Some Enchanted Season (15 page)

As he brought the sandwiches to the fireplace, she commented, “If you were home, you would have been in the office at least two hours ago. Do you miss it?”

He shrugged.

“Come on. You’re starting your fifth day away from work. You haven’t had five con—consec—” She grimaced. “Five days off in a row since you got your first job twenty-one years ago. Be honest. When Tom was here yesterday, didn’t you have the urge to lock the door and talk business for a few hours? When he left, didn’t you envy him, just for a moment, because he was working and you weren’t?”

“Honestly?” He was silent for a moment before answering. “Yes, I might have been a little envious.” Then he shrugged. “All right.
Damn
envious.”

“There’s no reason you shouldn’t work here. I don’t need your attention all the time. As long as you’re available in case something happens …”

He was obviously tempted even as he shook his head. “I don’t know how to work just a few hours at a time. It’s a talent I never developed.”

“When we first met, I really admired your dedication—to your work, your studies, to me.”

“But over time, dedication became obsession, and it wasn’t very admirable.”

Maggie shook her head. “Oh, I still admired it. But I resented it too, because it consumed you, including the part of you that was supposed to be mine.” She gazed out the window at the snow and moved an inch closer to the warmth of the fire. “Could you ever imagine yourself living the same kind of life as the men you met yesterday? Alex Thomas, Nathan Bishop, Mitch Walker—they’re all good at what they do, but their jobs aren’t their lives. They go to work, they dedicate those eight or ten hours to their job, and then they go home. They have families, friends, hobbies. They go to church. They take vacations. They have
lives
. Could you ever be satisfied with that?”

Again, Ross remained silent a time before answering. “Do you remember when you were finally able to quit your job?”

Maggie nodded. It had been the start of his fourth year in business, and for the first time he’d made enough money that not every spare penny had to be pumped back in. To celebrate, he’d wanted her to quit her secretarial job and be a woman of leisure, like the wives of the successful businessmen he knew.

“You’d worked long enough and hard enough, putting me through school and supporting us while I got established. Finally you were able to sleep in. You had the time and the money to fix up the house, to indulge in some shopping, to relax and take it easy. I thought you would be happy.” His smile was self-deprecating. “You weren’t.”

That was putting it mildly. For the first week, she
had
slept late—a true luxury that she’d rarely been allowed. But sleeping late was no fun when she woke up
alone. And yes, she’d had time for long, leisurely lunches—but no one to share them with. All her friends worked full-time. The shopping had been fun for the first new wardrobe and the first houseful of new furniture, but she’d soon lost interest.

“You were bored. You didn’t know how to live like that. And I don’t know how to live the life these people live.”

“All we’re talking about is a little moderation.”

“I don’t know moderation. For me, it’s all or nothing.”

How true, she thought. In the beginning, even when they’d been chronically broke, they’d had it all—all the love, the romance, the passion, the commitment. And in the end they’d been left with nothing.

“If that disappoints you, I’m sorry.”

He was giving her an earnestly regretful look. She patted his arm as she got to her feet. “I got over being disappointed a long, long time ago. I was just curious. Nothing more.” She stretched, then headed for the boxes stacked neatly against the wall. “I’m going to start on this. Why don’t you go to the office and see if you can do a little work?”

“Maggie—”

“Just a little. I’ve done this alone for ten years. It’s kind of become a tradition.” And traditions were worth observing, even if they weren’t happy ones.

He looked as if he wanted to argue, but how could he when she’d made it clear that his presence wasn’t needed—and when he really wanted to do what she suggested? As she arranged a half dozen boxes in a single layer on the floor, he carried their dishes to the
sink, then stopped in the hall doorway. “I’ll be in the office,” he said grudgingly.

“Thank you,” she said with a smile. “If I need you, I’ll call.”

And who knew? Though she’d needed him hundreds of times, had called for him in hundreds of ways, and he’d never answered, this time he just might.

