A Dog's Perfect Christmas Read online

  It was a chilly day, this Saturday. Allison was hugging herself and wore a knitted cap. Lucille had on a wool overcoat the same color as her leather boots. Red-headed Claire grinned at him as he approached.

  “Ladies,” he greeted them awkwardly.

  For a long time, that was all he said, but he did gather a lot of what he supposed was good information.

  Claire liked sailing in the summer and cross-country skiing in the winter. She was a huge Beatles fan.

  Lucille loved to spend time in the kitchen.

  Allison claimed to like movies that most women didn’t, the kinds with guns and superheroes.

  Lucille loved dogs.

  Allison said, Oh, I love dogs, as if that were somehow a different thing.

  “I feel as if I’m on a reality show,” Claire said with a laugh.

  “Next time we have coffee, let’s go to the bookstore,” Allison announced viciously. “I just love spending hours with the books.”

  “So you had coffee,” Lucille stated blandly. She looked at Sander with raised eyebrows.

  “Well…” Sander began, ready to defend himself.

  “What a nice…” Lucille turned to Claire. “What’s the word?”

  “Innocent?” Claire suggested.

  “Platonic thing to do,” Lucille decided.

  Allison narrowed her eyes to slits.

  “They have a nice lunch menu too, Sander, for when you and Allison are ready to take the next big step,” Claire informed him with a smile.

  “I would love that!” Allison agreed contractually.

  “Allie, bless your heart, if you keep losing weight you’re just going to up and blow away with the wind,” Lucille said, arsenic in the sugar of her voice.

  “You didn’t even bring your grandchildren with you today,” Allison sneered.

  “I can’t think of a time when I’ve had a more interesting conversation,” Claire observed.

  “Whatever happened with Gary?” Allison probed Lucille. “I thought he was going to be your fourth husband for sure.”

  Sander saw Winstead and Ruby go stock-still in the dog park, as if they sensed a threat. He met their eyes.

  “Fourth husband,” Lucille repeated with an icy smile. “So funny, Allie. You know I’ve only been down the aisle twice.”

  “And they both died, right?” Allison pressed, her expression positively prosecutorial.

  Lucille stood. “This has been so fun, but I need to go. Sander, would you mind walking me to my car? Allison, you’ll keep an eye on his boys for a moment, won’t you? That’s so nice.”

  Claire gave him a light wave while Allison seethed. Sander escorted Lucille to her Mercedes.

  “I was wondering if I could come cook dinner for you sometime. I am a really good cook.”

  Sander nodded—she’d mentioned her expertise in the kitchen more than once. “I do appreciate the offer,” he told her, “but between my granddaughter and me, I think we’ve got it handled. To tell you the truth, it’s been a bit of a bonding experience for both of us. Last night we made enchiladas.”

  Lucille regarded him intently. “I understand. But I would love to cook for you. And it would seem to me, Sander, that you could use some female company about now.”

  Sander blinked. Had he heard her correctly?

  “That would be nice,” he admitted faintly, feeling a little unsteady.

  Lucille stepped closer. “Your nanny has the boys on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, right?”

  Sander swallowed dryly. “Yes,” he agreed. Was this how women were, now? He had absolutely zero experience with situations like this.

  “So, this coming Monday, why don’t you come over and I’ll make you a nice lunch. With a special dessert.”

  Sander could think of no reason to say no to this.

  “Plan on staying a while, Sander,” she suggested. As she said this, she traced her index finger across Sander’s jawline, and he shivered.

  * * *

  Ello’s skating coach was Mrs. Steigler, a thin woman with hair gone gray, though she couldn’t have been much older than thirty. She only took her hands out of her pockets when she was demonstrating something.

  Today, as if part of some conspiracy, Mrs. Steigler paired Ello with Mitch for most of the session. They were dancing in closed position, meaning they faced each other. Mitch’s right hand felt damp under her shoulder blade as he clutched her a tad too tightly, and at every opportunity he shot her a brooding, intense stare from beneath his preposterously dark eyebrows.

