The Christmas Gift
When she knew him, Alex had been renting a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Jarrell above a hardware store. Back then, his father had lived in an equally small condo he’d purchased after Alex’s mother died and he sold the house where Alex had grown up.
“I moved in when he bought the house next door,” Alex said.
“Recently?” Krista asked.
“Three years ago,” Alex said.
“Nobody told me,” Krista muttered.
Nobody should have to tell her. If she visited her parents even semiregularly, she’d know who their neighbors were.
She unbuttoned her coat and slipped it off to reveal a long blue sweater worn over skinny black jeans tucked into her boots. The clothes were wrinkled from traveling, but the jeans outlined the shape of her lovely legs and the sweater hugged her breasts. He took the coat from her and missed the rod on his first attempt at hanging it up.
“How long are you home for?” he asked.
“Now that I know Mom’s okay,” she said, “just until the day after Christmas.”
The news hit Alex like a snowball to the face. Holding back his reaction would have been impossible. “You’re kidding me! That’s only four days. You haven’t been home in eight years!”
Krista’s spine stiffened and her chin lifted. “I wasn’t going to come at all. I made other plans.”
“Are your plans more important than being with your family?” Alex had witnessed Eleanor’s tears when she talked about how much she missed her daughter. “Look at the lengths your mother went to get you here.”
“You’re out of line,” Krista said tightly.
“Why?” Alex shot back. “Because I’m telling you something you don’t want to hear?”
She glared at him.
“Alex! Krista!” Eleanor’s voice drowned out the Christmas carols drifting through the house. “Time for dinner.”
Alex swept a hand in front of him, calling himself a fool for maneuvering to be alone with her. “After you.”
With a toss of her head, Krista preceded him into the kitchen. He fought to keep his eyes from dipping to the sway of her hips, reminding himself that what had happened between them had been very brief and very long ago.
He’d been right to break things off the instant Krista told him she was moving to Europe, no matter how wrenching the decision had been.
A woman who could stay away from her family for eight years, returning home for a few days only because she thought her mother was gravely ill, was not the one for him.
KRISTA COULD BARELY taste the honey ham she was chewing, although she was sure it met her grandma’s excellent standards. Her body was still on Prague time, where it was 2:00 a.m. That wasn’t all.
The mother she thought was dying sat at one end of the long dining room table, her paralyzed father at the other. Grandma smiled and laughed like nothing had changed and the only man Krista had slept with after one date was seated next to her in silent disapproval.
Krista felt like she was caught in a snow globe after it had been shaken. Her vision seemed hazy and her equilibrium off. Her temper, though, was still broiling. How dare Alex judge her when he didn’t know the whole story?
“Nobody’s said why Rayna isn’t here.” Krista and her sister weren’t close. Krista had made some overtures over the years and the miles, but Rayna seldom responded.
“She’s working,” Alex answered. He would have been easier to ignore if he didn’t smell better than the food. “The dentist is open late for the next few days.”
Did that mean Rayna already had her associate’s degree in dental hygiene? Krista was relatively sure her sister was still taking classes at a community college near Harrisburg but could be wrong. Krista certainly wouldn’t ask, not with Alex in the room.
“Why didn’t you bring your girlfriend, Alex?” her father asked.
Krista refused to acknowledge her sense of disappointment. It didn’t matter to her if Alex was involved with someone. Come to think of it, why wasn’t he married? Even eight years ago, it had seemed to Krista he’d been in the market for a relationship with a future.
“Alex broke up with Cindy before Thanksgiving,” Krista’s mother answered before Alex could. “Don’t you remember, Joe?”
“How am I supposed to remember all Alex’s women?” Her father sat in his wheelchair instead of one of the dining room chairs, a constant reminder that he was paralyzed from the waist down. “Seems like he has a new girl every year.”
Krista thought a year was a long time. She couldn’t remember the last guy she’d dated for more than a few months.
“He’s looking for the right woman so he can settle down and raise a family,” Ellie said. “Aren’t you, Alex?”
Grandma wagged a finger at her daughter-in-law. “Don’t put Alex on the spot like that, Ellie. I’m sure he doesn’t like it.”
