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“So you’re already thinking ahead to Christmas, are you?” Sara asked after a few minutes. “Does your family do special things?”
Josh licked his spoon. “You bet.”
“Put up the lights and decorations?”
“Not just that. We have a tree and stuff, but my mom bakes for weeks, and we decorate cookies on Sundays after church. We take ’em to the old people who live alone and to the nursing home.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Then we make a lot of our presents for each other, and we make our cards and—” He stopped, suddenly embarrassed.
“Please, go on.”
“My mom sings a lot. She’s got a really cool voice, and she sings all the Christmas songs. The funny ones, too. My dad and I sing along, but we sound awful.” Warmth spread through his chest at the memories. “Then we have lotsa Swedish food on Christmas Eve, cause my dad’s Swedish, and we always go to the candlelight service at church before we open presents. I guess everyone does all that stuff, though.”
Sara gave him a small smile. “Not everyone.”
“So what do you do?”
She stood and tossed her paper napkin into a trash barrel a few feet away. “Not nearly as much.”
“You have a Christmas tree, right?”
“Um...sometimes.”
“And mistletoe?”
“Nope.”
“Do you come back here, then?”
“Not always. Sometimes I’m too busy working.”
Her Christmases sounded awful. “I can give you some special mistletoe if you want it. We get lots, and it’s the best kind of all. My uncle Pete hunts it with a shotgun.”
She laughed aloud at that. “A what?”
“A shotgun,” he repeated patiently. “Mistletoe grows way up in the treetops where he lives in West Virginia. It’s too high to climb after, and it’s real bad for the trees. So he ka-blams it with his 20-gauge.”
“Really.”
“Then it falls to the ground.” She gave him a look that said she didn’t believe him, but that was okay. Tonight he’d e-mail Uncle Pete and ask him to send extra. If anyone needed Uncle Pete’s magic mistletoe, it was someone who spent Christmases alone and didn’t even put up a tree. “It’s cool that you get to be up here for Christmas this year, right? You can be with your mom!”
She didn’t answer for a long time. “Count your blessings,” she said finally, reaching out to tousle his hair. “You’re a very fortunate kid.”
Every year since he could remember, Josh had looked forward to Christmas with feelings that seemed to bubble up out of nowhere until he could barely stand to count off the days. Not because he knew there’d be huge presents under the tree—he’d learned long ago that they didn’t have that kind of money.
But it was something else much better. The beautiful lights on the tree at midnight, when all the other lights were off and just the embers in the fireplace remained. The smell of baking and the beautiful music and the feeling that everyone else in the world was happy at this very moment.
Yet Sara and Deputy Roswell didn’t seem to share that feeling a bit. How could such cool grown-ups be so messed up?
He studied her when she wasn’t watching and wished he could do something to help.
* * * *
MONDAY MORNING, Sara knocked on her mother’s door and waited patiently. Then tried again. “It’s just me, Mom. Are you in there?”
After a moment she heard the sound of slow footsteps, a hesitation that told her Bernice was peering through the curtain, then two dead bolts slid back and a safety chain jingled loosely against the door frame.
