A Mountain Springs Christmas

Chapter 5

five

NOELLE

Noelle went back to her desk, let out a huge breath of relief, and collapsed into her chair, sinking into the backrest. She wasn’t confrontational or demanding, so she was pretty proud of herself for pulling that off with her boss. But it had been exhausting.

Bridget was just setting her things down on her desk for the day and looked down at her watch. “It’s nine oh one. It’s way too early to be that tired. Especially on a day when we’ve got to make something like Lump of Coal Breath Mints sound like a good stocking stuffer.”

Noelle laughed and sat up in her chair like normal. “It’s days like today where we really get to prove how good we are at our jobs.” And that was one of the reasons why she loved her job. How boring would it be to work at a big ad agency where they only had to make things like jewelry and sweaters sound like good gifts?

She opened her bag and pulled out the metal box she’d gotten from Gran-gran, placing it on her desk, right in front of her keyboard. Then she took off the lid and pulled out the card she’d already placed on top of the stack—the one with the little painting of the two of them making a snowman in Downtown Park.

And, really, today wasn’t a bad day. For starters, it was Friday. She put the card, snowman painting facing forward, leaned against her monitor. As long as Jack’s sister was on board with her’s and Jack’s Christmas pact—and the expression on his face told her that he thought she would be—she was going to get Elfie fixed, and she was going to honor Gran-gran’s wishes. It might not be the easiest way to do either, but she at least had a plan and having a plan felt good.

On Saturday afternoon, she pulled up to the address that Jack had texted her—the address to his sister Rachel’s house. He’d kept his word. She was driving a rental car, and he’d told the shop to charge him for the repairs.

As she walked up to the small home, she decided that the Grinch-ness that Jack had must not be a family thing, because it looked like Rachel had quite a few Christmas decorations and lights outside her house.

Jack answered the door, wearing a dark gray t-shirt and jeans. For the record, he looked every bit as amazing in jeans and a t-shirt as he did in a suit. But it was so strange seeing him not dressed up for work. It was a peek into his personal life that she hadn’t seen before, and it felt wrong. Like looking through the pictures on someone’s phone without permission or going trick-or-treating as a kid and knocking on the door of a house that you didn’t realize belonged to your teacher.

A young boy wearing socks but no shoes came racing down the hall—Aiden, she assumed—with a golden retriever at his side. He skidded to a stop on the hardwood floor and held out a hand, beaming, like he was proud of himself for knowing how to greet someone for the first time. “Hi. I’m Aiden. And this is Bailey.”

Noelle shook his hand. “Hello, Aiden.” She nodded at the dog. “Bailey. It’s nice to meet you both.”

Jack closed the door behind her. “Come meet my sister.” He put his hand on the small of her back just long enough to give a gentle nudge toward the hallway, and the touch sent an unexpected thrill up her spine.

She walked down the hallway with him, Aiden skipping ahead of them, toward a combined kitchen, dining room, and family room. His sister sat in a recliner in the modest room, looking even sicker than she had in the picture Jack had sent. But she was smiling and looked happy as they walked to her.

“Rachel, this is Noelle. Noelle, this is my sister, Rachel.”

Rachel reached out both hands and enveloped her hand. “Thank you for coming. It’s so good to meet you! Jack has told me a lot about you.”

Jack flinched like he was panicked that his sister shared that. But why would he care? Of course, he would tell his sister about Noelle. She would be hanging out with her son a lot over the next few weeks—Rachel would naturally want to know about her.

They chatted for a few minutes while Aiden pulled on his snow boots, coat, hat, and gloves, then he and Jack drove to Downtown Park in his car, and Noelle drove in her rental. She made it out of her car and to the sidewalk in front of the park first, holding a couple of square buckets that she’d found handy for whatever sculpture they made. The sun was shining brightly, making everything look crisp and new and not nearly as cold as it actually was.

People were standing on the sidewalks and on the pathways they’d shoveled in the park itself, waiting for the event to start. They’d had a good snowstorm earlier in the week and a second one last night. The weather had been a little warmer for both, so the snow was nice and good for packing. Some years it had been so cold that the snow was nothing but powder, which was great if you were skiing, not so great if you were trying to make a snowman.

She spotted her sister, Hope, with her family and waved. She could see her sisters Becca and Julianne with their families, too, and her youngest sister, Katie, with her parents. Seeing them just made all the memories of being at this event over the years flood back in. Of course, the memories included all the family she saw here, but she and Gran-gran always worked on the same snow sculpture even if the rest of them didn’t, so her memories included her, especially.

Right out in the middle of the park, they’d created a canoe one year. It looked like it was floating on the snow, and they’d made a snowman inside holding two big sticks like they were oars going down into the snow. And over by the nativity, they’d once made two dozen snowmen that were each about a foot and a half high with little black circular rocks for the eyes and a little bigger one for a mouth, all looking like they were a choir singing. One year, they’d even made a sculpture of a person making a snow angel.

And the whole time, Gran-gran had made jokes, and they’d laughed until their guts hurt, and Gran-gran made her feel like the most important person in the world.

