Chapter 3
By the time she finally flopped into an airplane seat that night, Erica’s mood soared from exhaustion to elation. Finally—she was on her way on her first-ever plane trip. The closest she’d ever come to flying before this was when her mother had planned a trip to Mexico for them. But then her mom had been diagnosed with cancer, and they’d been forced to cancel.
The past eight hours had been such an ordeal—first the party, then the hour-long bus ride to DFW Airport, always with the clinging fear that something would go wrong when she tried to check in. Even once she’d had her ticket in hand, she’d expected the men on the other side of the walk-through metal detector thingy to haul her away to the airport equivalent of the principal’s office. Instead, they’d joked with her about not knowing to take her clunky necklace off, and one sent her on her way with a friendly wink after Erica had slipped her sneakers on again and asked him the way to her gate.
Of course, she would have been happier to be on a plane if she were headed directly to New York. The cheapest ticket she’d been able to find routed her from Dallas to Phoenix, Phoenix to Chicago, and Chicago to New York.
As the plane lifted off, her stomach fluttered both at the queasy sensation and the finality of what she’d done. No turning back now. She closed her eyes, trying to still her wobbly nerves. What if someone had realized she was missing already? They might be able to trace her. Maybe when she landed in Phoenix, there would be policemen waiting for her to take her back to Texas, where ...
She would be in mega-ginormous trouble. That worry had lurked at the back of her mind ever since the airline’s automated machine had accepted the bar code on the receipt she’d printed out at home after she’d bought the ticket online. That and a scan of her never-used passport and she’d felt she was home free. Except that she wasn’t, really. The ticket, plus taxes, had come to six hundred and twenty-eight dollars. When her dad and Leanne found out about that, they would kill her. Or lock her in her room until she was eighteen. Or make her spend the rest of her life babysitting Angelica.
Maybe after the trip, she’d have some of her spending money left over. She could give her dad that as a down payment. She could promise not to ask for anything for the entire next two years, and she could do without her allowance completely. Her allowance was ten dollars per week, when her father remembered.
She did some rapid calculating. To pay off her six-hundred-and-thirty-dollar debt, she would have to do without her allowance for sixty-three weeks, which was just a year and eleven weeks. So, really, any way you looked at it, she would have it all paid off by the time she was a sophomore in high school. That didn’t sound too bad.
Anyway, Webb had told her she needed to seize her opportunity for adventure, and now she’d done it. It didn’t make sense to do something exciting but then ruin it all by worrying.
The flight attendant arrived at her row and asked what she wanted to drink. The woman next to Erica ordered a Bloody Mary and handed over seven dollars. Seven dollars for a drink in a little plastic cup! Erica panicked. If she threw away money like that, she’d be broke by the time she arrived in New York. She needed to save a little money for fun spending and other stuff. Like a taxi from the airport in New York to Heidi’s place. That was bound to set her back at least ten dollars.
“I don’t want anything, thank you,” she told the attendant.
The flight attendant raised a thinly plucked brow at her. “You sure, hon?” she asked in a syrupy tone.
Erica sat up straighter.
There’s no reason to talk to me as though I were six years old.
She was a year over the airline’s age limit to qualify as a minor traveling unsupervised. She should at least be given credit for knowing whether she was thirsty or not. “I’m sure.”
“You visiting relatives for Christmas?” the woman next to her asked as she upended a tiny bottle of Smirnoff into some tomato juice.
Erica nodded. “My aunt. Well, she’s sort of my aunt. She would have been my step-aunt, I guess, if her mom and my grandfather hadn’t got divorced.”
“Does she live out west?”
“No, she’s in New York.”
The woman frowned. “You realize you’re going the wrong way?”
“It was cheaper to get there through Phoenix.”
An earthy laugh rumbled out of the woman. “Oh, sweetie. Sounds like you’ll be lucky to get where you’re going by New Year’s.”
Erica frowned. “It’s only three flights.”
“Sure, but you might want to look at a weather report. At some point, one of those flights will be heading you straight into a blizzard.”
