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“There’ll be changes here, I promise you.” Ollie hooked her arm through the crook of Bernice’s elbow. “I heard you mention Leon. Let’s go find him.”
“Kyle, come with us.” Bernice took his hand. “I think Josh wants time alone with Nathan and your sister.”
As Sara watched them move through the crowd, relief washed through her. A number of people acknowledged Bernice and Kyle with a smile. Several of them spoke.
Things were changing for her mother already, and the family had Leon and Nathan to thank.
Josh waited a few moments, then handed the biggest box to Nathan. “Merry Christmas.”
“Are you sure this is for me?”
He nodded. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”
Nathan carefully untied the lopsided red bow and slid a fingernail beneath the crisscrossed adhesive tape welding red-and-green Santa paper to the box. “You did a great job of wrapping,” he murmured. “But I really had no idea you’d do this, Josh...”
He removed the top of the shoebox and stared at the contents for a long moment. “Josh, you really shouldn’t have. I know how special this is to you.”
Holding out the box so Sara and Josh could see inside, he lifted out Josh’s antique Lionel Southern Pacific diesel engine. “You should keep it and give it to your own boys someday.”
“No.” Josh shook his head vigorously. “I remember you saying that you wished your dad had done things with you. And how Christmas gifts didn’t mean a lot just ’cause they were expensive.”
“But—”
“You’ve been really nice to me, and I thought maybe if you had my train engine, you’d know that my grandpa loved it when he was a kid, and my dad did. And I do, too. I want you to have something that was loved a lot. So maybe...well, maybe you’d feel different about Christmas.”
“I...I don’t know what to say. This is the nicest gift I’ve ever received.”
“I told my mom and dad, and they said it was okay.” Josh grinned. “If you start collecting model trains, I’ll even come over and help you get set up.”
“You are a very special kid, Josh,” Sara murmured. “I can’t think of a more wonderful gift.”
He grinned as he handed her a slender package. “Now you can open yours.”
Mystified, Sara carefully unwrapped her package. Inside the tissue, she found a scraggly piece of greenery. “This is...really pretty, Josh. I bet I can arrange it with some nice candles or put it on the wall.”
“No. Don’t you remember my uncle Pete in West Virginia?”
“Your uncle?” She thought for a minute, then chuckled. “The mistletoe hunter?”
Nathan glanced between them. “The what?”
“Mistletoe grows high up in the trees where he lives,” Josh explained, “so he blasts it down with a shotgun. I wrote to him way back in October and told him I needed really special mistletoe—the kind that works really, really well.”
“Honey, this is so sweet of you.” Sara gave him a big hug.
“I figured...maybe with the strongest kind, you and Nathan, well...” He shuffled his feet in the snow. “I don’t want you to leave. You were so nice to me and all... Can’t you stay?”
“Josh!” Zoe called across the nearly empty town square. “I’ve been looking all over for you!”
“I gotta go.” He looked back and forth between Sara and Nathan. “Merry Christmas!”
Sara watched him run across the snowy square to join his family. “My mom must have already walked to church with Leon. I guess it’s time for me to go, too.”
She looked at Nathan one last time, memorizing the lean planes of his face, his resolute chin. The beautiful hazel eyes that now were sad and dark and fathomless in the dim light.
“Maybe it isn’t,” he said slowly.
“What?”