She could feel her emotions rising as she saw Jack and Aiden get out of Jack’s car and start heading in her direction, so she tamped them down. It had sounded like a good idea to follow Gran-gran’s wishes and still celebrate Christmas when she’d gotten the cards and when Jack had been asking for help, but now that she was actually here, she was questioning that choice. There were just so many memories tied up in these activities that she wasn’t sure she could do it.

But Aiden looked so cute, all decked out for the snow, and he had such a massive smile on his face. And Jack was looking pretty fine in his coat, gloves, and hat. More than fine.

She was taken aback by the thought. He was her boss . And not just a regular boss, but an “always keep things professional” boss. The kind that made you not even stop to consider how good-looking he was because it wouldn’t be professional. But this wasn’t the office, he wasn’t wearing a tie, and somehow it made it so much easier to see just how attractive he was.

She cleared her throat as they neared. “So, Aiden, have you ever done this activity before?” He shook his head. “Everyone divides themselves into teams as small or as big as they want. When it’s time to start, they say go, and then we’ve got forty minutes to make whatever we’re going to make. After, we’ll get hot chocolate in that gazebo that looks like a gingerbread house, then we can check out Santa’s village.”

She pointed toward the life-sized nativity. “Some people make animals around the manger.” Then she motioned toward Santa’s village with the train going around it. “Some people make elves or other Christmassy things over there. Some people make funny snowmen, and some people make things that don’t really have anything to do with Christmas at all. One year, someone made a pretty impressive dragon. What do you think we should make?”

Aiden pondered it for a moment, tapping a finger on his lips, the most serious expression on his face. Then he raised his finger into the air. “I think we should make a chair.”

Jack looked at Noelle, his eyebrows drawn together, then looked back at Aiden. “A chair?”

“Yeah, like a big, padded comfy chair that anyone can sit in. And we should put it right over there so whenever someone sits in it, they can look at everything. Oh, and we should have a snow dog that looks just like Bailey sitting up beside the chair. And there should be a footrest.”

“You’ve got it, buddy.” Jack chuckled and ruffled the big pom on the top of Aiden’s hat like he was ruffling his hair, and it was definitely the cutest thing she’d seen all week. And she’d seen her six-year-old niece trying on her Mrs. Claus costume for her school play, so the competition had been tough.

They went and found a spot and chatted as they waited for the organizers to say it was time to start. She’d kept her focus mainly on Aiden and asking him questions, but since he liked to also answer for Jack, she’d found out that Jack loved playing Uno, hated the color brown, and wished there was a good Thai restaurant in Mountain Springs.

She’d also met Quinton, a dark-haired kid with a blue and orange coat who was one of Aiden’s friends from school. The two had talked rather animatedly about what they were each going to make.

They started building the snow dog sitting tall on his hind legs first, scooping the snow with their arms and pulling it to where they needed it. After they made the general shape of the dog, they started shoveling the snow with their hands, pushing it into the dog, and the more they did, the more the blob of snow began to look like an actual dog. Jack seemed to know just how to press the snow in hard and smooth it out with his glove, using the tip of his gloved fingers to scrape in details. He might not have had a lot of experience with Christmas growing up, but he had clearly had a lot of experience playing in the snow.

And he was so good with Aiden. He showed him how to do all of the things and let Aiden take over so much of it. It was clear that Aiden adored his uncle, too. Doing things together like this didn’t seem to be a foreign thing. Which was strange because with as professional and terse as Jack always was at work, she hadn’t really pictured him being good with kids.

She hadn’t pictured any of this, really. Not too far into making the comfy chair, they had to start filling the buckets to bring the snow from a little further out. The more they worked, the more she saw the mask of professionalism fall from Jack. He looked like he was actually enjoying himself. Truthfully, she hadn’t known it was a mask.

He was laughing and joking with her, too.

She bit a finger of her glove to hold it as she pulled it off, then she took out her cell phone and snapped a few pictures of the two of them working. Purely for Rachel’s and Jack’s sake. Not that she was going to go home and stare at them and think about how very good-looking her boss was and how completely adorable he was with his nephew.

Not that she could allow herself to fall for him, though, no matter how attractive or adorable or funny or very not-stuffy he was. Even if he wasn’t acting like her boss right now, he was still her boss. She hadn’t seen or heard anything about coworkers not being able to date anyone they worked with, but no one had dated anyone from the office the whole time she’d worked there. That could’ve been at least partly because there was a small dating pool available, but even if it wasn’t said, everyone probably assumed they couldn’t just by having Jack as a boss. It seemed like the kind of thing he wouldn’t be okay with.

As they neared the end of the time limit and, thankfully, the end of their project, Jack kept stopping to take his phone out of his pocket, frown at it, and then type something. She knew he hadn’t wanted to be there at all, so a part of her wondered if he was just laying the groundwork for skipping out early. He would probably break the news by saying there was some kind of emergency and was working on making it more believable.

“Alright, buddy,” Jack said. “I think it’s time you tested this chair out to see how it feels.”

