A Dog's Perfect Christmas Read online

  Ello nodded woodenly, remembering her mom in that hospital bed.

  “Do you want to go see her? I’ll drive you up anytime,” Sander offered. “Mrs. Espinoza says she’ll take the twin tornadoes.”

  Ello swallowed and shook her head. “I … can’t,” she said haltingly. “Is that bad? Do you think she knows I’m not visiting?”

  After a moment of consideration, Sander shook his head emphatically. “No, not at all. When your grandma was like this, when she was fading in and out, I was always there. I never left her side. But then, when she rallied and we talked, she had no idea I’d been sitting in that chair the whole time. She said she wished I had done something else with my time. She was…” Sander’s face froze, then pinched in on itself. “There she was with cancer in her liver, but all she cared about was me.”

  He bent forward, elbows on the table, and lowered his face into his open hands. Soon his shoulders were shaking. Winstead leapt to his feet and thrust his nose up toward Sander’s face. Ello hurried around the table to her grandfather, throwing her arms around him and sobbing with him over loss and fear and loneliness.

  All the twins could do was stare in shock.

  * * *

  Hunter sat by Juliana’s side. She was absolutely motionless, but the electronics in the room were still flickering with glowing green numbers. So even if she didn’t appear to be alive, she had to be. The machines said so.

  “You don’t have to worry about anything. It’s all under control,” Hunter murmured to her. Was it okay to lie to someone in a coma? In truth, the word that applied least to Hunter’s life right now was “control.”

  He forced himself to stop thinking about it. “I remember when I saw you on campus the first time,” he told her finally. “You were this amazing beauty. I figured out that you went to pick up your mail every day at the same time, so I’d park and watch you in my rearview mirror. Pretty quick I realized I couldn’t come up with a single excuse to talk to you. Like, what was I going to say? ‘How’s your mail this morning? Any interesting letters?’” Hunter hunched forward. “Did I ever tell you that when I found out you were from Brazil, I went to the language arts building and asked if anyone taught a class in Brazilian? I wondered why they were looking at me like I was an idiot. Then someone finally said you spoke Portuguese. Oh, man. But when I found out you were in that club that went to hospitals and sang Christmas carols, I thought, that’s it! I signed up, but I didn’t know that because my voice was deep I wouldn’t be able to stand next to you. So I sang loudly so you’d notice me. And it worked, because you looked at me and smiled!”

  Hunter’s phone vibrated, and when he looked down at it his smile faded.

  It was a text from Valerie O’Brien.

  VOB: Where are you? This is a critical time!

  Hunter took several moments to compose his reply.

  HG: Sorry, my wife is in organ failure and is comatose in the hospital. I should have let you know sooner, but I have been preoccupied.

  Hunter wondered if the word “preoccupied” was too sarcastic, but he sent the message anyway. There was a long pause.

  VOB: Any idea when you will be able to return?

  Hunter stared at his phone.

  HG: What kind of person would ask such a question at a time like this? Are you simply so awful you have no sense of any sort of common decency? My wife may be dead very soon. I should think you would care about an employee’s personal tragedies at least to the point of expressing some sort of concern. You are not a human being.

  Hunter regarded his message, heart pounding in his chest. At that moment, if Mrs. O’Brien had walked into the room, he would have punched her in the face.

  After a long minute, Hunter erased his unsent text and typed another.

  HG: Nobody knows.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  As a little girl, Ello had vehemently protested the idea that the Goss family would bundle up and head out to a choose-and-cut tree farm to pick a tree to whack down and decorate for Christmas. She couldn’t bear the thought of an “innocent tree” being “murdered” so they could put it in their living room. So for years, they had come to this parking lot at Meijer Thrifty Acres to find a Scots pine that was already chopped down—or “pre-murdered,” as Hunter had explained under his breath.

  Mrs. Espinoza was feeding and bathing the twins and hopefully preventing them from throwing butcher knives at each other before bedtime, so only Sander and Ello and the dogs had set out to find this season’s Christmas tree.

