A Mountain Springs Christmas

Chapter 6

six

NICK

Nick sank onto his bed and adjusted the pillow against the headboard so he could sit up comfortably. It had been such a long day, and he was exhausted. But Clara’s parents had gone to bed and Holly was asleep and he was finally able to crash in this temporary room of his. He opened his phone and flipped to the last page of apps so he could see Clara’s picture and smiled back at her.

“Remember that conversation you had with me a month or so before you passed away where you said that if you ever died that I should remarry quickly so I wouldn’t be alone and so that Holly would have a mom?” He gazed up at where the corner of his room met the ceiling for a moment before looking back at the phone. “I’m sorry I completely blew you off at the time. You probably needed me to say that I understood instead of just saying that your death wasn’t ever going to happen.

“I like to think that you had the same conversation with Holly and with your parents to prepare them, too, because that’s the kind of thing you would do. If part of the reason why you told them was because I had ignored your plea, I apologize.” He shook his head. “But between your parents, Holly, and Holly’s teacher, I got your message loud and clear this week.”

He shifted the way he was holding the phone so he could pull his wedding ring off his finger. Then he held it up between his thumb and pointer finger and just looked at it for a long moment.

He shifted his gaze back to the phone. “I think maybe it’s time I stop wearing this. Actually, today it felt like it was time to stop quite a while ago, and I’ve probably been ignoring that, too. I’m hoping that seeing me take this off and taking the first step to moving on is making you cheer. I mean, in a way, it feels good to be making this step finally.”

He paused for a long moment, not sure what to say. “At the same time, though, I don’t know how I feel about it. I can definitely say there’s not any cheering going on over here.” He shrugged. “But somehow, it also feels right, if that makes any kind of sense. Even though I know this is what you wanted, it’s still hard. Just know that I’ll never stop loving you, okay?”

He twisted in the bed to pull open the drawer of his nightstand and placed the ring inside before pushing it closed.

“Goodnight, Clara.” He turned off his phone and the lamp before readjusting the pillow and lying down, staring up into the darkness, praying that he could make it through everything that lay ahead of him.

Nick was glad that today had been a remote work day instead of one where he had to drive to the office. The day had been full of both meetings and deep focus work, but it meant that he was able to finish early enough for him and Holly to grab a bite of dinner before heading over to their new house with Holly’s dog, Rosy.

When he heard the knock on his new door, he answered it, letting in a gust of freezing wind blowing with it the powdery snowflakes that covered everything. Rachel, Aiden, and their golden retriever were all shivering in the light of the porch, so he said, “Come in, come in.”

“Hey,” Aiden said, “you’ve got the same wreath on your door that we have on ours!”

Aiden shrugged out of his coat and handed it to his mom, then he and their dog raced through the foyer and into the big kitchen, dining room, and family room where Rosy was barking her own hello.

“Welcome to our home that we don’t even live in yet,” Nick said. It felt weird to welcome guests into a home with no furniture—just empty, echoing spaces. He didn’t have a coat rack or even a chair to put their coats on, so he added Rachel’s and Aiden’s coats to his and Holly’s on the railing leading to the upstairs.

Rachel looked all around the area. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

“I’ve heard that a minimalist look combined with sawdust and accents of construction tools is what’s in this season.”

“I work at a magazine, so I’ve got some contacts. I think I’ll have to put in a call to see if we can get HGTV Magazine to come spotlight the look.”

He chuckled. “I’ve been told that I have the magic touch when it comes to home decor.”

“I can tell by the wreath you chose for your front door.”

His face immediately heated just thinking of their first interaction, before he’d known who she was and when he’d been trapped under an avalanche of the things. Luckily, though, she wasn’t looking at his face. She put her hand on the trim that went around the opening into the living room. It hadn’t had any until a couple of days ago. It still wasn’t painted, but all the nail holes were filled and sanded and everything was caulked.

“Seriously, though, this looks incredible.” she walked into the living room, glancing around at all the work he’d done. “You learned all this just by trial and error?”

“Well, in all fairness, the bulk of the errors happened at the previous house.” The kids and the dogs were both racing around the open spaces. They sounded happy and occupied, so he asked, “Would you like the grand tour?”

Rachel appeared interested in the idea, so he took her up the stairs first. Maybe because he was eating up her praise and he’d put in a lot of work on that staircase and railing. As she looked around at the room that would be Holly’s once they moved in, he said, “It’s good to see you again when I’m not trapped under a mountain of Christmas decorations or when we aren’t being called out by a teacher.”