Aiden sat down in the chair made of snow, his arms on the armrests, sitting in it like a king sitting in his throne, then put his feet up on the little ottoman they’d made, and he leaned back and surveyed the park and everything going on in it. He reached out and put a hand on the snow dog’s head beside the chair, giving him a little pat.

Then, with an entirely satisfied look on his face, he declared, “We did good work.”

Both she and Jack smiled at the cute boy. It felt good to see him so proud of his idea come to life.

Then, just as they blew the whistle to stop, Jack pulled the phone out again and frowned at it. Then he put it back into his pocket and bent down to Aiden’s height. “Listen, buddy. I’ve got to go.”

“But we haven’t gone around to see what everyone made yet. And we haven’t gone on the train around Santa’s village.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. Do you want to stay with Noelle and do those things?”

Aiden looked up at Noelle and smiled, nodding enthusiastically as he turned back to Jack. “But I’m still sad you have to go.”

“I’m sad, too. I’ll make it up to you, okay?”

Then Jack stood up, and as the righteous indignation that had been building inside her since he’d first started taking his cell phone out built to a crescendo, he said, “Are you okay to finish up here and take Aiden home after?”

Aiden’s friend Quinton came over just then, excitedly talking about his family's creation, so she took the moment while he was distracted to pull Jack aside a bit. “So you’re only sticking around for the wintery part and then coming up with an excuse to leave for the more Christmassy part of the event? You know, you’re not the only person who is struggling with this.”

Jack just looked at her, not saying a word, the muscle at his jaw clenching. She tried to stand tall and interpret the look on his face, but it was pretty impassive, and she was wincing inside pretty hard. She wasn’t the kind of person who just stood up to her boss and told him that he was doing things wrong. She was the kind of person who got an assignment and did it cheerfully. She didn’t know what had come over her.

Jack turned and left without a word.

She was the only one of them getting paid for being there—an amount per hour that she wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else—so maybe she should quit her judging and silent complaining. And definitely quit the out loud complaining to him.

She put a smile on her face and held out a hand to Aiden. “Are you ready to go look at what everyone made?”

He put his hand in hers. “Yep. We need to start with Quinton’s. They made a robot wearing a Santa hat!”

As they walked around and saw all the snow creations that had turned out great and the ones that hadn’t turned out so great, she felt terrible. Not only from the myriad of memories of Gran-gran that caused a new wave of grief to wash over her but because she felt bad about how she’d spoken to Jack.

After Aiden had gone on the train, went with her all through the village to see all of the elves working hard to make presents and get them wrapped and loaded onto Santa’s sleigh, then went on the train another two times, they took off their gloves and headed over to the gazebo to get hot chocolate. They had just gotten their cup of sweet and warm goodness, holding on to the curved part of a candy cane while they stirred the chocolate, when her phone buzzed.

She pulled it out of her pocket and saw that it was Jack. Probably calling to say that he didn’t think it was appropriate for her to talk to him like that, which would be totally fair. She answered, and before he even had a chance to say anything, she said, “Jack, I need to apologize. I—”

“Are you two still at the park?”

“Yes.”

“Good. My sister started doing a lot worse after we left, and I had to take her to the hospital. It’s probably going to be several hours before we can leave.”

Noelle’s stomach dropped, and she felt even worse.

“I’ve spoken with the mom of his friend Quinton. Do you remember meeting him?” He was back to being Boss Jack, not Playful Jack.

“I do.”

“Keep an eye out for her—they’re going to take Aiden home with them. They’ll stop by Rachel’s and grab his bag, then he’ll sleep over at their house. Can I speak to Aiden for a minute to let him know?”

She held the phone out to Aiden. He set his hot chocolate down on the ledge of the gazebo and cradled the phone in both hands as he held it to his ear. She couldn’t hear what Jack was saying and only heard a long line of “Uh-huh. Uh-huh” coming from Aiden. Then, “And mommy will be okay?” followed shortly by, “Will she call to tell me goodnight before bed?” and “When will I get to see her?”

Her heart was breaking for the poor kid.

Then Aiden said, “Okay. I love you, Uncle Jack.” Then he handed the phone back to Noelle. “He wants to talk to you.”

She put the phone up to her ear and said, “I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge you when I knew I didn’t have the full story.”

He was quiet for a long moment. She was about to pull the phone away from her ear to see if either she or Aiden had accidentally hung up when he said, “Keep calling me out whenever you think I’m not doing the right thing.”

She was too dumbfounded to make actual words come out of her mouth but did manage to make a sound somewhat resembling an “Oh?”

“It’s a skill not enough people utilize because they worry it might make someone mad. And it might do exactly that. But don’t let it stop you.”

“Um, okay.” The word came out as more of a question than she’d intended.

“And Noelle?” His voice was lower than usual, and her name sounded different from how he normally said it.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for staying with Aiden.”

She hung up the phone and looked up at the ceiling of the gazebo, knowing that she was in trouble. She had worked for Jack for a year and a half and hadn’t once gone home thinking thoughts about how attractive he was—inside or out. Yet, she knew she’d be going home thinking about him today.

And that was very bad.