  Ello trooped up and down the rows, stopping to examine and reject each one based on selection criteria only she understood. Winstead, less fussy, had already marked several he would be okay with. The puppy was alternately attacking pine branches and Winstead.

  Sander slapped his hands together. It was cold out under the harsh lights. “What about that one?” he asked.

  “Too sparse at the top,” Ello replied dismissively.

  “Looks okay to me.”

  Ello shot him a look. “You don’t know my mother. It’s got to be perfect.”

  Ello went back to her microscopic inspection of every pine needle and Sander watched her with a slight frown on his face. “There’s no cause and effect, Ello,” he finally ventured.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A perfect tree won’t make your mother get better.”

  She scowled. “I know that,” she snapped. “I’m not a child.”

  He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay.”

  “God.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She stabbed a finger at a specimen that was, as far as Sander could determine, no different from any other. “This one,” she declared.

  The man running the operation billowed bourbon fumes as he cheerfully pulled a tag from their selection and went to ring it up. Sander followed, fingering his wallet. Ello scooped Ruby off the ground.

  They stood at a checkout stand fashioned from plywood and sawhorses while the professional tree seller punched at an iPad, frowning and shaking his head. “That’s not right,” he lectured his electronics.

  “What are those?” Ello asked.

  Everyone but Winstead looked where she was pointing. Behind them stood a stack of objects in burlap—they looked a bit like corpses to Sander. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear bourbon-breath’s answer.

  “Oh, we ordered too many trees this year. Those are the extras.” He went back to thumbing the iPad.

  “You’re just going to throw them away?” Ello demanded, sounding outraged.

  The man shrugged, indicating he could only do one thing at a time here.

  “We’ll take that one.”

  Everyone, even the dogs, seemed startled.

  The man frowned at her, then cast a glance at the tree mummies. “You want one of them?”

  Sander noted the set to Ello’s jaw. “How much?” he inquired, wallet out and ready.

  The man scratched himself, evidently deciding it took all kinds. “Ten bucks?” he offered. Sander wordlessly offered two fives and the man stuck the bills in his pocket, bypassing the cash register. “You want help loading it up?”

  With a belch that smelled like it had been aged in a barrel, the tree man carried the confined pine to their vehicle. The minivan filled with the redolence of pine. Winstead could not stop sniffing at this strange object that stretched from back door to dashboard.

  “I want to apologize for what I said at the tree lot,” Sander ventured.

  Ello fixed him with a vulnerable gaze. “I don’t think about it,” she murmured.

  “About … your mom’s illness?”

  She nodded, swallowing. “I have to force myself to believe it. Believe that she’s sick, that she might die. Most of the time it’s not real to me at all. I don’t feel anything: not about Mom, not about anything else. I don’t let myself feel anything.”

  Sander considered his reply. “That’s called denial,” he advised after a moment, not adding that it was also known
as the first stage of grief. “It’s a survival mechanism.”

  “I’m not a horrible person?” she whispered.

  “Oh, Ello, no. No, of course not.” Sander turned into a Walgreens parking lot and stopped the minivan. He faced his granddaughter and then faced his own wretched tragedy. “When your grandmother was first diagnosed, that first weekend, we never spoke of it.” He closed his eyes briefly. He would not cry again over this in front of Ello. She needed to hear that grief was survivable. “We just went about our day. I was building a cabinet in the workshop and went out and lost myself in it. Hours went by and then I realized she was alone in the house. I raced in and she was folding laundry and singing to herself.” Sander smiled at the memory. “The worst day of our lives, and we were happy because we were pretending that it wasn’t true. No, Ello, denial is a way to stay positive. My advice is to hold onto it as long as you can.”

  Ello’s expression was so adult in that moment that Sander almost forgot she was still a little girl, barely a teenager.

  “Thanks, Grandpa.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Saturday, Ello was critically examining her silhouette when she noticed Ruby, who was lying on the bed, raise her head. Then the puppy plunged off onto the floor and ran to the door, wagging, pressing her nose to the crack for a sniff. A huge answering snort came from the other side. Ruby scratched at the door.

