A Dog's Perfect Christmas Read online

  “We’re behind schedule,” Hunter fretted, not for the first time.

  Monty shrugged. “That’s not our fault. Things are taking longer than we expected.”

  Hunter nodded as if this made any sense. If it wasn’t their fault, whose was it?

  Then a loud boom echoed through the building. Hunter looked at Monty, who wore a puzzled expression.

  “What was that?” Hunter asked.

  Monty shook his head. He reached out to stroke his thick mustache, as if checking to make sure the thing was still there. “Don’t know, Bossman.”

  They were walking down the hall toward the noise when they heard another, similar boom, this time from an office much closer. Alarmed, Hunter picked up his pace. He looked in an open doorway and saw a pair of movers standing and regarding an executive desk with disgusted expressions. The hutch had completely collapsed, scissoring flat.

  “What happened?” Hunter demanded.

  One of the men shrugged. “Thing just fell apart,” he observed in distaste.

  Boom. Another hutch down.

  Hunter turned and dashed across the hall into an office where two more movers were pulling a desk and hutch away from the wall. He watched helplessly as the shelves pancaked with a crash.

  “Wow,” one of the movers admired.

  From down the hallway: Boom. Boom.

  “Stop!” Hunter yelled. He stepped out of the office. “Everyone stop moving the desks!” he shouted as loudly as he could.

  Boom.

  * * *

  Monty produced a pack of gum from his pocket and extended it to Hunter the way smokers offer each other cigarettes. When Hunter shook his head, Monty pulled out a piece for himself and begin unwrapping it, taking much more care than the men moving Hunter’s furniture. “It’s not our fault,” Monty observed. “Somebody removed the back panels from all the hutches. That gave them no lateral strength, so the second we moved ’em, the bookshelves just collapsed on themselves. Only reason they stayed up was because they were supported by the wall.” Monty nodded, satisfied with his testimony. “Bam,” he concluded.

  “Sounds like the sort of thing that maybe your crew could have looked into before trying to move the executive furniture,” Hunter suggested.

  Monty stuck the wad of gum in his mouth and examined the foil wrapping as if it were a fortune from a cookie. “Yeah, maybe, Bossman.”

  By the time Hunter’s cries of “stop” suggested to the moving teams that perhaps they should, well, stop, only two desks had upright, intact hutches on them.

  “Can they be repaired?” Hunter pressed anxiously.

  Monty shrugged. “Thing is, the shelves were all just cheap pressboard with veneer. When they collapsed, the screws ripped out and took a pretty big chunk of shelving with them. What we would call holes.”

  “What would a layman call them?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Look, I sold that furniture to the CFO of a start-up that just got a little funding. I don’t know if he’ll want any of the units, now,” Hunter explained a bit desperately.

  Monty nodded. “Most start-ups fail,” he noted.

  “Which is relevant because…?”

  Monty opened his mouth to air out his gum. “Huh?”

  That was how Hunter’s morning began. He directed Monty to have his crew take the desks to the loading dock, sans hutches, calculating that maybe by Monday someone would come up with a way out of the mess. The day drained into night. By 6 P.M. the following day, Sunday, the installation was scheduled to be complete. It wasn’t. They still had at least ten hours to go.

  Hunter had not left the building, drawing all of his nutrition from coffee.

  “Gonna suck if people start coming to work tomorrow and we’re not done, Bossman,” Monty informed him helpfully through his gum.

  “If that happens, then we begin losing serious money while we have highly paid software engineers standing around, unable to work. Not your fault,” Hunter finished, simply to spare himself from hearing it come out of Monty’s lips.

  Monty agreed, blowing a bubble.

  * * *

  “You are not pregnant,” Juliana told herself with relief Monday morning. She flushed the toilet and staggered back to bed, feeling dizzy. “You’re just sick. You have the flu.” She frowned. Her pulse was fluttery, her head light, her stomach sore and weak. “But at least you’re not pregnant. Não grávida.”

  Later, when Juliana entered the kitchen, feeling shaky and weak, her husband was sitting at the table staring at a piece of toast on a plate as if watching for signs of life.

