Deck the Halls

She flattened her mouth, but then she answered. “Jolie Wheeler. Jolie Kay Wheeler.”

He smiled again for some reason. It just sounded…right. “Jolie Kay. I’ll remember that.”

“If you say so.”

His smile stretched into a grin. “Good night, Jolie Kay Wheeler. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“I doubt it.”

He didn’t. He didn’t know why, but even as that door closed to him once again, he knew somehow that he hadn’t seen the last of spunky, pretty Jolie Wheeler. Strangely enough, that thought was quite all right by him.

Jolie reached into the cabinet overhead and brought down a big pickle jar to serve as a vase. After filling it with tap water, she turned to the counter where the tightly budded roses waited. No one had ever brought her flowers before. Figured it would be some goofball like Cutler. First he doesn’t bother to have his mail forwarded, and then he strolls right in as if he owns the place, as if an open door is an automatic invitation to invade the premises.

The good-looking ones were always like that, thought they had a right to the whole world just because they were easy on the eyes. He was easier than most, with that pitch-black hair, lazy, blue-gray eyes, square jaw and dimples. More polite than most, too.

He had immediately apologized yesterday for invading her space, but her heart had been slamming against her rib cage so violently that she hadn’t found enough air to reply. Then embarrassment had taken over, and she’d mulishly let him stand there and wheedle until he’d given up and gone away.

Actually, he seemed harmless enough. Now.

The day before when she’d looked up and found him standing there in the middle of her apartment as if sizing up the joint, he’d appeared eight feet tall and hulking. Today, of course, he’d been his usual six-foot—or thereabout—self. She hadn’t imagined those broad shoulders and bulging biceps, though, or the slim hips and long legs. The truth was, she had panicked, which wasn’t like her, but then she didn’t know what she was like anymore. Nothing was as it had been. Without Russell.

She pushed away thoughts of her nephew, rapidly blinking against a fresh onslaught of tears.

This was getting to be a habit. She’d be okay for a while, and then something would remind her of that sweet baby face, that milky, gap-toothed smile and little hands that grasped so trustingly, coiling themselves in her hair and shirt. The loss still devastated her. More, it made her angry, at herself as much as at her sister and brother.

She should never have let herself love little Russ so completely. She should have treated him as nothing more than a foster child, his presence in her life temporary at best. After all, she knew only too well how the game was played. Ten years of experience on one side of that equation should have prepared her better for the other.

Oh, she had been placed with foster families who had truly tried to make her feel a part of the group, but she had always known that it would end. Something would happen, and she would be on her way again, shuffling from one home to another with heart-numbing regularity.

Somehow, though, she hadn’t let herself think that it could happen with Russell. When Connie had first gone to prison, pregnant and unwed, she had talked about giving up her child for adoption. Then, after his birth, when she’d asked Jolie to take him and give him a good home, saying that he ought to be with family, Jolie had seen her opportunity to really have someone of her own.

She and Connie had never discussed what would happen after Connie got out. For one thing, Jolie had never dreamed that a judge would actually hand over the child whom she had raised as her own to her misguided younger sister, no matter that said sister had given birth to him. It wasn’t fair, and to have their adored big brother Marcus side with Connie had been the unkindest cut of all.

Jolie was still grieving, but she supposed that was to be expected. It had only been days since she’d last seen him, eleven days, two hours, in fact. She could know how many minutes if she was foolish enough to check her watch, which she wasn’t. Of course she was still grieving. She’d grieved her mother’s absence for years, until she’d found out that Velma Wheeler was dead. Strangely enough, knowing that her mother had died was easier than believing that her mother had simply abandoned her children to the uncertain kindness of strangers.

Jolie shook her head and willed away the tears that had spilled from her eyes, telling herself that she would get on top of this latest loss. She’d had lots of practice.

Reaching for the roses, she slid them from their plastic cone and began arranging them in their makeshift vase. She did not realize, as the pleasing design began to take shape, that she made it happen with an innate, God-given ability which those lacking it would surely treasure.

Never once in her entire life had she ever imagined that anyone could admire or envy anything about her.

Chapter Two

Jolie picked up the two small rectangles of heavy paper from the counter top and studied them again, each in turn. One was the fifty-percent-off coupon that Vince Cutler had explained to her. The other promised a free tow. She wondered again what the catch might be, but she wasn’t likely to find out until she had need of the services offered. And the need was very likely to arise.

Her old jalopy was a garage bill waiting to happen. The thing had been coughing and gasping like an emphysema patient lately. She’d literally held her breath all the way to work this morning.

If the dry cleaners where she was employed had been situated just a little closer to the new apartment, she’d have walked it every day just to save wear and tear on the old donkey cart, but five miles coming and going on a daily basis was a bit more than she could manage, especially with the evening temperatures hovering in the thirties. Just to be on the safe side, Jolie tucked the coupons into her wallet—never know when they might come in handy—before going back to the ironing with which she augmented her meager income.

Since the death of his wife, Mr. Geopp, owner and operator of the small, independent dry cleaners where she’d worked for the past six years, had chosen to outsource the delicate work rather than invest in the new machines that could handle it properly, and he’d stopped taking in alterations and regular laundry altogether.

