Once Upon a Christmas

“Cassidy,” Maggie breathed.

The only McCreedy who beat her to the apartment’s kitchen was Caleb.

Cassidy stood in the middle of the room crying. Pancake batter splattered her pajama bottoms, the floor, the counters, the refrigerator door and even the ceiling. The bowl was in pieces.

“Now that’s a mess,” Matt said from behind her.

Jared’s snort could have been dismay, agreement, or it could have been him holding back laughter. Maggie couldn’t see his face.

“Don’t move,” Maggie ordered. Quickly she stepped amid the batter and shards, lifted her howling child under her arms and carried Cassidy into the bathroom. Flipping shut the toilet lid with her foot, Maggie stood her daughter on top and asked, “Are you bleeding?”

Cassidy continued howling.

Maggie knew neither cajoling nor scolding would have any effect. So, in a matter-of-fact voice, she reasoned, “Matt, from your class, is here. Do you want him to tell your friends that you’re a crybaby?”

Cassidy stopped.

“Now,” Maggie went on, gently wiping the tears from Cassidy’s face, “are you bleeding?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Cassidy searched desperately for some blood.

After a moment, Maggie nudged in a patient but firm voice, “Where do you hurt?”

The fact that Cassidy had to stop and think proved what Maggie already knew. Cassidy wasn’t bleeding and she wasn’t hurt. She was scared and embarrassed. The best cure for that was not a bandage but a hug.

Hugs were free.

A minute later, Cassidy was in her room changing into her school clothes and Maggie was in her kitchen trying not to stare as a tall cowboy, too tall for this tiny kitchen, cleaned up pancake batter.

Chapter Three

After eating a second breakfast, because Maggie offered and it seemed polite and, okay, Jared needed something to do with his hands, he ushered everyone down the stairs and out to his truck.

“Really,” Maggie insisted. “Cassidy and I can walk to the school. We always do.”

“We’re already late,” Matt protested.

“I want to walk,” Caleb volunteered.

“Matt’s right,” Jared said. “We’re already late. Plus, there’s something I’d like to ask you. I don’t know if I’ll have another chance to get away.”

Jared’s sons quickly piled in the backseat. Matt and Ryan sat by the coveted windows, while Caleb was more than annoyed to be in the middle. Cassidy, looking way too pleased, climbed in the front, quite content to be in the middle. She snapped on her seat belt and looked at Jared as if he were Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny all rolled into one. Jared knew the look well. It usually meant the kid using it was about to ask for something.

“Why don’t you have a girl?” Cassidy asked, once he’d put on his own seat belt and started the truck.

The snort from the backseat might have been Ryan or might have been Matt. For the first time, Jared got what Grandpa Billy meant when he said the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. It was all Jared could do not to snort, too. The only obvious non-snorter was Caleb because the five-year-old said, “Yeah, Dad, I want a sister. We can name her Molly.”

“We don’t need a—” Jared stopped, suddenly realizing that not just one but both females in the front seat were staring at him.

“We have a girl,” Jared revised. “Her name is Beth, and she’ll have to be in charge of giving you girl relatives.”

“But—” Caleb started to say.

Jared held up one hand. “End of conversation.”

“Dad has to be married in order for there to be a sister,” Ryan told Caleb.

“And Dad doesn’t like girls,” Matt added.

Jared almost drove off the road. Where did Matt get that idea? As for Maggie, she was looking away from him and out the window. He could tell by the way her cheeks were sucked in and her lips were puckered, that she was doing all she could not to laugh.

“Why don’t you like girls?” Cassidy asked.

“I do like girls,” Jared assured her, “especially ones who eat blueberry pancakes and ones who show me exactly where to park.”

Cassidy giggled and pointed to a visitor’s spot right by the front walkway of Roanoke Elementary. “Am I a visitor?” Jared asked.

“Yes,” Cassidy decided. “Because you’re not a kid and you don’t work here.”

“Good enough,” Jared agreed.

A moment later, both he and Maggie had signed their children in as tardy and watched as all of them, clutching late slips, scurried to their classrooms.

Well, Matt didn’t scurry. He looked at Jared accusingly. The only thing worse than being late, to Matt’s way of thinking, was being late alongside Cassidy Tate.

* * *

Jared had never stopped at Roanoke’s only coffeehouse just to have coffee. What he was paying for two cups could buy a whole pound, not that he would have. He didn’t like coffee. Plus, the concept of just sitting around, doing nothing, felt strange. He resisted the urge to fidget.

“You always come here after dropping Cassidy off at school?” He shifted in the brown hardback chair and stretched out his legs. They didn’t fit under the tiny table.

Maggie took a sip of something that was more chocolate than coffee and nodded. “As often as I can. It’s my one treat before I open the store for the day. Usually, though, I’m alone so I sit here and write in my journal. Or I read. Do you like to read?”

He hadn’t been asked that question in almost fifteen years, not since high school. “I read the Bible.”

“Oh.”

She visibly recoiled, her withdrawal so tangible it made him stop thinking about where to put his feet and how much he’d paid for the stupid cups of coffee.

“When I have time,” he added, hoping to get her to relax, “I read the newspaper.”

“Online or paper?”

“A little bit of both.”