“I wouldn’t keep coming over here if I minded.” Alex smiled at her mother, but Krista noticed he hadn’t answered the question. She wondered if both Krista and her mother had Alex pegged wrong. He was thirty-two, after all. Maybe he was a serial dater, like Krista.
“You can ask me about Charlie,” her grandmother said.
Krista felt like someone had just shaken the snow globe harder. Who was Charlie?
“He’s auditioning to be my new beau.” Grandma addressed Krista, answering one of her unspoken questions but raising others. Auditioning? “Your grandpa’s been gone a long time so I figured it was time I got myself one. You’ll never guess where I met him.”
“The senior citizen’s center?” Krista guessed.
“The internet!” Grandma announced. “Alex set up one of those computer profiles for me.”
Krista gaped at him, glad for an outlet for her residual displeasure. “You got my grandma into online dating?”
“Hey, don’t look at me like that.” Alex waved both his hands in the air. “Online dating was Grandma Novak’s idea, not mine.”
Alex called her grandmother Grandma Novak?
“In my day, we went on blind dates. That’s how I met my wife,” Milo Costas said. With his olive complexion, dark hair and angular features, he resembled a smaller, older version of his son. Milo’s dark eyes fastened on Krista. “She died when Alex was nineteen.”
Why hadn’t Krista known that? She searched her memory but couldn’t remember Alex mentioning his mother in the past. Then again, they’d probably known each other better in bed than out of it. “I’m sorry,” Krista told Milo.
“Don’t be sorry for me,” Milo said. “I have my memories, my son and great next-door neighbors. It’s a wonderful life.”
Grandma laughed. “Milo works that line in every year. It’s his favorite Christmas movie.”
“It’s his favorite movie, period,” Alex said. “The dogs we had when I was growing up were named George and Bailey after the Jimmy Stewart character.”
“That’s right,” Milo said. “I got your grandmother to stock it at the store, too. The holiday movies are big sellers.”
Krista put down her fork, the better to concentrate on the conversation. “People buy movies at the nursery?”
“Not the nursery, the Christmas Shoppe,” Milo said.
Krista blinked, trying to dispel the haze clouding her brain. “What Christmas shop?”
“The one your grandmother runs next door to the nursery,” Milo said.
The fog Krista was trying to plow through got even thicker. Beside her, she could almost hear Alex asking why she hadn’t known about the store.
“We opened November first.” Grandma seemed to sit taller in her seat. “Our specialty is lighted yard art.”
Considering her grandmother’s love of Christmas, the shop was a logical extension of the nursery business. Had Krista really been so out of touch that the new venture hadn’t come up in conversation? She talked to her mother every month or so, although lately Krista made excuses to get off the phone when her mother started pressuring her to visit.
“Why don’t you come see the shop tomorrow, Krista?” Grandma asked. “If you want, you can even help. We have a lot going on.”
“Sure,” Krista said through a tight-lipped smile. She would prefer avoiding the nursery altogether but would never admit that to her grandmother.
“Great!” Her grandmother clapped her hands. “I’m going to love having you home! I might not let you go back after the new year.”
“If she stays that long,” her father muttered.
“Of course she’s staying!” Krista’s mother exclaimed. “It’s the holidays. There’s no reason for Krista to hurry back to Europe.”
Krista avoided looking at Alex. “Actually, there is. I’m supposed to meet friends in Switzerland the day after Christmas for a ski trip.”
“You can’t go back that soon!” Krista’s mother insisted.
Krista steeled herself against her mother’s protests. As soon as she was through with dinner, Krista intended to book her return flight. She wouldn’t be in Pennsylvania at all if her mother hadn’t manipulated her. “I already paid for the trip, Mom. The reservation’s nonrefundable.”
Krista’s mother stuck out her lower lip. “What if I were still in the hospital?”
“You’re not,” Krista’s father interjected. “Leave the girl alone, Ellie. If Krista has to go back, she has to go back.”
Krista reached for her glass of water to wash down the tight feeling in her throat. Next to her, she was aware of Alex watching her silently.
So much had changed since Krista had left Pennsylvania, yet one thing remained constant—her mother didn’t want her to leave, but her father couldn’t wait to shove her out the door.
Krista didn’t blame him, especially because she was the one who’d put him in the wheelchair.