  “Winstead?” Ello wondered aloud.

  A knock followed.

  Definitely not Winstead. Ello cautiously opened the door and Sander was standing there. Winstead pushed past her legs and instantly was wrestling with Ruby in surprised delight, as if the two of them had never seen each other before.

  “Grandpa? What are you doing upstairs?” she blurted without thinking.

  He grinned at her. “I come up here sometimes.”

  “Huh.” A thought struck her. “Like when I’m at school?”

  “No,” he laughed. “Are you almost ready to go?”

  “Yeah, almost.” She gestured him into her chambers and was relieved to see him glance around with a lack of familiarity. Okay, so he wasn’t up here Going Through Her Things when she was away. Ew.

  He cleared his throat. “I just wanted to thank you again for the fried eggs every morning.”

  She cocked her head at that, puzzled.

  He shrugged, smiling sadly at himself. “Not just that. I realized recently that it’s the one thing I look forward to all morning. Sometimes all day. You come in, and it’s like Winstead when Ruby arrived. For a brief moment, you bring an energy I don’t have myself.”

  Ello felt a flash of shameful self-loathing. She lowered her eyes to the floor. “I never talk to you.”

  “No, that’s not right. You usually say something. And I get that I haven’t been much fun to chat with lately. No, not just lately.… Ever. I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, and when a man is in that mood he’s not of much use to anyone, including himself. You’re not just my granddaughter, Ello. You’re one of my best friends in the world.”

  Ello took a slow, deep breath. She stared at her grandfather, at his moist eyes and trembling smile, and suddenly found herself across the room and hugging him without realizing she’d even moved.

  He gently patted her back.

  They pulled out of the surprise intimacy and looked to the dogs as an escape from the awkwardness. Ruby, impossibly, had Winstead pinned to the floor and was mouthing the huge dog’s throat.

  “Who’s this?” Grandpa asked, looking at Ello’s collage of Brittne and Ello photos.

  Of course he wanted to know who the girl with the huge brown eyes was. Even though the pictures were all from sixth and seventh grade, anyone could see that Brittne was a stunner.

  “That’s Brittne. We’re kind of not talking to each other right now. It’s … complicated.”

  He nodded, still examining the shots.

  “I just have to get my stuff and we can go,” Ello informed him a little impatiently.

  “Did she pick out the photographs?” Sander asked.

  “Yeah. She put it all together and framed it for my birthday.”

  Sander nodded. “Thought so.”

  “Sorry?”

  He pointed to a picture of Ello and Brittne at the beach in Charlevoix. Then another on the Ironton Ferry. Then another, goofing off at Torch Lake. “She looks perfect in every single one.”

  “Well, yeah,” Ello agreed, a bit bitterly. “Because Brittne is perfect. She always has been, even—”

  “—But look at you,” he interrupted, peering at a photo. “In this one, you’re out of focus. This one, your hair’s funny. This one doesn’t look even look like you. In this one there’s, what, a shadow across your face. She picked pictures to make you look bad.” He regarded Ello mildly. “How long have you been friends?”

  * * *

  Sander was driving, Ello next to him in the passenger seat. The twins were occupied with a video on an iPad in the back. Ello decided not to mention how much Juliana loathed it when her children looked at screens instead of interacting with people. Ello’s thumbs were flying on her phone, texting Soffea and another one of Brittne’s exiles, Ashleigh. Turns out, She Had Friends. Maybe they had been there all the time, like the stars that only show up when the sun goes down.

  “I don’t know how you do that,” Sander observed.

  Ello blinked at him. “What?”

  “I can’t type on those things at all. The buttons are too small. Every word is a typo.”

  “Oh. Then just dictate,” she suggested.

  “Sorry?”

  Ello thumbed her phone and held it to her face. “Hi Grandpa. This is Ello. I am sitting in the seat next to you. When you get this text, comma, you’ll remember that you can just speak your messages into your phone.”

