Bad Heiress Day (15 page)

“I’m
fine,
Kate. Enthusiastic, granted, but fine.” Darcy eyed Kate. “Besides, trust me, you don’t want me returning the fabulous gifts I bought you.”

“Well, since you put it that way…”

“N
o, really, Glynnis, I’m fine. I mean, I have moments—times when I remember some Christmas or some present, or when I look at the fireplace mantel and it just looks wrong with four stockings on it—but I’m okay for the most part.”

Glynnis just nodded in response.

“And why does everyone keep
asking
me that? I swear, if I hear that overemphasized ‘How
are
you?’ one more time…”

Glynnis took a bite of cookie. “Because it’s hard to
lose
a loved one around the holidays. They’re just concerned about you, that’s all.”

Darcy snatched a cookie of her own off the plate. “If they were so concerned about me, why didn’t they show it before? When things were really messy and ugly and hard? Why now in the nice clean aftermath?”

Glynnis looked at her. “I think you just answered your own question, hon. Death is a messy business. People
don’t like to get too close to it. Makes ’em realize they’ll have to muck around in that mess, too, someday. Not exactly a cozy thought.”

“Still, I’m sick of people looking at me as if I’ve sprouted antlers or something.”

Glynnis chuckled. “In a way, you have.”

Glynnis was always coming up with the strangest metaphors. Darcy couldn’t always keep up. “Because…” she cued, half dreading the explanation.

“Antlers are a sign of maturity. The passage from—what are they called, fawns? I don’t know, whatever Bambi was—to adult deer. You’ve made it through a rite of passage of sorts. Become the senior generation—the survivor, if you will. Everybody dreads it, wonders if they’ll make it through it. You have. Or, are still making it through it.” She shifted in her seat. “In our generation, it’s losing your spouse. All of us well-seasoned human beings dread how we’ll cope when our husbands or wives die. Some of us handle that fear well, others don’t. I have friends who absolutely dread it. Ask any widow you know, and she’ll name a handful of friends who simply stopped talking to her once her husband died. They run in fear.”

“There’s a real friend for you,” Darcy replied.

“You end up either forgiving them for their human frailties or just counting them as lost.” Glynnis’s eyes brightened, and Darcy knew another metaphor had just popped up in her brain. It was funny how you could actually see this woman get an idea. It was that plain on her face. “They are lost, in lots of ways, ’cuz faith is what enables the good friends to stick it out with you. I can’t imagine how I’d handle it without my faith. I’ll be mighty lonely if the Lord calls Bid home first. But I know I’ll see him again, and I know God will stand by me until I do.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that.” Darcy stirred her tea, seeing not the brew but an image in her mind. “Seeing Dad, I mean. I found a picture of him and me from a couple of years ago—before he got sick—and I thought that’s what he’ll look like.” Darcy felt a lump rise in her throat. “Not all thin and pale, but stocky and tanned and running.” The tears welled up in her eyes. “Full of life, not fighting for it. I think of him…in heaven…that way.” She was crying now, ambushed by the sudden force of emotion. “I want to see him like that again. I know I will.”

Tears brimmed out of Glynnis’s own eyes. “It’ll be even better than that, hon. Better than we can even imagine. You hang on to that thought. That’s how you can hold those antlers high.”

Antlers, chickens, who knew what images Glynnis would conjure up next? Darcy realized it was one of the reasons she loved the woman.

And she did. She had come to love Glynnis as a mentor, and, well…as a mother. Could you adopt a mother like you adopted a child? Darcy had a friend who adopted a little girl from China, and she called her the “child of my heart.”

That’s what Glynnis was. The mom of her heart. There weren’t enough Christmas presents in the whole wide world to repay her for that.

“Thanks, Glynnis,” she heard herself say, “I love you.”

With that Glynnis’s eyes overflowed. “Oh, hon,” she said in a thick voice as she pulled Darcy into a gigantic hug. “That’s the whole point. The whole blessed point of it all.”

Two weeks later, Darcy sat in the kitchen updating a new 2002 calendar with school break and early-dismissal days.

Jack’s voice bellowed from somewhere upstairs. “Dar!”