CHAPTER TWO
KRISTA WOKE TO THE SOUND of silver bells.
As a child snuggled under her warm blankets, Krista used to listen for the bells until she fell asleep. They’d dangled from the wreaths that hung from her bedroom window, tinkling together with every gust of wind.
Krista’s room had been her refuge while she was growing up. She’d never tired of the glow-in-the-dark yellow stars her father had put up on the ceiling, insisting that one day she’d travel to the moon. In her teens, she’d plastered the walls with posters of more realistic places to visit—Venice, Paris, Rome, London.
Now that bedroom was a home office, and Krista was sleeping on the sofa bed in the basement recreation room. So why had she still heard the bells?
They jingled again. Pushing the cloud of hair from her face, Krista sat up in bed. Something sleek and white leaped onto the chair opposite the sofa bed and stared at Krista from glistening green eyes. It was a cat with bells on its red collar. Since when did her family have a pet?
“Where did you come from?” Krista asked aloud.
With sinewy grace, the cat jumped down from the chair and disappeared, the bells tingling together in its wake. Krista was about to lie back down when she caught sight of the bedside alarm clock.
Nine o’clock!
She didn’t even sleep that late in Prague, where it was already partway through the afternoon. Krista should have asked what time to be ready to leave for the Christmas shop and set an alarm.
She scrambled out of the sofa bed and hurried to her open suitcase. Since it was carry-on size, her wardrobe choices were limited. She yanked out dark slacks and a plain red sweater that was as Christmassy as her wardrobe got.
Ten minutes later, after using the bathroom in the basement that was adjacent to her sister’s empty bedroom, Krista hurried up the stairs. The smell of brewing coffee assailed her before she reached the kitchen.
A young woman sat at the kitchen table, her hands wrapped around a coffee mug, her long blond hair parted in the middle and tucked behind her ears. A newspaper was spread in front of her but she didn’t appear to be reading it.
If they’d been anywhere but inside the house, Krista might not recognize the woman as her sister, Rayna. The twenty-one-year-old’s face was thinner and her hair much lighter than when Krista had last seen her.
Feeling her mouth curving into a smile, Krista started toward her sister. “Rayna! You’re so grown up!”
Rayna lifted her large dark eyes from her coffee mug. Her lips were unsmiling, her body language distant. “I heard you were home.”
Krista stopped midstride, her hands dropping to her sides. She blinked sudden moisture from her eyes, annoyed with herself. Only a fool would expect a warm welcome after so many years apart. “I got here last night but crashed early because of the time difference.”
Rayna said nothing.
Krista cleared her throat. “I came because Mom called me and made it seem like she was really sick.”
“A few days ago, she was really sick. Her skin was gray and she was so run-down she could barely stand.” Rayna’s eyes didn’t waver from Krista’s face. “Then she started vomiting blood. Nobody knew why when we got her to the emergency room.”
Krista hugged herself, disturbed by the frightening scenario her sister was describing. “The doctors must have figured it out pretty quickly.”
“Not until the endoscopy. Even after they put her on medicine, she was too weak to get out of bed. They kept her in the hospital for three days.”
Some of the annoyance Krista had felt at her mother the day before faded. “I didn’t know any of that.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like you live around here,” Rayna said.
Even though the statement was true, it felt like a criticism.
Rayna’s eyes dipped to the newspaper. It was open to the sports page, the section Krista usually skipped. Was Rayna into sports? She hadn’t been as a child. She didn’t have a cat, either, although Krista’s guess was that the one downstairs was hers.
“Where is Mom?” Krista asked.
Rayna didn’t look up. “She and Grandma left early for the nursery.”
Krista had missed her grandmother, just like she thought. She hadn’t considered her mother would be working at the shop today, too.
“Shouldn’t Mom be resting?” Krista asked.
“Sure should,” Rayna mumbled, eyes still on the page.
The topic was too important to let her sister’s lack of response dissuade her. “Then why isn’t she?” Krista persisted.
“Mom promised she’d take it easy,” Rayna said.
“Will she?” Krista asked. “Probably not.”
“Maybe I can make sure she doesn’t overdo it,” Krista said, thinking aloud.
Rayna’s eyes finally flickered upward. “Yeah. You do that.”
