A Dog's Perfect Christmas Read online

  She waved him off. “Whatever. Say we won’t try to collect on our invoice, but if he wants us to pay him, he’ll have to sue us. At this point, that’s pretty much your only value to me. Have you been up to the engineering floor?”

  Hunter nodded wearily.

  “Well, it doesn’t look very good, now does it, Hunter?” Mrs. O’Brien asked in a voice normally reserved for addressing delinquent children. “Everyone has boxes on their desks. You can barely walk around the room. They aren’t collaborating; they’re up there hiding like voles.”

  Hunter blinked. Voles?

  “I didn’t hire you, but I believe in giving people a chance to correct their screwups. So here’s what I am going to do,” Mrs. O’Brien continued. “I’ll give you until we come back to work from the holidays in January. That gives you all of December to figure out what you’re going to do about this mess you’ve created. If you haven’t addressed the situation by then, I will not be requiring your so-called expertise any longer.”

  Hunter stared.

  “I’m saying fix it or you’re terminated,” she translated for him.

  Hunter nodded until he realized he’d been dismissed. He dazedly made his way to the men’s room and concentrated on not letting his meager breakfast punch its way back out.

  Hunter had never been fired before. Now it felt as if everything that defined him was leaking away.

  He eventually lost the battle with breakfast.

  * * *

  Ello lived every day that week as if recording it in a diary. The school ultimately decided it was too late in the semester to care about Sean’s schedule, so he just hung with Ello, her bodyguard against eighth-grade society.

  Dear Diary: I ate with Sean at lunch, we walked together to class, his locker is only three down from mine, Sean is so funny, Sean is so nice.

  Dear Diary: Sean, Sean, Sean.

  She took the envelope of photographs with the pinpricked eyes and, In Full View Of Everyone, dumped it in the trash in the hallway.

  “What’s that?” Sean asked innocently.

  “A list of all my mistakes.”

  Sean laughed and everybody heard it, and the two of them walked to math as if Ello Didn’t Care about how her supposed friends were treating her.

  She was immune. Sean was her flu shot.

  * * *

  Had to be peer pressure, Hunter concluded. The employees who’d built medieval castles out of corrugated boxes were doing so only because everyone else was doing it. It was the software-engineer equivalent of a street riot. But how to prove something like that? A survey, he decided. A survey would flush out how they really felt about their new digs—which were, after all, top-of-the-line, high-tech expressions of the art of office furniture.

  When the opinion cards came back, Hunter quickly established that, unsurprisingly, all of the executives were extremely happy with their new, nicer furniture. So, pretty much, were office workers like Kim. As for Kim, she always used pink ink, so he knew which card was hers. In response to the question, “On a scale of one to five, with one being extremely dissatisfied and five being very satisfied, how do you like your new furniture?” Kim had given him a four. Hunter had trouble picturing her ever being “very satisfied” with anything.

  The engineers ignored the one-to-five scale and defiantly wrote out their answers, which yielded an outsized number of zeroes and negative integers. On average, rating the new digs from one to five, they gave it a zero point three.

  Hunter stacked the cards, twisted a rubber band around them, and dropped them into an empty drawer with a defeated-sounding thunk.

  Time to deal with the rest of this awful equation: Colfaxette Engineering, Inc., the company that had purchased the executive furniture with the collapsing hutches. Hunter dialed the number listlessly.

  “Hi, Robert,” Hunter greeted the voicemail. “It’s Hunter Goss. I like to work through things on the phone rather than email, so would you give me a call at your convenience?”

  Hunter did believe that unpleasant topics were best handled voice-to-voice, but he also believed people were more productive when they collaborated. He believed his daughter was still his little girl and that his wife still loved him. He was, he realized bitterly, completely wrong about everything in his whole miserable life.

  * * *

  Hunter slid into his seat at the table just as his family was digging into dinner. Sander had reheated some of Juliana’s lasagna because she wasn’t feeling up to dinner, either the making or the eating.