Darcy turned her head in the general direction of the stairway. “What?” Such calls were usually preceded by “Mom!” and were almost always the precursor for questions like “Where’s my jeans with the flowers on them?” or “I can’t find my baseball cleats!” You’d think such helplessness would be confined to children, but Jack would occasionally—and most especially in times of stress—fall into the same pattern.
Mom, find my everything
mutated all too easily into
Hon, find my everything!

Dar had a friend who was always saying it takes both eyes and estrogen to find most household items. She wasn’t that far off. Darcy would frequently find Paula, Mike or even Jack howling to help them find an object when they were standing right in front of that very thing.

“Dar!” came Jack’s voice again, more sharply now. “Come up here!”

She tried to stem her anger as she started up the stairs. Jack’s work had been miserable. Rebounding from missing five days down with the stomach virus, he had been a ball of tension. Even though it was Sunday afternoon, and Dar had made not one, but
two
of his favorite meals, he still hadn’t loosened up.

Darcy turned into their bedroom only to find it empty. There were sounds—the rustling of plastic and paper bags—coming from the guest room. She looked down the hall and saw the guest room door open. What on earth could Jack be looking for in there?

Stepping into the room, she found Jack surrounded by shopping bags. Her Christmas shopping. She’d been picking up things for the past few weeks, tucking them inside the guest room closet where she always stashed her
Christmas shopping. Jack had evidently pulled it out of the closet.

And the pile was enormous.

Surely she’d not bought that much, had she?

“What is all this?” Jack’s face broadcast that he already knew the answer.

“Christmas presents. Decorations for the house.”

“How many presents are in here?” Jack’s voice was tight and precise. The tone he took when he was threatened or angry.

“I don’t
count
them, Jack.” How dare you get on me for this, after all we’ve been through, she thought as she bit back her growing anger. She couldn’t believe his attitude.

He pulled four more bags out of the closet, practically sending them airborne as he did. “Okay, then, do you have even the
vaguest
notion of how much you’ve spent so far?” He was patronizing. That really made her mad—she hated when he did that, explaining things as if she had Paula’s ability to grasp economics instead of a grown woman’s. As if she were irresponsible or something.

“No,” she countered, getting defensive. “I don’t. I’ve spent a lifetime bargain hunting, making Christmas as cheap as possible. Making do, buying knockoffs. I’m tired of it, Jack. We’ve been through enough already this year. I just wanted—
once—
” she almost spit the word out, she said it so harshly “—
once
—to go all out for the holidays. We need it.”

“Need? Need? There’s not a thing in this room we
need,
Darcy.” He snatched a bag from the Lazarus department store and held it up in front of her. “Can you even tell me what’s in here? There must be fifty gifts in this room. More maybe.”

“So I bought a lot of gifts. I like to buy gifts. You know that. Now you want to tell me I can’t?”

“This is not a lot of gifts.” Jack stabbed his hand around the room, pointing at pile after pile. “This is way too many gifts. This is over the top, even for you, Dar. It’s too much.”

“Why can’t you just let me enjoy this holiday?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“That’s exactly what you’re saying!”

“All right, you want to know exactly what I want to say? What I think? I think this isn’t about Christmas at all. You’re—what do they call it?—you’re overcompensating.”

She crossed her arms and glared at him, furious. Since when did he pull pop psychology into an argument? Had he been watching too many talk shows while he was home sick?

Jack blew a breath out in exasperation. “I’m trying to see it your way, Dar, I really am.” He waded through the bags, pacing the room. “But you do something like this and I don’t get it. You want to give your dad’s money away like water, and you want to spend ours like we’ve got millions.” His eyes narrowed at her. “Which do you want? You can’t have it both ways.”

Oh, that really sent her over the edge. She wasn’t going to let him play Scrooge. Not this year. “We have more than enough. We can afford
one
really nice Christmas. I won’t do what Dad did. I won’t sit on my money like some miserable old miser. We’re alive and healthy and our kids are here
and it’s Christmas.
”

“Wise up, Darcy, we’re alive and our kids need to go to college and the economy’s in the toilet and we’re about to go to war and…and—” he turned to look at her, his eyes intense and almost painful “—and all this isn’t going to make your dad come back.”