Krista tried not to take offense. She couldn’t expect her sister to instantly trust her. “Is Dad still here? Maybe I can hitch a ride with him.”
“Dad doesn’t drive, Krista,” Rayna said dryly.
Krista should have expected that. Her parents had purchased a handicap-accessible van before Krista moved to Europe but it hadn’t been equipped with hand brakes. Once again Krista wished she’d thought to reserve a rental car. “How will he get to work?”
“The Christmas Shoppe isn’t his thing.” Rayna waved an arm in a dismissive gesture. She wore a sterling silver bracelet with a heart-shaped charm dangling from it. Inside the charm was the name Trey. Was he Rayna’s boyfriend?
“But the nursery’s still open, right?” Krista asked. Her parents typically closed the business in January and February and reopened in March.
“They shut down early because of the Christmas Shoppe,” Rayna said. “Good thing, too. We’ve had a lot of ice this month. It’s hard for Dad when the weather’s bad.”
The first winter their father had been in a wheelchair, he’d struggled to get around. Krista hadn’t expected him to become a wheelchair whiz since then, but it hadn’t occurred to her that he’d be housebound.
“Where is Dad?” Krista asked.
“In his office,” Rayna said. “But don’t go in there. He doesn’t like being disturbed.”
So their father wasn’t only housebound, he was also a recluse. Suddenly in need of sustenance, Krista moved across the kitchen to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup. Rayna closed the newspaper and stood up. At thirteen, she’d been as tall as Krista and spindly. Now she topped Krista by a few inches and her figure verged on voluptuous.
“I’ve gotta get to work,” Rayna said.
“So you got your degree?” Krista ventured.
“No.” Rayna’s head shook slightly as she regarded Krista. “I got a part-time office job at a dental practice while I finish school.”
The implication was that Krista should have known that. In reality, Krista wasn’t even sure how Rayna had escaped getting roped into going into business with their parents at the nursery. “That’s great.”
“Whatever.” Rayna started to walk out of the kitchen.
“Rayna, wait,” Krista called. Her sister stopped but didn’t turn, making it even harder to ask for a favor. “Can you drop me at the shop on your way to work? Or someplace where I can rent a car?”
“The rental agency’s too far away,” Rayna said, “and work’s in the opposite direction.”
Before Krista could figure out where that left her, dogs started barking to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” The doorbell.
“That’ll be Alex,” Rayna said.
“Alex?” Some of the coffee in Krista’s cup sloshed onto her hand. If it hadn’t been lukewarm, she would have gotten burned. “What’s he doing here?”
“Grandma asked him to pick you up.” Rayna walked the rest of the way out of the room, leaving Krista to answer the summons.
The irony didn’t escape her that the man who’d criticized her last night was willing to give her a ride to the shop when her own sister was not.
THE FIVE MILES BETWEEN the Novaks’ house and their business traversed a rolling stretch of rural road that led to the sprawling downtown of Jarrell.
Alex drove his company pickup past a diner, a dry cleaner, a hardware store and a bank branch clustered within a few blocks. Giant fake snowflakes decorated the light poles, which he thought provided a nice festive touch.
“Not much has changed around here, has it?” Krista asked.
Jarrell’s population was less than five thousand but the town was only thirty minutes south of the city center of Harrisburg. Anything Alex needed, he could get without driving more than a half hour, including streams to fish, trails to hike and mountainous scenery to photograph.
“Some of us think that’s a good thing,” Alex said.
“I was never one of them,” Krista said. “When I left, I felt like the town was smothering me.”
“You said you’d suffocate if you didn’t leave.” Alex braked at a red light at the intersection where his favorite bakery was located. Sometimes in the mornings, he dropped in for a cinnamon-raisin bagel topped with cream cheese, one of the simple pleasures of life.
“I’m surprised you remember that,” Krista said.
Alex could call the moment instantly to mind. They’d been lying naked in each other’s arm, having just made love. Her cheeks had been flushed, her hair awry, her lips well-kissed. Alex had been about to surprise her with tickets to a concert at the Forum in Harrisburg, but he’d never gotten around to it. There wasn’t any point. The concert had taken place the day after she left town.
