Kitabı oku: «Snowbound With The Single Dad»

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 pony 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.

He moved to her car, an economy model that had struggled a bit on the very long, snowy road that led to his place from the secondary highway. Her grandfather wrestled her suitcase out of the trunk. It was a big suitcase, filled with gifts and warm clothes, and her skates. The pond behind the house would be frozen over. The suitcase had wheels, but her grandpa chose to carry it and Noelle knew better than to insult him by offering to help.

When they walked in the back door into the back porch, the smell of coffee was strong in the house, though she immediately missed the just-out-of-the-oven aroma of her grandmother’s Christmas baking.

They shrugged out of jackets and boots, and left the suitcase there. Noelle pulled off her grandfather’s toque and smoothed her hair in the mirror. Her faintly freckled cheeks and nose were already pretty pink from being outside, but she knew herself to be an unremarkable woman. Mouse-brown hair, shoulder-length, straight as spaghetti, eyes that were neither brown nor blue but some muddy moss color in between, pixie-like features that could be made cute—not beautiful—with makeup, not that she bothered anymore.

The dog had already settled in his bed by the wood heater when she got into the kitchen. While her grandfather added wood to the heater, Noelle looked around with fondness.

The kitchen was nothing like the farmhouse kitchens that were all the rage in the home-decorating magazines right now. It had old, cracked linoleum on the floor, the paint was chipping off cabinets and the counters were cluttered with everything from engine pieces to old gloves. The windows were abundant but old, glazed over with frost inside the panes.

Aside from the fact that her grandmother would not have tolerated those engine pieces on the counter, and would have had some Christmas decorations up, Noelle felt that sigh of homecoming intensify within her.

Her grandfather and grandmother had raised her when her parents had died in an automobile accident when she was twelve. In all the world, this kitchen was the place she loved the most and felt the safest.

“Tell me about the helicopter pad,” she said, taking a seat at the old table. The coffee had been brewing on the woodstove, and her grandfather plopped a mug down in front of her. She took a sip, and her eyes nearly crossed it was so strong. She reached hastily for the sugar pot.

“Well, it really started when I was watching the news one night.” He took the seat across the table from her and regarded her with such unabashed affection that it melted her heart and the intensity of that feeling home grew.

“There was this story about this girl—not here, mind, England or Vancouver—”

Both equally foreign places to her grandfather.

“—who was going to be all alone for Christmas, so she just put an ad on something like I-Sell and all these people answered her, and she chose a family to have Christmas with.”

Her grandfather was beaming at her as if this fully explained the helicopter pad he was building in his cow pasture.

“Go on.”

“So I was on there anyway, trying to figure out how to put up a posting for my old junk in the barn, and I just had this thought that I missed Christmas the way it used to be.”

“You and me and Grandma?” she said wistfully, thinking of music and baking and decorating, and neighbors dropping by.

“Even before that. You know, TV was late coming to these parts. It was better without it. And a whole lot better without the interstate.”

No point telling him again. Noelle waited.

“Don’t even get me going on what cell phones are doing to the world.”

“I won’t,” Noelle said, though in truth she knew it wouldn’t be long before she missed all her social media platforms. Or more to the point, relentlessly and guiltily spying on someone else’s newly exciting life through their prolific postings.

“We used to have big gatherings at Christmas,” her grandfather said longingly. “When I was a boy, on Christmas Day the whole community would show up at the old hall, and there would be a Christmas concert, and dinner, and games. Those tables would be groaning under the weight of turkeys and hams and bowls of mashed spuds and pies. Oh, the pies! The women would try to outdo themselves on pies.

“People sang, and talked together. They exchanged gifts with their neighbors. Not much, you see, a homemade whistle, a flour sack, bleached white and embroidered with something nice, like Bless This House. If you knew a family that was having a rough go, you made sure all the kids had a present, and that they got a big fat ham to take home.”

Noelle’s sense of worry was gnawing at her again. As lovely a picture as he was painting, her grandfather had never been like this. Grandma had pretty much looked after Christmas, he’d done the outside decorating and hitched up the old horses for the mandatory Christmas sleigh ride, usually after much nagging! Until Grandma had died, he had never been given to reminiscing. He was pragmatic, not sentimental!