His accusation hung in the air, knocking the breath out of her.

“You can’t see it, can you? Look around this room. Can’t you see what you’re doing here?” He softened his voice. “This is way too much. Wake up, Dar, and see what’s going on here.”

“It’s not too much.” She knew it was, though, the moment the words left her mouth.

She recoiled when Jack tried to pull her into the room. He pulled her in anyway. There were packages everywhere. There were even still more in the closet he hadn’t even gotten to. Piles upon piles of it. He was right—there were things she couldn’t even remember buying. “Stand here. Stand here and look at this, honey, and tell me it’s not too much.”

Darcy couldn’t answer.

Jack turned her toward him, tucking her head onto his shoulder. “We can’t do this. Somewhere down inside I think you know that. I know you love to give gifts, but this is…this is about something else.” He pulled her away to look into her eyes. “We can’t do this, Dar. Not with things the way they are.”

“Jack…”

“He’s gone. He’s gone and he won’t be here for Christmas.” Darcy started to cry, the sharp truth of it twisting inside her. “Your dad is gone and all this isn’t going to change that.”

“It’s not…”

“It is. It is.”

“I…” She couldn’t even begin to actually say it. To speak it would bring it all back up to wash over her and drag her under again and it was Christmas.

Christmas.

The pain would not stay down. It swirled up around her until she felt flooded by it. She clung to Jack as if he were a lifeboat in a hurricane. “I—I m-miss him so much. So much.” Darcy melted into sobs on Jack’s shoulder.

He just held her.

“I miss both of them.” She continued, unable to stop it now even if she wanted to. “I want my parents back. I don’t…I don’t want to be
alone.
” The last word came out as more of a wail than a word. “I can’t do Christmas without Dad. I can’t.”

“I know. I know.” Jack stroked her hair, speaking softly, the way he did the night Paul died and she just didn’t have any more words or sobs. “We all miss him. There were times I could barely stand the guy but I miss him, too. And that’s just how it’s going to have to be this Christmas.” He pulled his arms around her more tightly, as if sensing her need to feel his strength. “Our Christmas has a hole in it. But this isn’t going to fill that. It’ll just make things worse.”

Darcy sniffed and looked up at him. The anger was gone out of his eyes, replaced by a tender sadness. “I don’t know,” she offered, loving him so very much at that moment, wanting to give him the whole world and everything he ever wanted. “Some of this stuff is pretty neat.”

He laughed. She could feel it ripple through his chest. “Oh, I’m sure it is.”

They stood quietly for a moment.

“I think,” said Jack in his I-will-save-the-day voice, “that we need to find the middle ground between
celebratory
and
fiscally reckless,
wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s somewhere between here and the Returns counter, isn’t it?” Darcy sighed.

“I’m afraid so.”

Darcy looked down at the nearest bag, poked it with her toe and sighed. It was a fabulous sweater just the color of his eyes. With a pang she remembered that he already
had
a fabulous sweater just the color of his eyes. She winced.

“Let’s not do this now.” Jack let his hand slide down her arm until it wrapped around her hand. “Go downstairs, make a pot of tea and we’ll sit down and figure out a number between
celebratory
and
fiscally irresponsible,
okay? I’ll use my manly skills to see if I can get all this back
into
the closet.”

Darcy eyed him, pasting a look of mock indignation on her face. “You’re going to put me on a holiday budget this year, aren’t you, you cruel man?”

Jack laughed again, his arms now full of bags. “That’d be a bit of a reach. I’m a realistic kind of guy. I was thinking more in terms of an
x
number of gifts per person equation.”

“Holiday algebra?”

“Think of it as more of a game plan.”

Darcy groaned. “Oh, it’s so much more
appealing
that way.” She turned to go downstairs, then stopped and poked her head back into the guest room door. “What’d you come in here for in the first place, anyway?”

“My dark-blue socks.”

Sure Jack, I always put your socks in the guest room. It’s a game I play. It’s so much more interesting than just putting them in your sock drawer. Did everyone in this house think the laundry magically floated back upstairs into drawers once it was clean?
“Downstairs, blue laundry basket, left-hand side. Five pairs at least.” She pronounced herself the noblest of all women for not adding
like always.