  Hunter watched his family interact as if sitting behind one-way glass at a police station.

  What would happen to these people when he lost his job? Would Juliana stick with an unemployed husband?

  Not happy in my marriage.

  Oh, really? Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait until we can’t afford food.

  After the lasagna, Hunter went back to check on his wife. Juliana was sleeping. He tenderly put a palm on each side of her face. She did not seem feverish—seemed, in fact, at utter peace.

  Was he really losing her?

  * * *

  Thanksgiving had been only a week ago, and look how much had happened since then!

  Sean O’Brien had happened.

  Ello smiled, remembering how he had demonstrated in the hallway how he could skate backward, which of course was a total fail.

  Sean loved hockey, so Ello pretended to like it too. She didn’t tell him about her ice dancing, which was about as far from hockey as water polo. No one else in middle school was doing it. She pictured his scorn—You mean, you skate around in circles and don’t hit anybody?

  Ello turned to the mirror and her frown deepened as she took in her reflection. She hadn’t given her outfit much thought, and had automatically donned a variation of her standard school uniform: a baggy sweatshirt. Yesterday it had been a baggy sweater. All because she still worried about Brittne, which was ridiculous. Not like Ello Could Help It.

  Thinking of Brittne led to a check of her phone and there was, of course, no text. She turned away. “I guess the secret’s out,” she told herself. She pulled something from her closet she had never worn: a much tighter, much more revealing sweater made of thin, clingy cashmere. A perfect shade of green for her eyes. Brittne had never even seen it.

  She turned left and right in front of her mirror. This would be okay. It wasn’t like she was trying to be one of the Kardashians. There were many girls in her grade who were far more busty than Eloise Goss. Right? Come on.

  Brushing her hair, she froze for a moment, remembering a packet of pictures with poked-out eyes. You don’t have any friends, a cruel voice hissed from within.

  Sean O’Brien, a different voice replied.

  Nobody texted you today.

  Except Sean O’Brien.

  Ello exhaled. She painted on a small amount of lip gloss and a moisturizer with some pigment in it—pretty much all the makeup her dad would tolerate. She’d run a pencil through her brows when she made it to school. Then she’d add eyelid primer to even things out. Then she’d use a brush to apply a darker shade from a paint pot. Then a dark powder eyeshadow, and finally her Favorite Eyeliner In The World, plus a thick coat of mascara and fake eyelashes to Add Volume, then foundation, and then concealer, and then pigmented highlighter and a vivid lip gloss in a color her father had nicknamed Absolutely Not.

  Thinking of her father, she froze again.

  He had never seen this sweater either.

  * * *

  Hunter eased out of bed and padded into the kitchen to get breakfast going for his family for the second morning in a row, letting Juliana sleep. She had struggled throughout the night with her illness, twisting and bending as if sleeping with a Labrador.

  Ello sauntered in as Hunter was frowning at the fried eggs he’d prepared for his father. Sander liked them basted. Yesterday, the eggs had stuck to the bottom of the pan and he’d broken the yolks with the spatula prying them out. Today, the eggs slid around like
drunken eyeballs when he tipped the pan, leaving no room for his spoon to scoop up the butter to baste them.

  It was discouraging to realize that the two things that could go wrong with fried eggs were that they would either stick to the bottom of the pan or they wouldn’t.

  He turned to ask his daughter if she had any tips and literally gasped. “What are you wearing?”

  Ello glared back in stony defiance.

  “Ello? You cannot wear that to school.”

  Ello sneered at him. “Mom bought it for me for school.”

  “You’ll die of exposure.” Hunter glanced at his twin sons, as if seeking male moral support. They were both kicking in their high chairs like synchronized swimmers doing the backstroke. He turned back to his daughter, gesturing with his spatula. “When did this…” He simply lacked words for what he was trying to ask.

  “God.…” Ello groaned. “Why can’t you for once be normal?” She snatched the tray containing Sander’s breakfast and turned away.