“Neither of us got after-school detention, so I say we call it a win.”

He smiled at her. It had been a very long time since he’d last flirt-bantered. It was nice to know he could still do it, even if he was a little rusty.

The sounds coming from downstairs seemed to instantly turn argumentative, so they hurried back to the family room. Holly and Aiden were having a heated discussion about which parent was more creative.

“Whoa,” he said. “Why am I hearing so many angry voices?”

Aiden turned to Rachel. “She said that since we are making the fireplace here, it means that her dad won. That he’s the best at this kind of stuff.”

Nick was so embarrassed that Holly was acting like she was. He loved that she had a spitfire personality. At least most of the time. He didn’t love seeing it aimed negatively at others. He was going to have to have a good discussion with her about this later.

“I was just defending your honor, Dad.”

“Hollybear, my honor doesn’t need to be defended. Our guests do need to feel welcomed, though. How do you think you can help with that?”

“Are you trying to be grandpa, Daddy? Because sometimes ‘winning friends and influencing people’ doesn’t feel like the most important thing. Letting someone know when they’re wrong is.”

“Holly!”

She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “You’re right. Now isn’t the time to point out that Miss Goodrich says she tells us when we got the wrong answer because that’s how we learn. Now’s the time to work together.”

He rubbed a hand across his forehead. It was at times like this he wished Clara was still there. They could figure out how to help Holly together, instead of him trying to figure it all out by himself and constantly worrying that he was doing it wrong. He wanted to pull her aside right now and talk to her about everything. But he also didn’t want to make the situation more awkward than it already was for Rachel and Aiden.

Before he could even open his mouth, though, Holly turned to Aiden. “I’m sorry for what I said.”

Aiden tapped a finger on his lip, then smiled and said, “Thanks. Me, too.”

Holly may be a spitfire, but she was always quick to apologize. He’d never been so grateful for that trait of hers.

Quickly after, Rachel got both kids turned around and looking down at the plywood. It lay right in the middle of the mostly open space. Since this was the biggest room in the house and most central, it was where he kept all of his construction supplies and tools, but he mostly had them on a tarp near the wall by the fireplace and out of the way.

“So,” Rachel said, “the fireplace is at the bottom, with the mantle about halfway up, right?”

Aiden nodded. “Yep! And we need to cut open the middle part because a kid in our class”—

“Zach S.”—Holly cut in.

“—is going to be Santa Claus, and he needs to come from behind it, like he came down the chimney.”

Rachel grabbed the tape measure from his supplies and sat down on the floor with her legs crossed. “Well, then, it sounds like we need to figure out how tall that opening needs to be for Santa to climb out of it.” She extended the tape a good three feet, then held it measuring from the floor up, and had both kids walk beside it, crouched, so she could measure.

Since the wood they were working with was only four feet wide, the logical width of the opening was two or two and a half feet wide, and if they were doing the mantle halfway up, the logical height of the opening was about three feet high. That would leave enough space to do the faux bricks surrounding it.

They could’ve figured that out even if the kids weren’t present. But Rachel was telling them how many inches high they were as they crouched past the tape, and both of them were going past it time and time again, trying to get lower, the dogs participating right along with them, the kids’ laughter building with each pass.

The sound made his heart happy in a way he hadn’t felt lately. Like a tiny little piece of it was fused back into place.

No, it was more than that. The more he watched, the more he realized the feeling came from knowing a piece of Holly’s heart was fusing back into place. He knew that leaving their old home was the right choice and that Holly was excited to move close to her grandparents. It was still hard, though. It was the only home she’d ever known. It was where her friends were, and she was apprehensive about making new friends.

But he’d assured her that she would. Every day after school over the past two weeks since they’d moved to Mountain Springs, he’d ask if she’d made any friends that day. The only kid he ever heard about was Aiden and how much they weren’t becoming friends. Finding out from Holly’s teacher that she was struggling because Clara was gone had just pulled at his already frayed heart.

He studied Rachel as the kids and the dogs went around and around. The smile on her face was open. Full of Joy. Her green eyes sparkled and her dark hair fell in big waves down to her shoulders, framing her face. Watching her help the kids turn from anger to happiness was mesmerizing. She was mesmerizing.