A
fter a tremendously satisfying day’s work, Ross returned to the kitchen late in the afternoon and found the room looking as if a hurricane had swept through—Hurricane Maggie, to be precise. Cartons stuffed with boxes, wrapping paper, and bubble wrap were pushed against one wall, and their contents covered every flat surface in the room, including much of the floor. There was no sign of the source of the chaos, though, and no sound of her either.

“Maggie?”

The dining room was empty, though she’d left signs of her passage—nutcracker soldiers in every size marching across the table. The living room was empty too. At the bottom of the stairs he called again and thought he heard a soft sound in response. It came from the library, though, not upstairs. He went to the room he’d passed by only moments before and found her curled up in the chair-and-a-half there, her feet resting on the matching ottoman, her eyes closed in sleep.

She had come in, he suspected, to deposit an armload of haphazardly coiled strings of lights and opted for a moment’s rest. With the drapes drawn, the room
was dimly lit and welcoming, and the chair was obviously comfortable. It was a good place to snooze.

He backed out of the room without disturbing her and went back to the kitchen. It took only a few minutes to return the unpacked boxes to the basement, quite a few minutes more to bring some order to the things she’d scattered about. The larger items he lined up on the floor in front of the window seat. The smaller pieces went into a dozen baking pans and baskets.

He didn’t recognize many of the ornaments—proof of how little attention he’d paid to such things in recent years—but more than a few brought back memories. There was the glass ball, painted in delicate colors, that had been his only present to Maggie the first Christmas they were married. A tree had been an extravagance they couldn’t afford, and so the ball had hung from a ribbon in the middle of the living room. They had treated it like mistletoe, kissing every time they passed underneath it.

They had passed under it a lot.

The miniature Mardi Gras mask hung with curling ribbons in purple, green, and gold marked their first vacation. To justify the expense when they were still living on a tight budget, they’d made it their birthday, anniversary, and Christmas presents rolled into one with a belated honeymoon, and they’d made the most of it.

Not once in those four days had he thought about work.

The crystal icicles—two of them, heavy, faceted—had come from Paris, the Father Christmas from Amsterdam,
the tiny bean pot from Boston. There were dated ornaments, a full set of fifteen, one for every year of their marriage. He imagined there would soon be a sixteenth—after all, they were still together—but no more. He wondered if she would hang them next year or if they would be relegated to some dark corner of the basement, too meaningful to throw away, too full of sad memories to use.

Maggie came into the room. He watched her reflection in the window glass as she took a soda from the refrigerator, then came to lean against the nearest end of the island. “See anything you remember?”

“A lot.” He picked up a handmade piece, a gnome’s face with a pointed hat and a long beard that also flowed to a point. “The art student who lived across the hall from us in the last apartment made this.”

“Venita. She also did the cornhusk angels.”

“And the next-door neighbor at our second house made these.” He picked up a pair of beanbag snowmen with stick arms and red plaid stocking caps that matched the scarves around their necks.

“Maureen.”

“And you made these.” She’d stacked the decorations crocheted from cotton string in no particular order. He knew if he laid them out on the counter, he could pick out the first one, and the second and the third. The later ones were perfectly shaped and proportioned, but the early efforts held more charm—the lopsided stars, the wobbly hearts, the bumpy stockings.

She’d made others too, from store-bought clay and homemade salt dough. There were cinnamon-scented creations, bright-colored felt pieces and tiny hand-pieced
quilts. Satin balls elaborately decorated with beads and braid. Shiny gold bows with long, curling streamers. Fat wooden Santas meticulously painted. A punched tin heart with a red satin bow. If he turned it over, he could read the inscription, but he didn’t need to. He remembered.

Maggie loves Ross
.

Forever
.

There was a time when he’d thought forever meant forever—a lifetime—and he’d felt cheated finding out differently. What was his next lesson? That
always
was actually a finite number of years? That
never
was only a matter of months?

“Do you remember these?” Maggie opened a small box and held it for him to see.

Inside was a set of nineteen ornaments—glass, fragile, faded. They started with Baby’s First Christmas and progressed up to Friends. The latter was inscribed with a sappy verse about how “you’ll always be my daughter, but now you’re also my friend.”