  “I’ll be darned,” Sander marveled as his phone beeped. “Thanks, kid.”

  “Technical support.… Isn’t that why you have grandkids?”

  Sander laughed and they drove on in silence for a moment. “Did you talk to your father yet? About quitting?”

  Ello knew what he meant; they were on their way to her ice-dancing lesson. She shook her head. “The few times I’ve seen him since Mom went to the hospital, he’s been totally wrecked, you know? I didn’t think he could handle it.”

  Sander nodded. “He has a lot going on right now. Might be best to wait until he’s out of the woods on all of that.”

  Ello regarded her grandfather in his new haircut and strange new role as her confidant and friend. “Is my mother going to die?” she asked bluntly.

  Sander flinched, then gave her a solid look. “I don’t think anyone expects that.”

  Ello blinked back her tears. Hearing his encouragement somehow made her want to cry more than contemplating the worst did.

  “While you’re at your lesson, I’ll take the boys to the park,” Sander told her. “And then when we’re home, I’ll take the dogs for a walk.”

  “Grandpa?”

  Sander raised his eyebrows at her.

  “Thank you for everything.”

  * * *

  Sander was back at the house, preparing to take the dogs and boys to what he now thought of as Widow Park, when his phone chirped. It was a text from Allison. He no longer thought of her as Alley Allison because he’d spent a little time with her and could now tell her apart from Clear Claire and Not-Claire Lucille.

  AT: Sander?

  Sander raised the phone to his mouth and pressed the dictate button. “Hello Allison,” he pronounced distinctly.

  SG: Hello Allison.

  He grinned, pleased with himself.

  AT: How come you didn’t call?

  Sander frowned. When? Why was he supposed to call Allison?

  SG: I did call, member? I told you how much I enjoined having coffee with you.

  AT: Right but I thought you would be calling me again. When I didn’t hear from you I thought I had done something wrong.

  Sander took a
deep breath.

  SG: Sorry. No, hi horse not I am Ron, I am just sane I didn’t have a reason Paul.

  AT: What?????

  SG: Not Paul! Paul! Paul! At sake!

  AT: I don’t know what you are saying!

  She answered on the first ring. “I’m trying to use the phone to dictate texts,” he explained by way of apology.

  “Oh. I thought you were mad at me.”

  “No, of course not. I was explaining you didn’t do anything wrong, I was just saying I didn’t have a reason to call. Not Paul, call.”

  “Well, I’m very glad you called,” Allison replied.

  “Sure,” he agreed. Wait! Did I call? “What’s on your mind?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Why did you want me to call?” Sander elaborated.

  “Oh. I just really enjoyed having coffee with you.”

  “Yes,” Sander agreed. They had both said that already. There was a long silence. Sander cleared his throat. “Well, I’m just getting set to take the dogs to the park.”

  “You’re going now?”

  Sander hesitated. “Yes, I thought I would.”

  “Okay. See you in a few minutes.”

  Sander looked at the dead phone, then over at Winstead, who was regarding him with a puzzled expression. He shrugged at his dog. “No idea,” he said. “Let’s load up the twins.”

  Winstead and Ruby had already incorporated park visits into their bill of rights, and now gazed at Sander expectantly whenever he stood up out of his chair. They tracked him with eager intensity as he fetched their leashes, then bounded joyfully into the minivan, wrestling all the way to the park.

  Allison was there, Claire was there, Lucille was there. Sander sat in his vehicle, watching them talk at the picnic table, seriously considering not getting out of the minivan. The twins were kicking expectantly, looking out the windows.

  “Well, old boy,” Sander murmured to Winstead, “this will be interesting.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When he freed the boys, they charged the park playground like Marines hitting a beachhead. Sander watched approvingly as they set about trying to climb the slides from the bottom up instead of using the ladders. The other children seemed a little intimidated by the assault. Sander put the pups in their fenced-off doggie area.