  Ello shivered with relief when Mrs. Steigler asked her to demonstrate a toe-step to one of the other girls. Her back felt cool from evaporation where Mitch’s hand had been trespassing.

  It occurred to Ello that she had ventured out of the emotional dead zone. Her protective shell had slipped. She was back to being irritated with Mitch, back to wanting to quit skating, back to feeling like Things Were Normal—which they weren’t, but only if she thought about Mom. And when she thought about Sean …

  A noise at the far end of the rink drew her eyes. What she saw made her stomach sink. A bunch of girls were loading in for free skate after Ello’s lesson. It was obviously some sort of party, with balloons and everything. Maybe someone’s birthday.…

  But they weren’t just any girls. It was Brittne and Mourgen and Jayneigh—the ones who, along with a few others, had mutilated the photographs.

  “Eloise?” Mrs. Steigler asked. “Do you know those girls?”

  Ello turned and gave her skating instructor a flat stare. “No,” she responded dully.

  Mrs. Steigler glanced at her watch. “Okay,” she told everyone, “line up. Let’s talk about what we did today.”

  Ello waited until the class was mostly in a row so that she could skate over and stand next to anyone except Mitch. She saw him struggling to decide whether to break out of formation and join her.

  As Mrs. Steigler reviewed the day’s progress, Ello spotted a boy in full hockey regalia clomping in front of the bleachers.

  He was grinning, of course, because it was Sean.

  His awkwardness vanished the moment his blades touched ice. As he flowed out toward them, Mrs. Steigler turned to tell him it wasn’t yet free skate, but Ello blurted, “It’s okay. He’s a good friend,” and glided across to meet him. They stopped in the middle of the rink.

  “Hey!” Sean greeted her cheerfully. “We were just finishing hockey practice and I thought I’d come to see you. How’s your mom?”

  “Oh,” Ello replied. She forced her grin off her face and made her voice low and serious. “She’s not any better, but the doctor told Dad that’s good because she’s not any worse.”

  “I’m really sorry,” he told her sincerely.

  “No, it’s okay.” Okay? What does that even mean? You sound like an idiot!

  “Can I do anything? Do you need anything?” he asked.

  “No.” God, could you say more than one word?

  “I didn’t think you’d be here. Because…” Sean shrugged.

  “Oh. My grandfather says that the way to handle stuff like this is to keep to your normal routine.” Why would you bring up your grandfather?

  “The one whose wife passed away?”

  “Yeah. Grandpa Sander.” We need to talk about something else!

  “Do you have any other grandmothers?”

  “My grandma lives in Brazil.” You sound like you’re bragging!

  This delighted Sean. “Cool!”

  “My mother’s side of the family is Brazilian.” Now you are bragging!

  “Wow! Okay, that explains it. Why you’re so pretty, I mean.”

  Ello did not trust herself to speak.

  Sean looked around. He spotted Brittne and her friends. He turned back and looked at Ello. “Are you staying for free skate?”

  Ello shook her head. “No, my grandpa’s coming to pick me up.” Because all I want to do is talk about my grandparents.

  Sean cocked his head, listening to the music
playing over the loudspeaker. “Hey, feel like doing some twizzles with me?”

  A twizzle consisted of three quick, consecutive turns across the ice. Their first couple of tries didn’t go well—they were supposed to be synchronized, and Sean clearly hadn’t practiced Ello’s version of the move before. But he caught on quickly. Quicker than Mitch, that’s for sure! After a dozen or so tries, they were pretty close. Ello laughed delightedly, feeling absurdly happy.

  “This is amazing,” she told him.

  “Ready for a lift?” he replied, grinning.

  “Um…” she stalled, hesitating. “Like, without practicing or anything?”

  “Just a simple one.”

  For some reason, her heart was thumping. “Sure.”