  As she stormed out, Hunter reflected on the question. Had he ever been normal?

  The boys quit kicking and fixated on pinching Cheerios between their fingers and stuffing them into their mouths, so he elected to leave them for the moment.

  Juliana was sitting up in bed, looking wan.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said tersely, then hesitated. “You okay? You didn’t sleep much last night.”

  Juliana nodded wearily. “Finally feeling better. What’s wrong, honey?”

  “We have an urgent situation. A family emergency.”

  She raised her eyebrows for him to go on.

  “Your daughter has developed these … these…” Hunter cupped his hands over his pectorals. “It’s like she’s become a … God, I don’t know, a … a…”

  “Mammal?” Juliana suggested.

  “Stop smiling. This is serious. It’s a serious situation. I mean it. Stop laughing! We have to do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t think I’m explaining myself very well. Remember how she looked just yesterday? Well now she’s got these protuberances. She’s protuberating!”

  “Hunter,” Juliana soothed, “your daughter is a teenager. That means things are going to be changing.”

  “No,” Hunter decided.

  Juliana laughed.

  “Not like this. Not this quickly. Changes like this are supposed to be slow, like over a decade. Give us time to deal with it. To, I don’t know. Find ways to disguise it.”

  “Do you honestly mean to tell me this is the first time you’ve noticed how your daughter is maturing?”

  “Of course. Fathers don’t look at that.”

  Juliana laughed again, then spasmed as it turned into a cough.

  Hunter regarded his wife with concern. “Should we think about taking you to the emergency room?”

  “No, no,” Juliana assured him. “I’m sure I’ll feel better today. Can you stay home from work this morning and take the twins to preschool?”

  Hunter attempted to prevent his answer from showing up on his face, but she knew him too well. Her shoulders slumped.

  “Don’t worry. Dad will do it,” he assured her.

  “Sander?” she replied skeptically.

  “I just really need to be at work right now,” he told her, wringing the desperation from his words.

  A few minutes later, Hunter was standing in his father’s doorway. “Hey, Dad,” he said by way of greeting. “So if it’s still okay, I’d like you to drive everyone this morning again.”

  “My eggs were not basted,” Sander replied.

  Hunter nodded. “Sure,” he agreed.

  “I like them basted.”

  “This is known to be true.”

  Sander regarded him with a where-did-I-go-wrong-as-a-father expression.

  Hunter sighed in exasperation. “I’m leaving now. Okay? Dad? You got this?”

  His father’s expression remained sour. Apparently the titanic tragedy of breakfast was something the family would have trouble getting past.

  “I suppose,” Sander said at last.

  “Just make sure Ello puts on a coat. Like, she has this big parka. All puffy?”

  * * *

  On Friday, Hunter despondently left another voicemail for the CFO of Colfaxette, sticking to his story that they needed to have an actual conversation, but leaving out the part about Hunter having sold the man a bunch of broken furniture. Aside from that, he accomplished almost nothing as he regarded the shantytown-like display of cardboard boxes that warrened off the engineers and their co-conspirators. He had once enjoyed this, walking around like a prince strolling the royal grounds, surveying his domain. Now, though, he felt as if the peasants were coming after him with torches and pitchforks.

  It was late afternoon when Kim found him in the break room, idly assessing the extent to which Kim had over-purchased herbal tea. Only she liked the stuff. The programmers lived on caffeine and sugar.

  “Your daughter’s on the landline,” Kim advised curtly.

  Hunter patted his pockets. “I’m not sure where I left my cell phone,” he confessed.

  “I have better things to do than answering your phone calls,” she warned him.

  Hunter frowned, because answering calls was what Kim was paid to do. As Hunter moved to leave, she reminded him, “Don’t forget your coffee cup.” He grabbed it and went to his office.

  There was something about the way Ello said “Dad?” that stabbed him. He gripped the phone. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Can you come home?”