  “What time did you get home?” she asked him, going automatically to the coffee maker.

  “A little while ago.”

  “Do you want your coffee? You left it here next to the pot.”

  “That would be great, thanks.”

  Juliana heated the cup in the microwave before taking it to him. “Did you get the project finished the way you wanted?”

  Hunter raised his wrist and stared at his watch as if he had never seen it before. Finally, he shrugged. “Supposed to be done. When I left, they said another half hour. So, figure an hour. Right about now, employees are probably arriving and the moving crew’s pulling away from the back entrance like it was a bank robbery.”

  “Honey,” Juliana said, “you look like I felt all weekend. You should get some sleep.”

  He nodded. “Soon as I get the kids off to school.”

  Hunter’s words warmed Juliana from within. She went to him and put a tender hand on his shoulder. “I’m okay to drive,” she told him. “Seriously, you need to rest.”

  Hunter stood, yawning. “Thank you,” he said. “Oh, and don’t forget to pick up Sean O’Brien. I wrote down his address on a sticky and put it on the refrigerator.” They both turned and looked. Hunter frowned. “Well, I put it somewhere,” he corrected himself.

  “I think Ello’s pretty unhappy with the idea of guiding the boy through his first day at school,” Juliana observed tactfully. Actually, she’s freaking out and has already thrown a tantrum about it.

  Hunter grunted. “Well, it can’t be helped. I really, really need points with my boss right now.”

  * * *

  Ello watched the curbside piles of dirty snow glide past the minivan’s passenger-side window, not speaking to her mother. This was going to be the Worst Day Of Her Life. She pictured this Sean O’Brien, some farmer from Detroit, following her around like an imprinted goose. Where was she supposed to sit at lunch? She couldn’t guide him to her usual table. That would get her Banned For Life.

  Brittne ate during the other lunch period, so at least Ello was spared that. She groaned, not for the first time that morning, pulled out her phone, and stared at it. Brittne had not responded to any of her texts. Send another one?

  “The thing with the school photos was just a joke,” Ello stated aloud. That’s how she was playing it. Something so insignificant, it wasn’t like Everyone Was Staring, whispering, laughing.

  Please, Ello thought to herself, almost a prayer. Please, Brittne.

  The Michigan sky matched her mood perfectly: gray, oppressive, dull.

  “This is it,” her mom announced, pulling into the driveway of a new and pricey two-story home. “Nice place.”

  Ello flicked a glance at the house, then looked away without comment. She was pretty sure she was going to throw up. They sat for a moment, the twins oddly quiet, probably reacting to the unexpected change in their morning routine.

  “Maybe he’s sick and can’t go to school today,” Ello suggested hopefully.

  As soon as she said this, the door opened and a boy bounded out, smiling.

  Ello glanced at him, then stared at him. This was Sean O’Brien? He was as tall as any boy in her class. He looked athletic and muscular, and his blond hair was thick and combed to the side. As he approached, she saw that his eyes were a piercing blue.

  He was almost breathtakingly handsome.

  Sean O’Brien sa
untered around to Juliana’s window, which she lowered.

  “Mrs. Goss?” he greeted jovially.

  Juliana was smiling. Ello assumed most people couldn’t help but smile at this boy—he radiated happiness, as if he’d never known a moment of bad mood in his life.

  “Hi, Sean.” Juliana turned. “Ello, why don’t you get in back with the twins and let Sean ride up with me.”

  Ello, too stunned to speak, wordlessly slid out of the car. Sean came around the front, grinning at her. “So, you’re Eloise?” he guessed. “You’re going to give me the grand tour today? I really appreciate it.”

  It occurred to Ello that she should say something. “Yes,” she grated hoarsely.

  “Her friends call her Ello,” Juliana told Sean.

  “Ello!” Sean confirmed with delight.

