dearly. Marigold’s mother and father had both died of cancer in their sixties, and where her sister suddenly seemed rootless and lost, Marigold had felt grounded by her husband and son and their life in the English countryside. It’s only now, as she enters her fifties, that she realizes how much she deeply misses them both and wishes they were still alive.
“Don’t you worry,” Marigold says reassuringly. “Sinterklaas will make an exception for you. He’ll visit.”