  He stayed his reflexive response. Of course he couldn’t go home right now—he was at work. Instead, he repeated his question. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Mom. She’s really sick.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The emergency-room physician was tall and dark-skinned and reassuring. Hunter grasped the words he offered like life preservers tossed down to him after he’d fallen over the ship’s rails.

  Not unusual. I am not too concerned. Dehydrated. Antibiotics.

  Still, Hunter’s hands trembled as he signed the necessary papers. Juliana gave him a feeble smile when they wheeled her down the wide hallway. He unconsciously brought his knuckles to his teeth as they hooked her up to an IV. He held her hand the rest of the afternoon and didn’t even notice when the sun eased below the horizon.

  His daughter and his father were waiting for him when he arrived home around midnight, leaping to their feet as soon as he walked in the door. “Ello,” he observed without any heat, “you should really be in bed.”

  Ello swatted the words away. “How’s Mom? How could you not reply to my texts? Did you lose your cell phone again? On a day like today?”

  Hunter fixed her with a steady gaze. “They said she’s comfortable and stable. They think it’s a UTI—urinary tract infection. They’re giving her an IV of antibiotics. It’s a common thing. I’m pretty sure she’s going to be fine. They told me I should come home and get some rest. Okay? They said nothing to worry about. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Everyone should just go on doing what they would normally be doing.”

  Sander’s face was unreadable, and Hunter flashed back to a similar conversation from when Barbara had first been diagnosed. Needing to push that thought out of his head, he changed the subject. “Dad, can you take Ello to ice dancing in the morning?”

  Ello’s gaze slid away evasively as he asked this. He had to hold back from snapping “Now what?” at her. There was obviously something going on with her.

  There was always something going on.

  * * *

  “Your dad says he’ll pick you up after ice dancing,” Sander told Ello in the minivan the following morning.

  Ello didn’t reply, as if having a conversation with an old man would violate the rules of being a teenager.

  “I haven’t given you much reason to even want to talk to me, I guess,” Sander said with a sigh.

  Ello stared at him, nonplussed.<
br />
  “Hey, Winstead, how you doing?” Sander hailed his dog in the rearview mirror. Winstead glanced at him from the third seat, then went back to sentry duty, watching out the side window for squirrel threats.

  “I want to quit ice dancing,” Ello blurted.

  Sander glanced at her in surprise. “Really? But you’ve been doing it since you were little. You’re really good.”

  Ello was shaking her head. “All my friends quit a long time ago. It’s no fun anymore.”

  “I see,” Sander replied reflectively as they paused at a light. “I guess I know what that’s like. I used to play poker the first Thursday of every month with the same group of guys, but then so many of them retired and moved, and Jeff had a heart attack.… Pretty soon I stopped going. Then your grandma died.…” Sander’s voice trailed off.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes. “I just don’t know how to tell Dad,” Ello fretted. “He’ll be so disappointed.”

  Sander mulled this over. “You’re right. Your father is really proud of you. But parents have to adjust to all sorts of changes as their kids grow older. Would you like me to tell him?”

  Ello stared at him in surprise. He interpreted her astonishment to mean, Grandpa Sander’s actually good for something? He bit back the defensive retort that rose to his lips.

  She had a point.

  Ewan said, “Baba air wook la wa-faa!” and the twins exploded into synchronized laughter. Sander looked to his granddaughter for translation.

  “Ewan says your hair looks like a waterfall.”

  “I’ve not heard that before,” he confessed.

  Ello was grinning, and Sander grinned back. Then the smile dropped from her face.

  “No,” she sighed. “I’ll tell Dad.”

  * * *

  Waiting for her at the ice rink was one of the main reasons she wanted to give up her lessons: Mitch. Mitch was her age: a thin, inexpert skater who perpetually fixed her in a gaze so brooding it made her nauseated. He always wanted to partner with her, to the point that Mrs. Steigler, the instructor, often intervened to give Mitch other skaters to practice with. When Mitch watched Ello skate with anybody else, it was like he’d given up blinking.