Ten o’clock found Heidi trudging through snowfall with her messenger bag slung over one shoulder and the café’s cash box tucked inside an old, plain shopping bag in her left hand. She always carried the cash box this way, with the expectation that any sane mugger would go for the leather bag rather than the paper tote. Of course, any sane mugger wouldn’t be out on the streets tonight, but better safe than sorry.
Her right hand was clasped around the trunk of the Christmas tree, which she dragged behind her, leaving a Hansel-and-Gretel tinsel trail in her wake. She hadn’t been able to pass it by. Especially since, when she’d locked up for the night, the Christmas tree was still in front of the parking meter, looking even more forsaken beneath a layer of newly fallen snow.
Now, as she approached her block, she could feel enthusiasm growing, as if she were bringing home a stray kitten, not a soon-to-be-dead tree. Tomorrow she would need to run out and buy a stand for it. She imagined herself cozying on the couch, staring at twinkling lights, and falling asleep surrounded by the scent of evergreen, with dreams of...
Uh-oh. Here was the problem. Dreams. That’s what these sneaky trees did to a person. They awakened memories of being young and having all sorts of impossible wishes—of waking up Christmas morning and discovering Santa had made all your dreams come true. It might be a dream that there would be a puppy under the tree, or the dress you’d whined about for weeks, or the dream that the next year would be the best year ever. When you were mesmerized by blinking lights and shiny tinsel, it was easy to forget that dreams were usually chased by disappointment.
But there was no reason she had to get carried away now. It was just a tree. Having it didn’t mean she would have to make wishes or glut herself on eggnog or waste a night weeping over Zuzu’s Petals. Just a tree.
It wasn’t as if she wanted anything, anyway. She had her café. Of course, she’d hoped to have money to buy a new, larger mixer. Also, it wouldn’t be terrible to meet someone and have a mad passionate love affair, which would turn into happily ever after ...
Just a tree. Just a tree. Just a tree.
The snow swirled down in fat flakes. Movie snow. The fresh white coating made Brooklyn look sparkly clean. There weren’t many drivers out, and the quiet combined with the streetlights gave her block an ethereal, almost magical quality.
A sharp series of barks drew her gaze to her building. On the sidewalk, yapping and straining at his leash, was Mrs. DiBenedetto’s Pomeranian, Marcello. Seeing her landlady standing above him on the stoop, Heidi had to suppress a groan. No one could kill a magic moment faster than Mrs. DiBenedetto.
The old lady was planted on the second step, fists on hips as she watched Heidi dragging the tree up the street. Mrs. DiBenedetto was small, but she was adept at using her stocky, bread-loaf body and baggy, brown eyes to intimidate. Relations between them had been cordial when Heidi first moved into the building’s basement apartment, but things had deteriorated after Mrs. DiBenedetto read in the newspaper about Heidi’s testimony at her boyfriend’s embezzlement trial. After that, she couldn’t be convinced that it hadn’t actually been Heidi who had stolen money from the Bank of Brooklyn’s geriatric depositors. If Heidi forgot the rent on the morning of the first day of the month, at noon Mrs. DiBenedetto would be rapping sharply on her apartment door, threatening legal action.
And then came the begonia incident.
“Where did you get that?” the old lady asked darkly, nodding at the tree. She had a hint of Sicily in her voice, although Heidi doubted that Mrs. DiBenedetto had ever been to Italy, even as a tourist. She suspected the woman just had Corleone in her soul.
“I found it on the street.”
Mrs. DiBenedetto let out something between a snort and a snarl.
“It’s true,” Heidi insisted. Marcello’s yaps came every few seconds and were sounding sharper—probably because the taut leash was strangling him. Most of his tiny canine fury was aimed at the tree. He growled at it as if it were an approaching menace.
“Always finding things on the street, aren’t you?” Mrs. DiBenedetto asked in a not-so-subtle reference to the begonia.
Heidi rolled her eyes. “I swear, I thought you were throwing that begonia away. It was right next to the trash.”
Another snort of disbelief.