One day, Jolie mused, Geopp would retire, and then what would she do? Her heart wasn’t exactly in dry cleaning, but she didn’t seem to possess a single exploitable talent. It was a familiar worry that she routinely shoved aside.

With the tip of one finger, she checked the temperature of the pressing plate, judged it sufficiently cooled not to damage the delicate silk blouse positioned on the padded board and carefully began removing the wrinkles from the fabric. Her mind wandered back to the coupons.

If she took in her car for an estimate, would she see Vince Cutler again?

She glanced ruefully at the flowers he had given her. They were a pretty pathetic sight now. The buds had opened and half the petals had fallen, but she couldn’t bring herself to toss them just yet. Not that she was harboring any secret romantic fantasies about Vincent Cutler. She wasn’t in the market, no matter how good-looking he was, and he was plenty good-looking. Why, the only thing that saved the man from being downright beautiful was the little hump on the bridge of his nose.

She couldn’t help wondering how his nose had been broken, then she scolded herself for even thinking about him. Vince Cutler was nothing to her, and she intended to keep it that way. Secondhand experience had taught Jolie that romantic entanglements were more trouble than they were worth.

Her mom had been big on romance, and all that had gotten her was three kids by three different men, none of whom they could even remember. Still, every time some yahoo had crooked his finger at Velma Wheeler she’d followed him off on whatever wild escapade he’d proposed, often leaving her children to fend for themselves until she returned.

Sometimes they were out of food and living in the dark with the utilities shut off when she’d finally remember that she had a family. One day she simply hadn’t returned at all, and eventually Child Welfare had stepped in to cart Jolie and her siblings off to foster care.

For years Jolie had harbored the secret fantasy that her mother would come back a changed woman, determined to reunite their scattered family, all the while knowing that Velma would have had to learn to care for them a great deal more in her absence than she ever had while present. Then one day Jolie had been told that her mother had died in a drunk-driving accident and been buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere in Nevada. A simple typographical error had resulted in the misspelling of her name and an incorrect filing of records. Her mother had been gone four years by that time.

With Velma as their lesson, Jolie and her sister Connie had sworn that they would not go from man to man. Then Connie had somehow settled on that jerk Kennard and doggedly refused to give up on him. Jolie understood that Connie had feared being a serial loser just like their mom, but only after Kennard had gone to prison for the rest of his life, taking a pregnant Connie along with him, did she turn away from him. Of course, Connie had claimed that she hadn’t even known that an armed robbery was being committed that day, let alone a murder, despite the fact that she had been sitting in front of the bank in a running car.

Jolie had been inclined to believe Connie at the time. Now she just didn’t know.

Maybe if Connie had made a better choice than Kennard…but then, Jolie reminded herself, she wouldn’t have had Russell. It was worth any hardship to have a little boy like that. Wasn’t it?

Jolie shook her head. Thinking that way could get a girl in trouble. Better just to go it alone.

Jolie had learned that lesson the hard way after the authorities had split up her and her siblings when sending them into foster care. At first she and Connie had been placed together, but that hadn’t lasted for very long.

Oh, they’d maintained contact. The department was good about that sort of thing. But the years had taken their toll. Jolie had been nine, Marcus only a year older and Connie just seven when their mom had disappeared.

Two decades later, Jolie was again alone.

With Russell to fill her days and nights and heart, it had seemed that she had family again, but only for a little while. Now all she had was a pile of other people’s clothing to iron and a single room with a private bath to call her own—so long as she could pay the rent.

That thought sent her back to the job at hand, and for a time she lost herself in the careful placement and smoothing of one garment after another. Funny how you could take pride in something so small and insignificant as smoothing wrinkled cloth, but a girl had to get her satisfaction where she could.

“Come on, baby, just a little farther.”

Jolie patted the cracked black dash encouragingly, but the little car sputtered and wheezed with alarming defiance. Then it gave a final paroxysm of shudders and simply stopped, right in the middle of rush-hour traffic.

“Blast!”

Someone behind her did just that with a car horn.

“All right, already!” she yelled, strong-arming the steering wheel as far to the right as she could. The car came to a rolling halt against the curb.

Tires screeched behind her. Another horn honked, and then an engine gunned. A pickup truck flew by with just inches to spare. Jolie flinched, put the transmission in Neutral and cranked the starter, begging for a break. The engine turned over, coughed and died again. The second time, the engine barely rumbled, and on the third it didn’t do that much. By the fifth or sixth try, the starter clicked to let her know that it was getting the message but that the engine was ignoring its entreaties entirely. Jolie gave up, knowing that the next step was to get out and raise the hood.

She didn’t dare try to exit the car on the driver’s side. Instead, she turned on her hazard lights, put the standard transmission in first gear, set the parking brake and released her safety belt to climb across the narrow center console and the passenger seat to the other door. Stepping out on the grassy verge between the curb and the sidewalk, she tossed her ponytail off one shoulder and kicked the front wheel of the car in a fit of pique. Pain exploded in her big toe.