An Angel For Christmas

Sure, he’d had to go. Why? He couldn’t have justexplained that the two of them were dating—no, more than dating. They were together. They should have been together at Christmas.

Well, he hadn’t. And—perhaps because he’d been so stubborn, she’d been stubborn as well. And maybe she had hoped until the last minute that Alex would realize he was in love with her, and he had to come with her on a family holiday.

But he hadn’t.

So Alex was on his way to Cancún, and she was … nearly blinded in the snow on top of a frigid mountain in Virginia.

She should have given in, she thought.

But he should have wanted to be with her; Christmas was a time for family!

At that moment, the cabin appeared before her. For a moment, it looked like a shack in the wilderness. Then it seemed that the snow miraculously cleared. She saw the porches, and the extensions of the wings. And from inside, the lights from a Christmas tree. Red and blue, green and yellow, festive and glittering out onto the snow. Her mother’s home was reputed to have once been the property of Thomas Jefferson, or at least the property of a Jefferson-family relative. It had been a tavern way back when, and had eighteenth-century pocket doors that slid across the parlor; at night, when the family had finished with the business of the day, children had been sent upstairs to bed while the doors had been opened, and all in the vicinity came to drink—and, she’d heard, plot against the British. During the Civil War, the MacDougals had been what would have been referred to today as “closet” Abolitionists, which had made the place part of the Underground Railroad. It did have history, she thought. She was amused to think as well that, since the area was known a bit for the Hatfield-and-McCoy kind of feuding, it had even survived the aftermath of the war, when grown men had dressed up in sheets as the Klan and come around burning down those who had aided the North in any way.

“So, it’s still ours!” she murmured.

She had arrived.

Morwenna wasn’t sure if her other siblings had arrived yet, or how they had come, but the garage door was open despite the snow. Her mother wouldn’t have wanted them to have to stop to open the doors, and the kids no longer had automatic openers for the door.

She wished that, in all their great wisdom, they’d managed a garage that connected directly to the house. But they hadn’t.

She grabbed her bag and, huffing and grunting, dislodged it from her small car. She slipped out the side door and headed for the house.

Once again, she stared at it.

“You’re a white elephant!” she said aloud to the structure.

Naturally, it didn’t reply.

She began the trudge to the porch. “Home, yep. Oh, yeah, home for the holidays.”

Bobby MacDougal added another ornament to the tree, wincing as he heard what had been the low murmur of his parents’ voices grow to a pitch that was far louder.

They were fighting about him, of course. They’d fought about him many times in his twenty-one years of life; he was the misfit of the family.

He didn’t want them fighting about him. Then again, while his mother had a tendency to view the world through Pollyanna eyes, and his father was more on the doom-and-gloom side and was always practical. But, then, of course, he worked with the worst of humanity at times, and Bobby had to figure that swayed his thinking now and then. On the other side, his mother liked to believe that everything was going to be all right when there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that it would be.

Still, he didn’t want to be the cause of their argument.

He’d tried—good God, he’d tried, really—but he hated the law. His father always thought it would be great if he got a degree in anything that was academic, and he had always understood facts and figures, and he honestly loved the different sciences. But he only loved exploration as a hobby, he didn’t want to dissect frogs or other cold-blooded creatures that the powers that be had decided were fine to take apart. He now knew what he wanted; he just knew that his parents would be horrified, and so, since he had arrived at the mountaintop a few days ago, he’d tried to keep silent and listen to the lectures.

And those lectures were endless.

He understood that his father was a super-achiever, but his father of all people should have understood. Mike MacDougal made a decent living; he might have swept the world away. He had chosen not to, which would make people think that he’d be understanding of the fact that his son wasn’t looking to dominate the stock market, just something to do for a living that would suffice—as long as he was happy. Bobby had tried once to explain that he didn’t need to make a fortune; he wanted to get along fine. He’d made the argument that when the economy went down, even computer scientists were struggling for a living, and that nurses might be in high demand, but hospitals couldn’t pay them. His father always just stared at him blankly.

Bobby looked at the little ornament he held. He hadn’t realized that he’d picked it up, or what it was—one of his mom’s cherished antiques. It was a little angel with a trumpet. He assumed that the angel was trumpeting the birth of Christ.

“Ah, but maybe you’re just a naked little cherub—advertising!” he told the ornament.

He could really hear the voices from the kitchen now. His father’s voice was growing aggravated. “Look, Stacy, you’re missing the point. He’s going to wind up being a bum on the streets of New York, drinking out of a paper bag and asking for handouts. And for what? Because he ‘can’t find himself’?”

“Shh! He’ll hear you,” his mother whispered.

“He should hear me—he knows how I feel. You’ve got Morwenna, working more than sixty hours a week at that ad firm, and you’ve got Shayne, who works all day as a doctor, and comes home to take care of the kids.”

“Shayne only takes care of the kids on his day,” Stacy MacDougal reminded her husband.

Mike was silent for a minute. “The point is,” he said. “He works hard.”

“Too hard,” Stacy said more quietly.

“If that bitch of a wife of his had just appreciated the time he was putting in for her and the kids, she’d still be with him—and she and the kids would have been here, too,” Mike said.

“I am going to miss the children terribly!” Stacy said.

At least they’d stopped talking about him! Bobby thought. Still, he was sad. He’d cared about his sister-in-law. She had her eccentricities like everyone alive; she had probably just been fed up. Shayne was so seldom home; she had little help and no social life.

“The thing is this—no matter what, Shayne and Morwenna are going to be all right,” Mike said. “They know how to work. They’ll survive. You know, Stacy, life isn’t one big Christmas holiday. It’s reality. You have to work to make a living. You have to make a living to have food and shelter!”

Back to him!

He set the angel or cherub or antique-whatever on the tree. As he did so, he heard the purr of an engine and hurried over to the window—the Audi. Morwenna had arrived.

Morwenna would jump right into the lectures with their father. Great. At least Shayne was just depressed beyond all measure, so tangled up in his own misery over his divorce that he wasn’t about to pick on anyone else. He’d be able to let Shayne bemoan the loss of his wife as soon as he arrived. Better than listening to the same lecture over and over again.

“Hey!” he cried loudly. “Morwenna’s here!” Bobby hurried to the door, rushing out to help his sister with her bag. He grinned as he saw her; Morwenna was always the height of fashion. She’d grown into a stunning woman, tall and leggy, with eyes so deep a blue they were the kind referred to as violet. Her hair was their dad’s pitch-black, although now, Mike MacDougal’s hair was definitely showing more than minor touches of distinguished gray. Morwenna’s hair, however, was the old MacDougal hair, as lustrous as a raven’s wing. And stylish, of course. Perfectly coiffed. She was in advertising and marketing, and he knew that in her mind, people trusted you to make them look good when you looked good.

“Baby bro!” she said, dropping the suitcase to give him a fierce hug.

That’s the way it always started out; hugs and kisses and warmth and happiness.

Then … drumroll … the sniping began!

“Hey, big sis,” he said. He frowned, looking around. “Where’s the boy toy?”

She looked at him with irritation. “Alex is in Cancún. He couldn’t get out of it. I guess he planned it before he knew that I had to come home. He kept trying to get me to go, but …”

“Ah, poor girl! Cancún. Hmm. And he went without you,” Bobby said.

“It’s business, Bobby. He had others in the firm going with him.”

“Sure,” Bobby said.

“Let’s get this inside. I can do the carrying. Was it bad getting up?”

“Horrible.”

“I hope that Shayne is close behind,” Bobby said.