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“Yes and yes. Let’s get your shoes on, and I’ll grab the snack bag on the way out the door. We’re going for a little drive.”
Willow sent her mother a quick text explaining the newdevelopment, grabbed the snack bag, and ushered Emma to the car. As she buckled her daughter into her car seat, Willow’s thoughts returned to Noah Tannehill’s phone call. Drew must have had some reason to bring up Santa Claus. Wonder what it was?
“What happened to your hands?”
Noah ignored the question and turned a scowl toward the boy seated at the small table in the kitchen section of his workshop. “Do you want warm milk or hot apple cider?”
“Can I have hot chocolate?”
“No.” Noah didn’t have any hot chocolate. “Milk or cider. Those are your choices.”
“Milk, I guess. I’d rather have hot chocolate.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“What does that mean?”
“That a boy who needs something warm to drink should be satisfied with what he gets even if it’s not exactly what he wants.”
“I like milk, too.” The kid—Drew—rifled through a container filled with screws that Noah had sitting on the table. “I just like chocolate milk better.”
Noah filled a brown earthenware mug with milk and set it in the microwave. While the oven did its thing, he folded his arms and studied the boy. Noah’s temper had risen from simmer to stew when he learned that the boy had come from the lodge by Mirror Lake instead of wandering off the Triple T Ranch. While the chance of falling through the ice in one of the few deeper sections was minimal, Drew could have easily gotten wet up to his waist.
Hypothermia could have killed the kid. Noah did not need another senseless death anywhere close to his world. “What made you think it was a good idea to go off in the woods alone? Not to mention walking on the ice.”
“I dunno.” Drew shrugged his shoulders. “I just needed to be by myself for a little while. My mom worries about me a bunch, and sometimes that makes me want to be away from everything.”
That took some of the heat out of Noah’s irritation.Been there, done that.He’d never forget the look on his mom’s face that one Easter dinner when he, Daniel, and Dad had all been called into a four-alarm downtown. The weight of a mother’s concern could be a heavy burden. “Why does your mom worry about you?”
Again, that little shrug. “It’s complicated.”
Okay, this kid was too young to say something like that.
Ding.Noah turned back toward the microwave, removed the mug of milk, and placed it on the table in front of the boy.
“Thank you.” Drew tugged off his hat and gloves and stuck them into his coat pocket.
“You’re welcome. So why aren’t you in school?”
“We’re already done for the day,” the boy replied. He lifted the mug and took a sip. “I’m homeschooled. When we moved here in January, I was going to go to St. Luke’s School, but they didn’t have room for me. I didn’t want to go to public school because I was bullied at my school in Nashville and the third-grade teacher in Lake in the Clouds scared me, so my mom said she’d teach me. She’s really good at it, but she says I try her patience. If we’re still here next fall, I’ll go to St. Luke’s because I’m smart and exhausting and need kids to play with. How come the sign outside says ‘Santa’s Workshop’?”
It took Noah a moment to catch up with the whiplash-speed change of subject. Drew divulged a lot of information that piqued Noah’s curiosity. Thinking of the one-by-twofoot sign hanging on the cabin’s front porch that he’d carved in middle school woodshop and given to his parents for Christmas, he corrected, “It says ‘The Hideaway.’”
“No, it doesn’t,” the boy insisted. “It says ‘Santa’s Workshop.’ It’s kinda hard to read because thekhas a big splat of bird poop on it and there’s a big crack in it, but that’s what it says.”
The bird-poop comment triggered Noah’s memory of the contents of his scrap lumber pile stacked out of sight against the far wall of his workshop. “Oh. We’re talking about different signs. My dad made the old ‘Santa’s Workshop’ sign.”
“Does your dad live here?”
“No, he’s gone.”
“He’s dead? My dad is dead, too. How did your dad die? Mine had a car wreck, and I was in the car with him, but I didn’t get hurt too bad and everyone said it was a miracle because I wasn’t buckled in. I need more miracles ’cause I break things all the time.”
“What sort of things?”
“Bones. I broke my right arm twice and I thought I broke my ankle, too, but it was only a sprain. I broke a tooth, too. Are you going to answer any of my questions?”
“No. I can’t get a word in edgewise.”