“Probably because it’s the opposite of how I feel about Jarrell,” he said. “The clean air makes breathing easy for me.”
“Lots of places have clean air,” Krista said.
“Only one of them is home,” Alex said, then felt frustrated at himself for getting in the last word. They weren’t arguing. He liked living in Jarrell and she preferred Europe. End of story.
The light turned green and he stepped on the accelerator, but not before noticing she’d lost none of the vibrancy that had first attracted him to her. She filled up the truck with her presence, her skin glowing with health, her hair shiny clean. Dressed in the red coat, she looked even more alive.
“I’m surprised you agreed to drive me,” Krista remarked.
“Happy to do it,” Alex said.
“Oh, come on,” she drawled. “Why don’t you just admit Grandma twisted your arm?”
Alex’s eyes left the road. She gazed back at him, her expression challenging. For a woman who should be suffering from jet lag, she was surprisingly lucid.
“You believe in speaking your mind, don’t you?” Alex asked.
“You didn’t mince words yesterday. Or just now, for that matter,” she pointed out. “It’s obvious you disapprove of me.”
Alex focused in front of him, unwilling to be drawn into an argument. “You were right last night. I shouldn’t have criticized you.”
“But you meant what you said?”
“I did,” he confirmed. In his rearview mirror, Alex noticed a black SUV that was following too closely. The driver had a cell phone to his ear. “But I heard your mom at dinner. She doesn’t need me to speak for her. She does a pretty good job herself.”
Krista laughed, the last thing he expected.
“I guess my mother and I have something in common, after all,” Krista said. “So while we’re being outspoken and clearing the air, let’s hear why you dumped me.”
Alex abruptly turned to Krista, not able to determine from her expression if she were joking. “I didn’t dump you! You moved to the Czech Republic.”
“You dropped me like a hot potato two weeks before that.” She gasped and pointed at the road. “Red light!”
They were approaching a traffic light that was turning from yellow to red, but Alex only had one choice because of the SUV on his bumper. He kept his foot steady on the gas and went through the intersection. Behind them, the SUV came to a screeching stop.
“You ran that red light!” Krista said.
“It was safer than stopping.” Alex counted himself lucky he didn’t hear a police siren. How could he explain missing the red light when he’d driven this route thousands of times?
“Am I distracting you?” she asked.
“Ya think?” He vowed to keep his eyes on the road, but his mind was mired in the past. “To set the record straight, I didn’t break things off until after you accepted the job.”
“You had to realize I would have liked to keep seeing you in those two weeks before I moved,” Krista said.
“What would have been the point?” he asked.
“We were having a good time together.”
“The good times had to end, sooner or later.”
“It would have been nice if it was later,” she said.
Were they really having this conversation? Alex didn’t know any other woman who talked so bluntly. Was that one of the reasons he’d been attracted to her?
“More time together would have changed nothing,” he stated. “You still would have moved to Europe and I still would have stayed here.”
“I suppose,” she said, a sigh in her voice. “But it’s not like we had a commitment.”
The few weeks they’d known each other had been enough time for Alex to suspect he wanted more from Krista than sex. Her surprise announcement that she was leaving had forced him to conclude he hadn’t known her at all.
“Why didn’t you mention you were considering moving to Europe?” Alex posed the question he should have asked back then.
“I wasn’t,” Krista said. “The job offer came from out of the blue, and I accepted on the spot.”
Alex hadn’t seen it coming. One day, he was dating a woman with a semester left at a college less than three hours away in Philadelphia. The next, she was moving across the Atlantic Ocean.
Looking back on it, Alex had envisioned the same future for Krista that her mother had. She was a business major at the University of Pennsylvania and her parents owned a nursery. It seemed a given that she’d eventually join the family business, perhaps because that was the choice Alex made.
No, he hadn’t known Krista well at all.
“You sound like you have no regrets,” he said.
“Not about moving,” Krista replied. “But if I had it to do over again, I’d wait a lot longer before telling you I was taking the job.”
The last mile before they reached the nursery was on a fairly steep road with a narrow shoulder. Krista didn’t sound as if she were teasing, but Alex couldn’t risk a glance at her to find out.
“We still would have had an expiration date,” he said.
Krista agreed. “But think of the fun we could have had in the meantime.”