  Ello and Mitch often struggled with their lifts. Mitch simply wasn’t strong enough to hold her up. But when she flowed into Sean’s arms, splaying her legs behind her, he pressed his hands against her hips and lifted her and twirled her as if they’d been practicing the move together all their lives. When he set her back down, they were both laughing.

  “Oh my God, that was great!” Ello exulted.

  Sean shrugged and smiled. “You did all the work,” he pointed out. “I just picked you up and set you back down.”

  They began waltzing, not attempting anything complicated, just moving together. Ello’s back faced the direction they were skating, which meant trusting Sean, whose hand was precisely where Mitch’s had been. Sean’s touch was light, featherlight, and Ello felt it as a tingle. They talked and skated, smiling, their rotation taking them past the party to which Ello had not been invited. She never looked once.

  Later, Ello positively bounced into her car seat, throwing her bag at her feet. She grinned at Sander, who grinned back at her.

  “Good lesson today?”

  “Yes!”

  Ewan said something and Sander shook his head. “Did you just ask for a donut?” he chided. “We do not stop for donuts.”

  “You understood that?” Ello asked suspiciously.

  Sander shrugged. “I may have picked up a little Twinglish here and there, though mostly I can’t understand a word they’re saying.”

  “A donut does sound pretty good,” Ello admitted.

  “So, you’re seconding the motion?” Sander asked slyly.

  Ello frowned. “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  After a moment, Ello sighed. “Grandpa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “At my ice dancing? I did denial. I’ve been doing it all day.”

  Sander nodded. “Yeah, me too, Ello.”

  * * *

  Sander panfried some walleye and Ello prepared a peppery cream cheese shrimp sauce to put on top. He simmered carrots and broccoli in butter and chicken broth, and Ello made a salad. The boys chomped on the carrots and ate a frozen cheese pizza that Ello baked for them.

  Hunter, of course, was at the hospital, but they set a place for him anyway. Sander focused on cutting pizza into pieces and trying to catch the ones the twins threw. Sometimes the dogs beat him to it.

  Sander watched Ello, worried about her uncharacteristic silence, but she seemed to be in a happy place, so he didn’t try to draw her out.

  The Christmas tree was unwrapped and in its stand in front of the window. It remained a tight column of pine boughs, stubbornly maintaining its bound-up shape.

  “Maybe it will loosen up during the night,” Sander observed.

  Ello helped him bathe the boys and shove them into their beds. Sander read them a story about a dog, a rabbit, and a hawk, all of whom became great friends despite the fact that two of them probably wanted to eat the other.

  It had been a day. He climbed into bed with a weary groan. As he drifted off, a phrase kept turning up in his thoughts.

  Female company.

  He was pretty sure that meant exactly what it sounded like. Somehow he had gone from having no company of the female kind to having three separate widows seemingly try to outbid each other for his attention. How was that possible? Alley Allison seemed almost desperate. Red-headed Claire blazed him with her clear eyes, and seemed to be reading him like a blueprint. And Lucille, with her talk of cooking and … other stuff … was taking aim at his, well, his appetites.

  Had this really all happened in such a short period of time?

  Sleep was deep and dreamless. And then he started awake. Ello was standing next to his bed, peering down at him. It was past three in the morning.

  “Are you okay?” he whispered. Her expression was too shadowed for him to read it.

  “Grandpa? Can you come see something?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Sander followed Ello down the tenebrous hallway, his feet dry on the wood floor. They were padding as silently as they could, though the twins probably could have slept through an artillery barrage.

  “Ello?” he murmured as they entered the living room. The absurd thought struck Sander that she might be sleepwalking.

  “Wait right there,” she urged. The curtains were drawn, the room dark, the couch aglow from some ambient illumination from the kitchen. He frowned as she went to her knees and fumbled with something he couldn’t see.

  And then he gasped with surprise. She had carefully strung the multicolored Christmas lights around the tree; when she lit them, they set the whole room ablaze.

  Ello’s face was as bright as the lights. “See?” she whispered triumphantly. “It’s a perfect tree!”

