Coming Home For Christmas

It felt very odd to be back.

In all honesty, he never thought he’d be back here again. Not back in this city. Certainly not back in this house.

But then, he never thought his mother would become someone he’d be forced to think of in the past tense, either.

Granted, he and his mother hadn’t spoken in almost ten years. But despite his criticism the last time words—angry, hot words—had been exchanged between them, she had always struck him as being a force of nature. Forces of nature didn’t just cease to exist. They continued. Whether or not someone was there to witness the force, it continued.

Somewhere in his unconscious, he had thought his mother would be the same way. She would just continue.

But Dorothy O’Connell didn’t continue. Quite abruptly, without any warning, without any lingering diseases, her heart just suddenly gave out and she died. If it hadn’t been for the phone call he’d received from her neighbor, he wouldn’t even have known this had transpired.

Well, now he knew. Knew when there was nothing further he could do about it. Knew that there would never be an opportunity to mend the rift that had existed between them.

Not that there would have been much chance of that, even if she were still alive and they had another twenty years. The wounds had gone too deep.

And he had lost his mother long before he’d walked out of the house that day.

Keith sighed as he looked around the first-floor family room. You would think, after ten years—and knowing that she was gone—he wouldn’t expect to see her come walking into the room. Wouldn’t, on some level, strain to hear the sound of her voice as she called out to him, or to Amy.

Or both.

The house had always been filled with her voice and her presence. At least, he amended, for most of the years he’d lived in it. It was only after—after the car accident—after Amy wasn’t around anymore—that everything changed.

And somehow, in an odd sort of way, it had stayed the same. Except tenser. So much tenser. He supposed that part of it had been his fault, too.

Keith shrugged even though there was no one there to see him do so. No one there to call him on it.

It didn’t matter. All the tension, the things that were said, the things that weren’t said, none of it mattered anymore. It was all in the past now.

Just like his mother was in the past.

He was here. Here to tie up all the loose ends, to tend to the arrangements. To shut down that chapter of his life and put it all away in a box.

After all, life went on. Except, of course, when it didn’t.

Keith resisted the fleeting temptation to go upstairs and look into rooms he hadn’t looked into in ten years. There was no point to that. He wasn’t here to thumb a ride down memory lane. He was here for one purpose only: to sell the house and everything in it. The items in the house were of no use to him and hadn’t been for a very long time.

Squaring his shoulders, Keith got down to business. The sooner he was finished, the sooner he could get back to the firm up north in San Francisco and to his life.

And forget all about the house on Normandie in Bedford and the woman who had lived in it.

Chapter One (#ulink_b8ca5456-cd75-5b2a-b709-4187912dabeb)

With her trim figure and attractively styled light blond hair, Maizie Sommers looked far younger than the actual years noted on her birth certificate. She liked to tell people that her family and her real estate company kept her vital and young, which was true.

And then there was her other hobby, the one she was involved in with Theresa and Cecilia, her two best friends since the third grade. The hobby that, she firmly believed, aided her in finally getting the son-in-law and grandchildren she’d always hoped for. She, Theresa and Cecilia were very skilled at, quite unashamedly, matchmaking.

Specifically, covert matchmaking. The unassuming objects of their selfless efforts were never aware of what hit them when love came barreling into their lives.

The matchmaking tasks were usually undertaken at the behest of either one unwitting participant’s relative or the other, most often a parent. And the ladies happily took it from there.

As it turned out, they were enabled in their altruistic endeavors because of the companies they had formed during the second half of their lives. After each woman had raised her child—or, in Theresa’s case, children—and found herself squarely faced with widowhood, all three friends had met the resulting emptiness in their lives the same way. They turned their attention to whatever skills they had and transformed those into what eventually amounted to lucrative livelihoods. Maizie went into real estate, Theresa undertook catering and Cecilia, always the very last word in organization and neatness, began her own housecleaning service.

Each of these three businesses, now quite nicely successful, brought into their collective lives an ever-changing and growing pool of people.

It was within this pool that the three friends found their likely candidates: unattached people who were in need of soul mates in order to reach their own full potential and thrive.

Maizie, Theresa and Cecilia thought of their matchmaking as a calling.

Even as they conducted business as usual, all three women were on the lookout for their next matchmaking success stories.

And none was as proactive as Maizie, whose cache of candidates was always changing.

Maizie had an eye not just for excellent property buys, which in turn were responsible for bringing money into her company, but also for loneliness, no matter how well disguised that loneliness might be within the person who crossed her path.

Such was the case, she felt, with her latest client. The tall, good-looking young man walked into her office on a Wednesday morning, wearing a somber expression and an expensive gray suit. He had green eyes and very precisely cut thick, dark brown hair, and his incredible straight-arrow posture made his broad shoulders appear even broader than they were.

“Maizie Sommers?” Keith asked as he approached her desk.

He’d gotten her name from the same neighbor who had notified him of his mother’s sudden passing. He felt one real estate firm was as good as another, but perhaps a smaller one was a little hungrier than a corporation so the agent could be persuaded to sell the house faster. At least, that was his reasoning when he’d found her on the internet and then came here immediately after that.

Maizie looked up into his eyes and gave the young man her best maternal smile. It usually went a long way in disarming her prospective clients and getting them to trust her.

She didn’t do it for any devious or self-serving purpose. What she was trying to convey to her clients was that it wasn’t a matter of her versus them but a matter of them and her. She thought of herself and her clients as a team, and she intended to be on her clients’ side.

Sales were not final until the clients were happy with the home they were buying. She took any misgivings they might entertain very seriously. Their ultimate satisfaction was always her bottom line.

And if, along the way, said client also turned out to be an unattached person who would be decidedly happier as part of a twosome—Maizie was a very firm believer in love—well, so much the better.

That part of what she and her friends did—the matchmaking—was undertaken without any thought—or collection—of financial rewards. Maizie, Theresa and Cecilia all unequivocally believed that the soul needed nurturing as well as the body. And in the case of their matchmaking efforts, with each success—and thus far, they had only successes—they felt even more fulfilled than they did when the actual jobs they did collect fees for were successfully executed.

Thus, until she knew otherwise, Maizie viewed the young man who walked into her office this morning as quite possibly a candidate on two fronts.

The smile on her lips came from deep within.

“Yes, I am, young man,” she told him warmly. “What can I do for you?” she asked, rising ever so slightly from the seat behind her desk to shake his hand.

The woman reminded him of his mother.

It wasn’t so much that this Maizie Sommers he had come to see actually resembled his mother visually, but there was an enthusiasm—as well as a kindness—that seemed somehow to radiate from this woman. Such was often the case with his mother.

At least, his mother the way she had been those years when he was growing up. The years before Amy had died. The three of them had been a happy unit then, bolstering one another. And no matter what, he and Amy had always been secure in the knowledge that although there was no father in the picture for a good deal of the time, all was well in their lives because their mother was with them. They were convinced Dorothy O’Connell could handle anything. Nothing would ever hurt them as long as she was around.

It turned out to be a lie.

Keith realized that he had lapsed into silence when he should be saying something. Attempting to recover ground, Keith cleared his throat and took a stab at apologizing, something he hardly ever did.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare,” he said, deliberately averting his eyes from her. “For a minute, you reminded me of someone.”