Honestly, who in their right mind in Brooklyn left pots of begonias sitting on the sidewalk in front of the stoop? And it had been right next to a sack of garbage. But nothing would convince Mrs. DiBenedetto that Heidi wasn’t an evil flower snatcher.
From the look in her eye now, she evidently assumed Heidi had escalated her thieving to include Christmas trees. Big game.
“Marcello! Get away from that tree,” the landlady said sharply. As if it were tainted.
“Seriously, Mrs. DiBenedetto—a cop found the tree and gave it to me.”
A penciled-on eyebrow arched at her. “You said you found it in the street.”
“Well ... the cop found it.” She cursed herself for caring what the old battle-ax thought anyway.
“Marcello!”
Marcello had worked up the courage to actually lunge at a branch. A one-sided battle ensued—dog versus blue spruce; it wasn’t pretty—and Mrs. DiBenedetto was tugged down a step.
Heidi decided the smartest thing to do at that point was to take her tree and go inside, but, pivoting toward the entrance to her basement apartment, she failed to notice that Marcello’s leash had snagged on a branch. When she yanked the tree toward the basement entrance, she unwittingly sent Mrs. DiBenedetto flying off the porch.
At first Heidi caught the catastrophe out of the corner of her eye—the initial jerk a confusingly swift move for a seventy-year-old lady. As Heidi turned, she saw her landlady’s feet slip on the slick stair, sending her sailing down to the sidewalk. The moment the woman hit the pavement, Heidi could almost hear the snap of brittle bones. She surged forward.
“Mrs. DiBenedetto!”
The woman let out a moan of pain.
“Oh my God.” Heidi reached for her.
“Don’t touch me!” the lady yelled at her. “You’ll kill me!”
Hearing the angry rasp was a relief. For a terrifying heartbeat, Heidi had been afraid she really had killed her. “Are you all right? Can you get up?” she asked.
“Of course I can’t get up! Something cracked!” Heidi reached into the shoulder bag she’d dropped on the sidewalk and dug for her cell phone. Marcello had stopped barking and was now lifting his leg next to a Christmas tree branch. Heidi called 9-1-1 and frantically relayed what had happened and the address. The dispatcher’s calm, almost bored voice gave her the impression that there were old ladies all over New York slipping off their stoops. She only hoped they had ambulances enough for them all.
Waiting on that ambulance felt like the longest fifteen minutes of Heidi’s life. Especially since Mrs. DiBenedetto wasn’t shy about telling her that it was all her fault. Heidi didn’t know what to do or say, so she took off her coat and covered Mrs. DiBenedetto’s shivering body with it. “Murderer,” her landlady muttered between clenched teeth.
“I’m sooo sorry.” As apologies went, it sounded anemic, but Heidi didn’t know what else to say. (“I honestly didn’t mean to cripple you”?)
Without her coat, she stood awkwardly by, teeth chattering—even Marcello with his fur was shivering in the cold. The snow was coming down more heavily now and Mrs. DiBenedetto wouldn’t let Heidi touch her to flick the flakes off, so by the time the ambulance stopped in front of the building, the woman looked flocked. The EMS guys gaped at Heidi as if she was an awful person for standing there while snow accumulated on her landlady. And of course it didn’t help matters that Mrs. DiBenedetto was pointing at her and yelling
assassin.
Heidi smiled and tried to explain what had happened, but the paramedics were understandably more interested in getting Mrs. DiBenedetto off the sidewalk. Heidi decided the best thing to do at that point would be to take Marcello into the house. She scooped up Mrs. DiBenedetto’s keys from where the woman had dropped them on the stairs and then hurried with the dog into the landlady’s apartment. A stale, meat-loafy aroma hung in the air.
Marcello crept along the wall, trembling and freaked out, and kept up a constant growl at Heidi that periodically burst into a full-fledged bark. In the kitchen, she threw open cabinets until she spotted his dog chow, which she poured into the food bowl on the floor. He sniffed it and then growled at her as if she were trying to poison him. Heidi sighed and sloshed fresh water into the neighboring bowl.