“So,” he said, “I got me an email address and I just put a little ad on there, inviting people to an old-fashioned Christmas, if they wanted one.”

“Here?” Noelle asked, stunned.

“Well, sure. Can you think of a better place?”

“Grandpa, you can’t invite strangers off the internet to your home!”

He folded his arms across his plaid shirt. His craggy face got a stubborn look on it. “Well, too late for your good advice, little miss Dear Abby, I already done it.”

“People replied?”

“All kinds of them,” he said with satisfaction.

“But how do you know if they’re good people?” Noelle asked. Was that faint hysteria in her voice?

Her grandfather patted her hand. “Oh, Noelle, most folks are good. You’ve just lost a little faith because of that fella, Michael—”

“Mitchell,” she corrected him weakly. She did not want to think of that “fella” with his newly exciting life right now!

“Does this have something to do with the helicopter pad?” she whispered, full of trepidation.

“Yup, indeed. Some kind of Mr. Typhoon is coming here.”

“Tycoon?” she asked, despite herself.

“Whatever.”

“Oh, Grandpa!”

“With his little girl, who lost her mommy.”

“Grandpa! Tell me you didn’t send anyone any money.”

“Well, I did send somebody money. Not the typhoon, someone else. They wanted to come to my Old-Fashioned Country Christmas, but my goodness, them people have had a run of bad luck. Couldn’t even put together the money for a tank of gasoline.”

Noelle felt sick. How far had this gone? How many people had duped him out of his money? Her hopes for a healing Christmas were evaporating.

Her grandpa was an absolute innocent in the high-tech world. All kinds of people out there were just waiting to prey on a lonely old man; all kinds of villains were trolling the internet to find the likes of her grandfather. She hoped he hadn’t spouted off to anyone else about having more money than he could use.

“Grandpa,” she said gently. “It’s a hoax. If the tycoon hasn’t asked you for money yet, he will. You’re probably being scammed…”

Her grandfather was scowling at her. “It ain’t like that.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they sent me this.” He produced a piece of paper from a heap of papers leaning off one of the counters. Noelle took it and stared at it. It appeared to be specs for building a rudimentary helicopter pad.

“Oh, no, Grandpa,” she said. This was how easy it was to fool an old man. The drawing could have been done by a child.

Her grandfather cocked his head.

“Hear that?” he asked triumphantly.

She stared at him. She heard absolutely nothing. She felt the most heartbreaking sadness. What a year of losses. The land. Her grandmother. Then, weeks after her grandmother had passed, her fiancé announcing he just wasn’t “ready.” To commit. To live in one place. Apparently to hold down a job in the oil industry that had employed them both. Mitchell had gone off to Thailand to “find himself.”

If his favorite social media page was any indication, he seemed to be being helped in this pursuit by a bevy of exotic-looking, bikini-clad beauties who had made Noelle newly aware of her lack of boldness—she had never worn a bikini—plus her own plainness and her paleness.

So, she had lost her family ranch, her grandmother and her fiancé. It was true she had held on to hope for a ridiculously long period of time that Mitchell would come to his senses and come back, even after his final betrayal.

But now, this felt as if it would be the final blow, if she was losing her grandfather, only in quite a different way. His mind going, poor old guy. She’d heard of this before. Moments of lucidity interspersed with, well, this.

He had pushed back from the table and was hurrying to the door.

“I can’t not be there when they land,” he said eagerly. “And I better throw some hay at that pony, so she’s on the back side of the barn. Don’t want that secret out yet.”

Even the dog looked doubtful, and not very happy to be going back outside.

“Grandpa,” she said soothingly, getting up, “come sit down. You can help me take my suitcase up. Maybe we’ll go find a tree this afternoon, put up some decorations—”

Her grandfather was ignoring her. He laced up his boots and went out the door, the reluctant dog on his heels. Moments later his side-by-side all-terrain vehicle roared to life and pulled away, leaving an almost eerie silence in its wake.

And then she heard it.

The very distinctive wop-wop-wop of a helicopter in the distance.

She dashed to the back porch, put on her grandfather’s toque, grabbed her jacket, shoved boots on her feet and raced out the door.