  Ello slid in next to Ewan, brushing away the chunks of donut he had tossed on the seat. The twins peered at her as if they had never seen her before. Sean buckled in, and as Juliana was backing down the driveway, turned and tossed another dazzling smile at Ello. “I’m really looking forward to this,” he told her. Though that seemed impossible to Ello—they were headed to middle school—Sean obviously meant it.

  So, okay, maybe he wasn’t too bright. Somehow, Ello had the sense she could overlook that.

  * * *

  At 11 A.M., Hunter struggled to drag his state of being into wakefulness. He applied jumper cables to his nervous system with two hasty cups of coffee, but he’d clearly built up too much immunity over the past several days. The car drove itself to his office, Hunter blinking away what felt like sand in the gears of his eyelids.

  The receptionist, Kim, glared at him with her pale brown eyes as he walked in the front door. “Well, you look like crap,” she observed. She tossed her head, her tight, sandy curls rippling with the motion.

  “Yeah,” Hunter agreed.

  Kim theoretically reported to Hunter, as did all the general office staff. Kim did not seem to believe this.

  “So, how’s it going with the installation? Everybody like their new setup?” he asked.

  Kim’s expression seemed a little odd to Hunter, as if she had taken a bite of something and was trying to figure out what it was. “I guess you could say that, maybe, a little.”

  Hunter shrugged. “It might take them a while to get used to it. But all the studies show that a more open floor plan results in more collaboration, especially where it’s most needed, in the engineering department.”

  “You look that up on Wikipedia?” Kim challenged him scornfully.

  Hunter simply shook his head. Kim reached into her drawer and pulled out Hunter’s moving plan, all two hundred pages of it, in a ring binder. She dropped it on her desk with a thump. “So, can I throw this away now?”

  “No, not yet. There are still tasks to be completed.”

  “I never even read the thing,” Kim advised contemptuously.

  “I guess I’ll go up to engineering and see how it’s going,” he responded.

  Kim shrugged her apathy.

  Hunter rode the elevator up to what he was counting on to earn him his promotion—the engineering floor, where everyone pulled in six-figure salaries. Added productivity in software development would instantly show up on the company’s bottom line.

  When the doors eased open and Hunter stepped off the elevator, he gasped.

  The new collaborative pods were all in place. The cubicle walls were gone. The software engineers should have been “buzzing like bees in a hive, cross-pollinating their ideas” (a direct quote from the manufacturer’s sales brochure). Instead, they had apparently gone to the loading dock and grabbed the large cardboard boxes in which the furniture was shipped. Using packing tape, they had erected tall barriers between themselves and their compatriots, completely cocooning themselves in brown walls with FRAGILE—THIS SIDE UP printed on them.

  Some of the THIS SIDE UP notices were upside down.

  Okay. Obviously, this was a joke. Whereas the developers were supposed to be facing each other over a low divider, they had instead walled themselves off on three sides. Ha ha, they’d be saying, wait until Hunter sees this! We will all get a good chuckle from his reaction for sure, ha ha. This is the kind of hilarious hijinks we software guys come up with, ha ha.

  Hunter forced a jaunty grin onto his features. He could take a joke; he had a sense of humor. “Hey, Stephen,” he said, greeting one of the software engineers. “So, pretty funny, these walls.”

  Stephen often rode his bike to work and had prescription goggles so he wouldn’t crash into Michigan potholes. For some reason, he had given up wearing regular glasses no matter what his transportation, and he was goggled now, peering owlishly through thick, rubber-lined, protruding lenses, as if he’d come to the office in an open cockpit.

  “What?”

  “I mean, the cardboard,” Hunter explained, his grin cracking from the effort of holding it in place.

  “Huh?”

  Hunter dropped all pretense. “What’s with the boxes?”

  Stephen blinked at him with magnified eyeballs. “Someone took down the cubicles.”

  This non-answer made Hunter want to slap the goggles off the man’s face. “Yes,” he agreed between clenched teeth, “that’s by design. This way, people on a project can collaborate and even overhear conversations that will make them more effective.”

  “Collaborate.” Stephen shook his head. “See, that’s not how I work. I don’t want to collaborate. I don’t like people. That’s why I’m a software engineer.”