  He looked closer and saw that she was right; the branches had surrendered to gravity and resumed their normal relationship with one another, rendering the tree as symmetrical as any Sander had ever seen.

  Ello was literally bouncing up and down with glee, and Sander regarded her fondly. Here was the little girl he remembered: a kid at Christmas.

  “I prayed, Grandpa. I asked God to make Mom better. And then something made me get out of bed and I came out here and look! It’s a sign, Grandpa! Mom is going to be okay!”

  Ello was beaming at him, an odd intensity in her eyes, begging Sander to believe her.

  What would be the harm?

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “It’s a sign.”

  * * *

  Sometimes when Sander dropped off the boys at preschool, they clung to him as if they were children being forced to board a sailing vessel for the New World. “I do wa go pe kool crampa!” Ewan would howl.

  “Say if you an we head!” Garrett would agree.

  “I know you don’t want to go, Ewan,” Sander would reply. “Don’t worry, you’ll see me and Winstead after school, Garrett.”

  Other days, the boys would bolt from the car, twisting their little arms away from his grasp, so eager to join the mayhem inside the building that they sprinted without a backward glance. This was one of the latter days. Sander handed over their backpacks to one of the teachers without even seeing where his grandsons had gone.

  “Sander?”

  He turned and blinked in surprise. Coming out of the administrator’s office, clutching a brochure, was Claire. He was so accustomed to seeing her in the context of the dog park that he verbally stumbled. “Well, yeah. Um…”

  “Claire,” she prompted.

  “I knew that, sorry.” He had been about to call her “Clear.” He regarded her, puzzled.

  She smiled. “Don’t look so alarmed. I’m not here to hunt you down and mount your head over my fireplace. Though I am here because of you, because you recommended the place. My daughter’s looking for a preschool, and you spoke so highly of this one I thought I’d come by and see for myself.”

  Sander hooked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the chaos. “The real action is in there. If I were a braver man, I would volunteer, but I’m afraid it would exhaust me.”

  “I did spy on the children a little,” Claire admitted. “I don’t believe I ever had that much energy.”

  They shared a smile, then Claire gave a tiny shrug, the lift of her shoulders touching the soft curl of her auburn hair.
“Well…” she said.

  Sander felt suddenly pressured, as if he were supposed to do something but had forgotten what it was. “I’ll walk out with you,” he stalled.

  Their breath blew out in clouds as they headed to the parking lot. “Cold. So little snow this winter,” he noted.

  “I love the first snow. It’s so clean and new when it drifts down in big fluffy flakes,” Claire said. “But then after Christmas … it’s a pretty long slog until it stops snowing.”

  “By say, June, maybe,” Sander agreed. They both smiled ruefully.

  “I’ve heard there are other locales you can go to in the winter,” Claire remarked. “There’s no law that you have to stay here. They don’t detain you at the border or anything.”

  Sander laughed but couldn’t come up with a clever rejoinder.

  They had reached their cars. It suddenly seemed wrong that they were about to drive away from each other. “Claire…”

  She regarded him with one eyebrow raised, her brown eyes friendly.

  “Why don’t we have lunch. My treat, of course. Unless you’re…” He gestured to the whole rest of the world, because she could have had anything planned.

  She shook her head. “Nope, I’m not going anywhere or doing anything. Lunch sounds like fun.”

  They picked a place on Front Street to meet and eat. As he followed her, Sander looked in the rearview mirror, where Winstead would be if he had come along for the ride. “Do you think this is a coincidence?” he asked his absent dog.

  * * *

  Hunter met Dr. Lombard at her request in her office, which had a couch and a few chairs in what he felt was an oddly incongruent fashion, making the space feel like a psychiatrist’s lair, built for conversation. Perhaps it had to do with her specialty, “intensivist,” a field of medicine Hunter had never heard of before.

  Dr. Lombard was a slim and elegant woman with an accent Hunter had originally misidentified as British, but which turned out to be South African. She had striking eyes, but Hunter felt sure he saw a grim purpose in them now.