The Night Before Christmas (2 page)

 

Chapter Two

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next morning laying new floors in a cabin he was renovating. He'd bought the cabin in early fall, and though it had been in near-­derelict condition, he'd planned to do the same thing to it he'd done to his and Caroline's cabin; namely, rebuild it from the outside in. The work was going well, and if he could sell it in the spring, at a healthy profit, he planned on making a business out of renovating cabins on the lake.

But despite his busy morning, he still left himself plenty of time to drive to the bus stop to pick up Daisy. So much time, in fact, that he was there half an hour early. He didn't mind, though. Being a real father to his daughter was still new to him, and he was determined to do it “right,” even though the meaning of that word sometimes eluded him. Being an alcoholic had taught him how to be a drinking buddy, a casual lover, and a fair-­weather friend, but it had taught him almost nothing about how to be a good husband and a good father. Now, after being two years sober, he was just learning this, and there were times when he felt a sudden sense of insecurity and self-­doubt. Had he said the right thing? Had he done the right thing? Had he been the man they needed him to be? The man
he
needed to be for
them
?

But all these thoughts fell away the moment he saw Daisy get off the bus. “Hey,” he said, scooping her up in his arms and swinging her around. “You're home.”

“I'm home, Dad,” Daisy agreed. “And I missed you so much.” She sounded like herself, the self that Jack thought was just about perfect, but when he set her down and took a closer look at her, she didn't look like herself. Not entirely. She looked thinner, and her blue eyes were shadowed with fatigue, her pale skin almost translucent.

“Daisy, what's wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing's wrong,” she assured him, as the bus driver opened the baggage compartment and Jack took her suitcase out. They thanked the driver then, and Jack carried her suitcase over to his pickup and sat it down in the flatbed.

“Dad, I'm fine,” Daisy said, as they both climbed into the truck. “Really,” she insisted, seeing the worried expression on his face. “It's just . . .”

“It's just what?” he asked, turning on the ignition so the heat would be on in the truck, but making no move to drive away.

“I don't know, it's just . . . everything,” she said, with a helpless shrug.

Jack said nothing, but he knew what Daisy meant by “everything.” She meant Will Hughes. Will was Daisy's boyfriend. Her first serious boyfriend. They'd gone to high school together, though they'd been in different worlds there. Daisy, the straight A student and gifted athlete, and Will, the perennial bad boy, irresistible to girls, but, alas, not to the administrators and teachers at their school. Last summer, though, to everyone's surprise, Daisy's and Will's worlds had intersected—­or, in Caroline's mind, collided—­and the two of them had been inseparable. When Will had told Daisy at the end of the summer that he was joining the army, she'd been almost inconsolable. And Will, it turned out, hadn't been much better, though there hadn't been any tears on his part, just a stoic misery that Jack had recognized immediately. It was that same misery that had kept him company on those late nights, and those early mornings, after he'd given up drinking, but before he knew if he would ever get his wife and daughter back again.

“Hey,” Jack said gently, watching the bus drive away. “I know what it's like to miss someone.”

Daisy nodded, and, as she snuggled deeper into her down jacket, she suddenly looked much younger than her twenty-­one years. “Did it ever get better?” she asked.

Jack sighed, considered lying, then changed his mind. “No, not until I was with you and your mother again,” he said. And, for a moment, he almost told her about the surprise they were planning for her. But it wasn't definite yet, and to get her hopes up now only to dash them later seemed especially cruel. So he pulled on his seat belt and shifted the truck into drive, then glanced over at Daisy, and said, “We better get going. Your mom's expecting us for lunch at Pearl's, and I promised Jessica you'd have a hot chocolate with her afterward.”

“That sounds good,” Daisy said, as Jack pulled out onto the highway. And then, “How's Mom?”

“Mom's good,” he said. “Excited to see you, of course.”

“And busy with the wedding plans?” Daisy asked, looking out the window at the snowy landscape sliding by. And there was something about the way she said this, and looked away from him as she said it, that gave Jack pause.

“She's very excited about the wedding,” he said carefully. “But I'm getting the impression you're not.”

“Oh, no, I am excited,” Daisy said emphatically, turning to him. “I'm thrilled you two are getting remarried, Dad. I don't have
any
reservations about that. But this wedding Mom's planned, I have to say, honestly, it doesn't sound like her at all. And it
definitely
doesn't sound like you. I mean, the fancy clothes, and the tiered cake and the sit-­down dinner—­is that really your kind of thing? I thought if you got married again you two would do something like, you know . . .”

“Fly to Las Vegas?”

“No, not that. But something smaller. Something . . . I don't know, intimate. And, and not casual, maybe. But not fancy, either.”

“I'm not sure you can call this wedding ‘fancy.' ”

“Well, by Butternut standards it is.”

“Maybe,” Jack allowed. “But that's not saying much. Besides, it's not like we're breaking the bank here. You'd be amazed how much less a reception costs when you're not serving alcohol.”

“I don't mean the money, though, Dad. I mean . . . what do you want?”

“I want to be married to your mother.”

“No, what kind of
wedding
do you want?”

“Oh, that's easy,” he said. “I want whatever kind of wedding your mom wants.”

“So this is about Mom being happy?”

“Well, yes, to a point. But it's about more than that, too. It's about rewriting history. Which is something you don't get to do very often in life.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, turning toward him.