  “Well, sure, that’s the thing.… The layout’s conducive to working together, even if some people don’t like it.”

  “I liked the way things were. Everybody did, okay? If you make me take down the cardboard, I’ll quit.”

  Hunter nodded numbly. Since being hired, he’d assumed that everyone saw the same problems he did: people surrounded by other individuals, yet not ever interacting, spending all their time in solitary confinement. Emails as inflammatory as Twitter posts because the sender had no personal relationship with the recipient. Low morale. Isolation.

  Now he understood that what he saw as a debilitating flaw was, for some, a coveted way of life.

  So what had been designed to be a gorgeous new office, populated with cheerful, interactive engineers, instead had grown into an ugly maze of refrigerator boxes.

  Hunter tried to breathe. It was difficult to imagine a worse failure.

  He felt a tap on his arm and turned. Kim handed him his cell phone. “You left this on my desk,” she admonished, in the same tone she would have used had he decorated her blotter with a dead rodent.

  “Thanks.”

  “Also, Mrs. O’Brien wants to see you in her office,” she advised neutrally.

  “Okay. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “I think now. Like, the way she said it.”

  Hunter was aware of Stephen monitoring this exchange. “Thanks, Kim.”

  “So, you need to go see her,” Kim added firmly.

  Hunter sighed. What he did not say was that he didn’t want to talk to Mrs. O’Brien.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ello didn’t know if people were staring at her because she was with Sean O’Brien, or because Brittne had used her witchery on the student body to transform Ello into a dead girl walking. Either way, she felt as if a thousand pairs of eyes were watching her every move.

  Ello escorted Sean to the office, where they confirmed that he was enrolled but had not yet been assigned any classes. The vice principal suggested that Ello take Sean with her on her own schedule while the staff tried to figure out who was to blame for what had not happened.

  Sean seemed implausibly jubilant at the idea of spending the day on Ello’s elbow.

  “So, you moved from Detroit?” Ello asked him as they moved through the crowded hallway. She Would Not Look At Anyone But Him.

  Her question made him smile. Everything made him smile. And his smile was one of the cutest thi
ngs about him. It made her want to grin back, like they had some shared joke.

  He even has dimples.

  “Yeah,” he affirmed. “We lived there for three years. Before that, Vancouver. Have you ever been to Vancouver? It’s in Canada. But it’s not, like, freezing cold, the way it is, well, here. It’s at sea level, but there are mountains. Do you ski?”

  Ello did not ski, had not been to Vancouver, and was, compared to Sean O’Brien, a Complete Loser. If he cared about any of that, he didn’t comment.

  On their way to third-period history with Mr. Morrison, Ello felt Brittne’s icy stare tracking her as she strolled next to Sean. Ello did not return the look. It felt surreal not to care more about Brittne than anything else in the world.

  “Hey, do you ice-skate?” Sean asked abruptly.

  Ello narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “Did my dad tell you to ask me that?”

  Sean shook his head. The question (of course) made him smile. “No, it’s just that I really love to skate. I’ve been playing hockey since I was like six years old. And my aunt teaches ice dancing.”

  “Ice dancing,” Ello repeated.

  “Yeah,” Sean replied. “Do you know what that is? It’s not figure skating, it’s a different thing.”

  “I’m aware,” Ello replied faintly.

  * * *

  Valerie O’Brien viewed Hunter with cold, hawklike eyes. “When were you going to tell me that you broke all of the executive furniture?”

  Hunter’s fuzzy brain processed the question a little slowly. “Now?” he guessed.

  She pressed her lips into a bitter line. “What,” she finally replied, “am I supposed to tell the CFO of that start-up when he calls to inform me all of the furniture we delivered to him is busted up?”

  Hunter had a good answer for that one. He wondered what it was.

  “Well, just see if you can talk them into not making us pay to have the junk removed, at least.”

  “Colfaxette Engineering,” he finally replied. That was the name of the start-up, and Mrs. O’Brien, as far as he knew, had never spoken to anyone there.