Keeping Christmas

“You are a sinful woman,” Daddy said to Pookie, but clearly enjoyed the attention. “Rebecca,” he said with a nod as he stepped around to face her. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t said a word.

She and her father rarely spoke. He never seemed to know what to say to her. He could talk for hours with Dixie. But then, Dixie was his favorite, no matter what he said. Oh, he tried to make Rebecca feel loved. That was the problem. He tried too hard, as if it didn’t come naturally the way it did with Dixie.

“What brings you into town?” Rebecca asked as sweetly as she could while pasting a smile on her face. “Are you meeting someone?” she added, looking around the restaurant expectantly, all the time hoping he was.

“Samantha, honey, could you excuse us for a moment?”

Pookie gave Rebecca a curious look. “Of course. I’ll just go powder my nose.”

Beauregard Bonner took a seat across from his daughter and she saw that he was upset. She braced herself, afraid suddenly of what he was going to tell her.

“Have you seen your sister?” he asked.

She blinked, so taken off guard that she wasn’t even sure she’d heard him correctly. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your sister. Dixie. You might remember her from last Christmas? No, that’s right, you went back east for Christmas.”

She didn’t like his tone. “I remember my sister,” she said coldly. He always blamed her that she and Dixie weren’t closer. She was the oldest, he’d say, as if that made a difference.

“I believe you missed Christmas, as well,” she shot back. “Jamaica, wasn’t it? What was her name? Carmella? Lupita? I lose track.”

Her father didn’t seem to hear. He was trying to get the waiter’s attention, no doubt for a drink.

She couldn’t care less about last Christmas. Or the one before it. They’d never been that kind of family. They might have been, if her mother had lived. But she hadn’t.

“What has Dixie done now?” She tried to sound bored by this conversation, but her heart was pounding. What had Dixie done?

“Have you talked to her lately?” he asked.

She frowned. “No, Daddy, I haven’t. How about you?”

“She’s…missing.”

Rebecca laughed, politely of course, since they were in one of Houston’s most elite restaurants. Another reason she really didn’t want to have a discussion about her sister here, now.

“She’s always…missing. I really don’t see what that has to do with me.” Rebecca picked up her bag from the chair next to her and started to rise. “I’m sorry, Daddy, but I really must get going. Please give my apologies to Pookie.”

“Sit down.” He hadn’t raised his voice, fortunately. But she knew by his tone that he could at any moment. He had no compunction against making scenes. In fact, he seemed to enjoy them as if he never wanted to forget his poor white-trash roots. As he was fond of saying, “If Houston society don’t like it, they can kiss my cherry-red ass.”

She sat back down.

“I think she might have been kidnapped,” he said quietly, and picked up her water glass and downed it. “How do you get a drink in this place?”

Rebecca caught the waiter’s eye and mouthed Scotch neat. She didn’t have to tell the waiter to make it the best they carried. That was a given.

“What makes you think she’s been kidnapped?” she asked carefully. Bringing up Dixie’s other shenanigans would only set her father off, although she would have loved to have listed them chapter and verse.

“I got a call.” The waiter set down the drink and Beauregard snatched it up, downing it in two gulps before motioning for the waiter to bring him another. “You don’t seem all that upset about it,” he said a little too loudly.

“Because I don’t believe it,” she said, keeping her voice low by example. She could always depend on her father to embarrass her. Oh, why couldn’t she have come from old money like Pookie and her other friends?

“The ransom demand is a million dollars.”

She stared at him. “You can’t be serious?”

He gave her a deadpan look.

“How silly of me. It’s Dixie. It is only a matter of time before she’ll want it all for some foolish cause of hers.” And Daddy will give it to her, Rebecca thought angrily. Oliver had warned her that Dixie would get everything in the end, hadn’t he? “So you paid it. What’s the problem?”

“Hell no, I didn’t pay it.”

The waiter set down another drink and looked nervously at Beauregard as if, like Rebecca, afraid he might be a problem.

Rebecca watched her father take one gulp. “You haven’t paid it yet?” This did surprise her.

“I’m not paying it.”

He would. Eventually. He always caved when it came to Dixie. “So what are you doing?”

“Obviously trying to find her.”

Rebecca glanced around the restaurant. “If you’d called, I could have told you she wasn’t here, Daddy.”

His eyes narrowed. “Why do you have to be such a bitch?”

His words stung more than she thought they would. She knew he was only striking out because he was worried about his other daughter. “Why do you have to be such an ass?” she hissed back at him.

He gripped his glass, anger in every movement as he downed the last of it, and carefully put it down.

She knew she’d gone too far. But she was sick of being the other daughter. The one her father never gave a concern to. “I heard you went to Montana.” She waited, hoping he would deny it.

“Who told you I went to Montana?”

She stared at her father. “You really did go?” She hadn’t meant to sound so shocked. But she was. So she’d been right about the “son of a bitch” Oliver had been referring to.

“Isn’t that what you just— Never mind,” he said, and motioned to the waiter for another drink. “That’s where I guess she is.”

This was all too surreal, especially on top of the two strawberry daiquiris she’d consumed—and what little she’d gleaned from Oliver’s phone conversation she’d overhead last night.

“I hired your old boyfriend to find her.”

There it was. She hadn’t been mistaken. She felt light-headed. For an instant she thought about pretending ignorance and saying, “What boyfriend would that be, Daddy?”

Instead she said, “You hired Chance Walker to find Dixie?” saying his name carefully as if the words were expensive crystal that were so fragile they might break otherwise.

“He’s a private detective. Damned good.”

Was that supposed to make her feel better?