He hesitated. “When your mom and I got married the first time, it wasn't exactly her dream wedding. Her parents hated me, for one thing, so there was no happy family to celebrate with us. And we were broke, for another. Neither of us had any savings yet, and her parents didn't want to spend any of their money because . . . well, as I said, they hated me. So we put something together. Your mom bought a dress on sale, and her family's minister married us in a small ser­vice at Lutheran Redeemer. At the last minute, your great-­grandmother relented, a little, and made some iced tea and finger sandwiches for guests to have in the church basement after the ceremony.” (Jack didn't mention here that in a twist of fate this was the same church basement where he now attended his AA meetings.)

“Anyway,” he continued, “is it so surprising that your mom wanted something different this time around? Something that felt more . . . special, I guess. More permanent.”

His mind caught on that word now.
Permanent
. The marriage that had followed that wedding, of course, had been anything but. And if Caroline wanted something else this time around, how could he blame her? Because while he might not feel that strongly about the details of the wedding, he felt very strongly about the marriage that came after it. “Permanent” was what he had in mind now. And while the whole “till death do us part” thing had always seemed unnecessarily morbid to him, it didn't seem that way anymore.

“Aren't you forgetting something, Dad?”

“What?” he asked, slowing down on the highway to let another car pass them. He always drove conservatively when Daisy was in the pickup with him.

“Aren't you leaving something out of the whole first wedding story? You know, the part about Mom already being pregnant with me?”

The truck swerved so slightly it was barely noticeable. “I . . . didn't think you knew about that.”

“Well, I do,” she said, looking amused.

“Your mom doesn't think you know, either.”

“Don't worry,” Daisy said. “I won't tell her.”

“When did you, umm . . .”

“As soon as I was old enough to count,” Daisy said, archly. “No, not really. When I was about twelve, I think, I was helping Mom organize some papers and I came across your marriage certificate. I realized it was dated six months before I was born. But she'd never told me, so I figured she didn't want me to know.”

“It's not like that,” Jack said, turning off the highway and onto a county road. “I think she was afraid if you knew you weren't planned, you might think, wrongly, that we weren't as thrilled about your arrival as we might have been otherwise. But we were, trust me. That wedding might not have been perfect, but you, Daisy, you were perfect. Even though you were still just a tiny bump under your mom's wedding dress, you were already the best thing that either of us would ever do.”

“Dad, stop,” Daisy said, brushing at the corner of one of her eyes. “You're going to make me cry.”

Jack smiled at her. “No crying, all right?” he said as he drove past the
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sign. “Your mom will not be happy with me if I bring you into Pearl's and you're already in tears.”

“No crying,” she agreed, looking out the window at the sight of a town so familiar to her that Jack thought she could probably reconstruct every detail of it with her eyes closed. But at this time of year, of course, Butternut was all dressed up in its Christmas finery, and as they turned down Main Street, Daisy let out a little cry of pleasure.

“I forgot how pretty Butternut is at Christmastime,” she said, and even Jack, who'd once chafed at a town he'd considered gossipy and small-­minded, had to admit that it did Christmas right. The sidewalks on Main Street were lined, at twenty-­foot intervals, with Christmas trees hung with colored lights, and an enormous lighted wreath was strung on wires over the street's main intersection. Then there were all the storefronts—­Butternut Drugs, Johnson's hardware, and the Pine Cone Gallery among them—­which were also strung with lights and hung with wreaths.

But it was Pearl's, Jack thought, easing the pickup truck into a parking space right in front, that was the crown jewel of Butternut. Part coffee shop, part town hall, and part gossip clearinghouse, it was the one indispensable business in this town. And it was decorated like it knew it. The brightly polished windows were adorned with strands of tiny white twinkling lights, and its front door sported a lush green wreath with a big red bow on it. Through the windows, Jack could see the miniature red and white poinsettias on each table, and, from the ceiling, the big shiny gold stars that hung down, rotating gently in the draft from the opening and closing front door.

“Oh, look, Mom put out that sleigh,” Daisy said, pointing at the entryway table where a miniature Santa's sleigh and eight miniature reindeer were set up. “I used to spend hours playing with that when I was little. And it shows, too. Last Christmas I noticed it was definitely a little worse for wear.”

“I'm sure that's just part of its charm now,” Jack said, as he cut the ignition and put the truck in park. “But Pearl's looks nice, doesn't it? We spent the Friday night after Thanksgiving decorating it. It helped, of course, that Frankie is so tall he didn't have to stand on a ladder to hang those stars.” Frankie was the fry cook, manager, and now, part owner of Pearl's. Jack unfastened his seat belt and reached for the door handle. “You ready?” he asked when Daisy made no move to join him.

“Do we have to go in yet?” she asked. “Could we stay here a little longer?”

“Sure,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Your mom's not expecting us for another five minutes. Why? What's up?” he asked, as he turned the ignition and the heat back on.

Daisy sighed. “Nothing's up; I just want to mentally prepare myself.”

“For Pearl's?” Jack said, bemused. “I wasn't aware that eating there required any mental preparation. I mean, the menu's still pretty straightforward.”

Daisy laughed. “No, I mean, everyone in there will know me, and know everything about me, including at least five embarrassing stories from my childhood. And they'll know what position I played on the volleyball team in high school, and what my grade point average was, and who I dated.”

“The burdens of celebrityhood?” Jack teased.

Daisy smiled. “The burdens of living in a small town. Because I'm not unique. Believe me, I'll know as much about everyone else in Pearl's as they'll know about me. I just want to get ready for it, that's all. All that familiarity. All that . . . concern.”

“Should we be concerned?”

“No,” Daisy said, shaking her head. “I'm fine.”

“You know, honey, every time you say ‘I'm fine,' I feel a little less convinced that you're fine.”

She laughed again, and Jack savored the sound of it. Making his daughter laugh had become one of his great pleasures in life.