Coming Home For Christmas

Keith blinked. “What? No. Why?” The single-word sentences were fired out at her like bullets, shot one at a time.

Maizie’s tone continued to be kind as she answered him. “I thought that might explain why you seem so...tense,” she finally said for lack of a better word.

She didn’t want to offend the young man, but she did want to get to the heart of what might be troubling him, because he was troubled. Anyone could see that.

“Jet lag,” Keith told her dismissively, as if that explained everything.

“San Francisco is in the same time zone,” she pointed out gently. There was no reason for him to be experiencing any sort of jet lag.

“Of course it’s in the same time zone. I’m not an idiot,” Keith protested. “Sorry,” he murmured, doing his best to bank down his temper. Over the years, he’d schooled himself to be emotionally reserved. But what he’d learned was escaping him right now. “I was in New York on business when I got the call that—” Abruptly he changed the course of his response, correcting his last words. “My firm took a call from my mother’s neighbor saying that my mother had passed away. My assistant called me. So I caught the next plane back,” he told her.

And then he stopped cold.

Keith wasn’t accustomed to explaining himself. He hadn’t done that in a very long time. This had all caught him completely by surprise, and he was revealing more than he’d intended.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” he informed her stiffly.

“No,” she agreed, “it doesn’t. But I was just trying to get a feeling for the situation—and you. It helps me do a better job.” Maizie knew she had to sell this to the young man, who needed far more than the sale of this house to tie up loose ends.

He needed peace, she thought.

“I don’t care what you get for it. Just sell it,” Keith was saying. “I don’t want it hanging around my neck like the proverbial albatross.”

“You might not care about the sale price now, but you will someday soon. Perhaps even very soon.” Maizie paused, her sharp eyes sweeping over everything in the living room. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you planning on doing with the furnishings?”

“Furnishings?” Keith repeated uncomprehendingly.

“The furniture, the clothing in the closets, the books—”

He hadn’t even thought about that. He supposed he was still coming to grips with the idea that as far as his mother was concerned, there would be no more tomorrows and all that entailed.

Replaying the agent’s words in his head, Keith waved his hand, dismissing the problem. “Get rid of it. All of it.” The things she’d enumerated represented a place in his life he had no intention of revisiting. “Throw it all away.”

That would be a terrible waste, and Maizie wasn’t about to be wasteful if she could possibly help it. “I think if you do that, if you just throw all this away, you’ll live to regret it.”

He was already regretting this conversation. However, he told himself that it cost him nothing to hear her out. “All right. What do you suggest?”

Maizie thought of the conversation she’d just had yesterday with Theresa over a late lunch. It involved the daughter of a mutual friend.

The single daughter of a mutual friend.

A wide smile blossomed on Maizie’s lips. “I think I have an idea you just might like.”

Chapter Two (#ulink_0e0b54e8-258f-572d-88ac-228b50e3ddfe)

“You do realize you work too hard, right?”

Marcy Crawford aimed the question at her younger sister, MacKenzie Bradshaw, as she followed her sister around a showroom that was nothing short of an obstacle course for anyone who wasn’t a size three. And in her current state of pregnancy, Marcy admittedly hadn’t been a petite size three for a little longer than eight months now.

Her question was a rhetorical one, and it was meant to get Kenzie, the youngest of five and the one everyone in the family doted on, to reassess her present life. However, her supposedly impromptu visit to Kenzie’s place of work wound up getting the latter to fall back on her usual evasive maneuvers. Whether or not she actually meant to, Kenzie was weaving her way in and out of small pockets of space. Pockets that Marcy was frustratingly finding close to impossible to get into. Thus she was completely unable to follow.

Kenzie glanced over her shoulder, pausing only long enough to blow her light blond bangs out of her eyes—she had to find time to get a haircut, she silently noted. With Christmas almost here, business had been good lately, really good. The turnaround at her shop, Hidden Treasures, both with items coming in and going out, had been more than a little gratifying.

“Said the woman who’s more than eight months pregnant and carrying a fourteenth-month-old around in her arms,” Kenzie pointed out.