So
always
must be nineteen years, since that was when Janet Gilbert disowned her only daughter and friend.

“I remember them,” he said shortly. Janet had collected the ornaments for Maggie so that when she eventually married, she would have a starter set for her first Christmas away from home. When that time came, though, she’d refused to hand them over. Instead, she’d thrown them away, and a neighbor had rescued them and passed them on to Maggie. Maggie had kept them, but she’d never hung them on a tree.

Too meaningful to throw away, too full of sad memories to use.

“Did she know about the accident?”

Ross took the box from her unsteady hands, secured the lid, and laid it aside. “I don’t know. Two years ago she moved away from Buffalo. No one knew where she went. Some of her coworkers thought she was getting married, but they couldn’t come up with a name. Tom spent weeks trying to locate her, but he couldn’t.”

“And my father?”

He would really rather not talk about her parents, though he supposed, it being the holidays with its intense emphasis on family, her questions were only natural. “He knew.”

“You told him?”

“Tom did.”

He waited, but she didn’t ask what her father’s response was, whether he’d come to see her, whether he’d given a damn if she lived or died. She knew where she ranked in her father’s life—had known since she was a little girl. Most of the time she was past caring. Sometimes, though, the bastard still held the power to hurt her.

He was glad she didn’t ask for details, because the story Tom had repeated to him wasn’t a pleasant one. The old man hadn’t even recognized his daughter’s name—had put her so completely out of his life and his mind that he’d needed reminding that he had a daughter from his first marriage. Tom had come back from the meeting thoroughly disgusted—and, since he was a ruthless bastard himself, it took a lot to accomplish that.

“I can find a good private detective for you if you’d
like to locate your mother. Tell her that I’m gone, and she’s likely to forgive everything and welcome you back.”

The look Maggie gave him was sharp with derision. “I’m not the one in need of forgiveness. I did nothing wrong. I’m sorry she felt the need to remove herself from my life, but it was her decision—her mistake.”

“It
was
her mistake, but you’ve had to live with the consequences. You’ve missed her.”

“I miss the ideal of a mother, but my reality was far from ideal. Even before I met you, things weren’t easy. My mother was controlling. She had my entire life mapped out, and if I did anything that deviated from her plan, she punished me by withholding her affection. I wish I had a mother like Miss Agatha or Miss Corinna—a mother like I hope to be once I’m blessed with children. But I’ve long since accepted that my mother isn’t what I need.”

She didn’t need so much, Ross thought regretfully as she picked up the box of ornaments. Just a husband whose commitment to her couldn’t be overshadowed by anything else and children to love. Instead, she had everything but that.

Finding no storage carton for the box, Maggie stuck them in a cabinet under the window seat. Straightening, she busied herself with bringing order to a tangled string of gold beads. “How did it go in the office?”

“Okay.” He’d spent all but a half hour lunch break at the computer or on the phone. It had felt good to get back to work, though he’d caught himself more than once paying little attention to the task he was doing and listening intently for sounds from the
kitchen. He could have closed the door, as he’d always done at home, but then how would he hear her if she called?

Not that she had, except to tell him that lunch was being served in the living room. The rest of the day she’d spent happily alone, doing a job that a husband and wife should share. That she hadn’t wanted him to share.

“So … what about dinner?”

“What about it?” he asked.

“Let’s go out.”

“You mean you don’t want leftovers again?”

“Sorry, but turkey and/or ham four meals in a row is my limit. I want a thick, juicy, rare steak. You said there was a place in town.”

“McCauley’s. Do you want to go now?”

“After I clean up. Care to escort me upstairs?”

He gestured toward the front of the house, then followed her. She went into her room and he turned into his own.

The room was large, high-ceilinged, comfortable. The walls were colonial red, the linens deep green and muted red paisley, the floor gleaming oak planks scattered with rugs. With her taste and his money, Maggie could have worked wonders on their house in Buffalo, if only he’d let her.