Eventually, the kids fell to the floor, exhausted from laughing, but they still managed to laugh and squirm more once the dogs started licking their faces. Rachel turned to him and grinned. “I think three feet will do it.”

“Thank you,” he said, and it was the most genuine thank you he’d given in a long time.

She smiled back at him, and he had to admit it did something to his stomach. Something rather unexpected.

He and Rachel lifted the piece of plywood onto two saw horses, putting it closer to waist height, and she measured the wood three feet from the bottom in a couple of places, marking each. He placed his framing square against the side of the plywood so he could make sure the line they were making would be perfectly parallel to the base. Then he held it down with his left hand so he could mark the line with his right.

As soon as he put his hand on the square, his ring looked conspicuously absent. At first, he thought that maybe it just looked that way to him, since he’d spent the last nearly eight years always seeing it there, but Rachel seemed to notice every bit as much.

Enough that it felt like a tangible thing in the air between them, begging for a comment from him. He cleared his throat. “It was time.” He watched as the expression on Rachel’s face changed, but as much as he studied it, he couldn’t guess what she might be thinking.

He hadn’t noticed what Holly was doing, since she was on the floor behind him, playing with the dogs, but she’d apparently had a great vantage point for witnessing the exchange. She reached forward and patted him on the leg.

The perceptive kid had noticed the lack of his ring within moments of seeing him this morning. He’d told her that it was hard to take it off, but that he knew he should. She’d said, “It doesn’t mean you don’t love Mommy still. It just means that you know she’s in heaven, and we need to keep on living here.” He’d been worried about telling her, yet she’d been the one to share wisdom and reassurance with him.

Sometimes it felt like Holly had the insight of someone well beyond her years, then she would show the maturity of someone exactly her age when she played the whole “my dad can beat up your dad” card with Aiden. The girl was a walking dichotomy, and he loved her fiercely.

Before long, he and Rachel had the opening cut. Pretty quickly after that, they’d figured out how to use the two-by-fours to construct a frame on the back of the fireplace to make it freestanding. They’d even had enough wood left over to create the mantle and get it screwed to the plywood. And it had all generated enough small leftover pieces of the two-by-fours that the kids were having a blast using them like building blocks.

It had taken a lot of back-and-forth discussion and lots of measuring and math to decide how to make the piece. He and Rachel stood next to each other, grinning at the very plain fireplace. Both Holly and Aiden crouched down and climbed through the fireplace opening, just to test it.

Rachel turned to him. “We did good work.”

His smile was big as he nodded. “We did.”

Before they started, he’d wished that Clara was there to help him figure it all out, because she’d always been crafty. But what he’d experienced that evening with Rachel had been rather remarkable. Neither of them had known what they were doing when they started, but together, they figured it out just fine and the results were pretty great. Everything he was feeling was pretty great. It was nice to experience that specific sense of teamwork again that could only come when two people figured things out together.

The kids were now playing something with the extra wood pieces that seemed to be a mix of the floor is lava and follow the leader, all while chanting the lines of The Night Before Christmas that they’d memorized.

He turned to Rachel, hoping that he could manage to take a leap of faith without crashing and burning at takeoff. “Holly and I have a few Christmas traditions of going to holiday outings, but most of them were tied to our old town. Well, except for my in-laws' ugly sweater party. We’ve got a fresh start here, and we decided that we need a few new traditions. Do you have any suggestions?”

He wasn’t asking Rachel on a date. The last time he’d asked someone on a first date was ten years ago, and he wasn’t quite ready to take a leap that big. But he also knew that it would only take about one more day to finish the fireplace, and he wanted to see Rachel again.

Rachel’s entire face had brightened when he mentioned Christmas traditions, but then she seemed to hesitate. He held his breath as he waited for her response. It was fine if she just recommended a town event that he and Holly could attend or told him about a Christmas activity. He hoped that she would take it as an opening to see each other again.

She bit her lip and looked at Aiden, thinking. Not thinking, like she was coming up with a list of things to suggest, but thinking like she was trying to decide something. She clearly understood that his question was an opening.

He continued holding his breath.

Then she turned back to him. “Yes.”

“Yes?” He wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

“The snow sculpture activity in Downtown Park happened last week, but they’re still there. And there’s Santa’s village, a manger scene, a gingerbread house with hot chocolate, the works. Aiden and I planned to go tomorrow. Would you like to join us?” Her expression was uncertain, but he could see the hope behind it, too.

He grinned. “We’d love to.”