She dearly loved her sister—loved all four of her siblings and her mother—but she instantly went into withdrawal mode the moment Marcy or the others felt compelled to change around the structure of her life. She liked it just the way it was—busy and profitable.

“Exactly my point,” Marcy said, shuffling so that she was finally able to move in front of her sister by coming in from the other side. The less than fluid movement managed to trap Kenzie with an ornate carved turn-of-the-century credenza at her back while she, with her sheer girth, barred her sister’s escape from the front. “All this effort you keep putting out, it should be going toward your own family, not toward pawing through dead people’s junk.”

“Hidden treasures,” Kenzie corrected her with just a touch of indignation, taking offense for both her clients and the one-of-a-kind items in her shop. “One woman’s junk is another woman’s prized possession.”

“Call it whatever you like,” Marcy told her with a sigh. Alex, her sleeping fourteen-month-old son, was growing increasingly heavy and she shifted him from one side to the other in an effort to balance his weight. “Just say you’ll come to dinner tonight.”

“I’d say it,” Kenzie replied willingly, “but you know I don’t believe in lying.” She fixed her sister with a penetrating look. “Look, Marce, I’d come over in a heartbeat if you weren’t setting me up.”

“Setting you up?” Marcy echoed, torn between sounding utterly innocent and completely indignant at the suggestion that she would do something so underhanded—even though that’s exactly what she was doing. Her free hand was pressed against her offended breast. “Who’s setting you up?” she asked, her voice cracking as it went up just a little too high at the end of her question.

“You are,” Kenzie replied without blinking. Turning, she found an opening next to a vintage Singer sewing machine console and wiggled through it, leaving Marcy to lumber over to a wider aisle.

Marcy valiantly attempted to keep up the ruse. “I am not. Why would you say that?” she demanded. When Alex began to whimper in response to her elevated voice, Marcy was forced to lower it to a whisper. “Why would you say that?” she repeated in almost a hiss.

Kenzie gave her a knowing look. “You told me not to wear my jeans and to remember to fix my hair.”

Because of her hectic schedule and the fact that she had to dress well for work, in her off hours Kenzie enjoyed kicking back and being comfortable during her get-togethers with her family. Apparently, in her sister’s estimation, there was such a thing as being too comfortable.

Marcy sniffed. “I just happen to think you look nice with your hair up.”

Kenzie felt compelled to point out the flaw in that excuse. “Marcy, you spend your days running after a kid whose energy levels rival the Energizer Bunny and you’re about to give birth in a month or less. Why would you even care if I shaved my head before I came over for dinner?” she challenged. “Unless, of course,” she went on, “you’re inviting an extra guest to attend that dinner.”

Marcy sighed, giving up the pretense. “Okay, you got me. I had Bob invite his friend George to dinner. But George is very nice—”

Kenzie immediately cut her off. This line of conversation had no future. There was no point in letting Marcy just go on and on.

“I’m sure he is,” she said, patronizing Marcy just the slightest bit, “but I’m never going to find out because I’m not coming over to dinner.”

Marcy looked at her pleadingly. “C’mon, Kenzie, don’t be stubborn.”

“You call it being stubborn. I call it surviving. Stop pulling a Mom on me,” Kenzie requested, then added a little more kindly, “I have no desire to be set up. My life is full enough as it is.” With that, she went on adjusting a new display of furnishings.

Marcy cast a disparaging look around at her sister’s most recent acquisitions. “Yeah, full of dust and allergens,” she grumbled.

Kenzie paused for a moment to pat her sister’s cheek. “C’mon, Marcy. Don’t pout. Your face might set that way,” she teased. It was something their grandmother used to threaten them with when they were little and scowled at being reprimanded.

“What am I going to tell George?” Marcy asked. “I’ve already built you up to him as the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

“Tell him I ran off to feed the masses,” Kenzie joked. And then she sighed, shaking her head. She would have thought Marcy would know better by now. “This can’t be coming as a surprise to you. You know how I feel about setups.”

Marcy shifted Alex over to her other hip again, clearly physically uncomfortable. “But that’s when Mom does them.”