Page 132 of How My Neighbour Stole Christmas
She flashes me her gloves. “Wouldn’t know.”
“Oh, right.” I shake my head. “You really put on gloves to pack the car?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s freezing here. I will never get over it and will always bundle up because I don’t want frostbite.”
“Ridiculous,” I say as I move to my front door, nerves starting to inch up my spine.
She must notice because she places her hand on my back. “I won’t judge you, Cole.”
I look over my shoulder and softly smile at her.
“Thank you,” I reply and then open the door, letting her into the first floor that has gone completely untouched.
And unseen by anyone besides Max and myself.
To the left is the dining room and the long table that’s covered in white linen. A place where we used to have “fancy meals,” as Mom used to call them, but has been vacant for quite some time. I can’t remember what it’s like to hear silverware clatter against fine bone china or my father’s boisterous laugh as he sipped on his bourbon after a three-course meal.
To the right is the living room, with a fireplace, couch, and two wingback chairs where I used to sit and chat with my dad about the upcoming Foghorns season.
The chairs are covered in sheets, but the couch is not.
Because the couch is where I sit and stare at the fireplace.
“I, uh…I covered everything up so it wouldn’t get dusty or sun-damaged since the rays are stronger here.”
“You don’t need to explain yourself,” Storee says softly as she takes in my home.
She’s never been in here before. She’s only ever been on my porch.
She walks over to the fireplace and runs her finger over the mantel and across the nails where we used to hang stockings. She takes in the pictures one by one, a smile playing on her lips when she sees the one of Dad and me when I was twelve. We found a lake on a hike and decided to fish bare-handed. Somehow, I grabbed one, and I’m holding it up in the photo. Storee then walks in front of the most recent picture of Mom, Dad, and me, when they dropped me off at college. My first and only semester at UC Boulder.
“That was the last picture we took together,” I say, stepping in closer to her.
“I remember this boy,” she whispers. “I remember all these versions of you, Cole.” She picks up the picture of Bob Krampus and me when I was fourteen. “I remember this haircut. God, I thought you were so cute.”
“Thought?” I ask, loving that she can make this hard moment feel so…easy.
She looks over her shoulder. “You’re still cute, but now you have this rugged handsomeness about you that’s actually really unfair to possess.”
“Rugged handsomeness?” I smooth my hand over my jaw. “Think it’s the beard?”
She motions over my body. “It’s the whole package.”
That makes me smirk.
She puts the picture back and moves over to another. It’s of Max and me, our arms around each other, standing in front of the Ornament Park Christmas tree.
“You two really haven’t changed, have you?”
“If you look inside the frame, you’ll see that we have.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mom took a picture of us in front of the Ornament Park tree every year. This is the one from when we were seventeen because she never gotthe chance to print the one from when we were eighteen. But she kept all the past pictures one on top of the other in the frame.”
“That’s so sweet,” she says and then turns to me. “Do you look at these pictures often?”
“Not so much anymore. When I first lost my parents, yeah. I’d mindlessly sit on this couch for hours just staring. It’s why it’s the only piece of furniture not draped in a cloth. I would numbingly sit here and do nothing. It wasn’t until Max offered me the job at the farm that I started to leave the house. For a while there, all I had were the people in town coming in and out and offering me support. Since I was eighteen, I was technically an adult. My parents had a hefty life insurance policy, so I didn’t need to work if I didn’t want to, and, well…at the time, I couldn’t fathom leaving. But the Maxheimers couldn’t take me being alone all the time, so they took me in as one of their own.”
