Merry Humbug Christmas (22 page)

“That’s horrible.” Reese squeezed his arm and snuggled closer.

“It’s sort of amazing she’s so upbeat and funny when she’s had the most tragic things happen to her.”

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“Regg has always been that way. Nothing ever keeps her down

for long. But her faith is really strong. I think that has a lot to do with it. Okay. Who’s next?”

“Next comes Matthew,” she piped up. “Thirty-nine years old,

married for eighteen years to Courtney, lives in Colorado with four kids: P.J., fifteen—Paul Junior, named after your dad; Hannah, age thirteen; Sarah, ten; and Ezekiel, age seven.”

“He likes to be called Zeke.”

“Zeke,” she repeated with a nod. “Got it.”

“And then?”

“Elijah!” she exclaimed. “Eli is your younger brother by two

years, thirty-one-years-old, married to Sofia for seven years. Two children: Abigail, age six, and Jeremy, five. Sofia is from Puerto Rico, where they moved when Eli took a job working for her father’s real estate company three years ago. He’s a marathon runner, and he

recently broke his personal best to run a seven-minute mile. Are you dazzled?”

“Quite. Now what are my parents’ names?”

“Oh. You have parents?” she joked, and Damian gave her a nudge

with his elbow. “Dad Paul and Mom Jeane. Currently living out their retirement in sunny Sedona where it is very, very hot in the summer but—”

And they finished it in stereo: “It’s a dry heat.”

He kissed her head as she nuzzled into his shoulder for a moment.

“You really did study,” he encouraged her. “You do me proud.”

“That’s the plan!”

“And the dog?”

“Paco,” she said without missing a beat. “Belongs to Matthew’s

daughter Sarah.”

Damian cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow.

She chuckled. “Chihuahua, six years old.”

“Right,” he replied. “And seriously, don’t turn your back on him.”

“No eye contact, no loud voices,” she recited from memory, “and

no quick movements.”

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“Ding, ding, ding,” he rewarded her, and Reese returned the

favor with laughter that sounded to Damian like a perfectly pitched choir singing on a distant hill. “You’re amazing,” he told her.

“And?” she prompted.

“And I am the most blessed man on the planet.”

“Yes, you are.”

Damian slipped his arm around Reese’s shoulder, and she nestled

against him as Frank Sinatra crooned “The Christmas Waltz.”

“I’m a little nervous,” she said softly.

“About?”

“What if your family doesn’t like me?”

“Not possible.”

“You said yourself, they’re not usually all in one place like this.

What if they get to talking, and they make a collective decision . . .

like . . . I’m not good enough for you.”

“That is not going to happen.”

“You’re so sure of your family that you know this for certain,”

she stated.

“I’m so sure of
you
that I know this for certain,” he told her. “The only real worry we have is they might turn on
each other
.”

“Why? Do they fight a lot? You never mentioned that.”

“No. We don’t fight, really. I mean, there are a few sarcastic jabs bantered about every now and then—especially when Matthew is

in the room. It’s important to just step back and get out of the way.

Regg calls it our Family Power Surges. Like we’re conductors for

each other’s electricity. Personally, from what I’ve deduced over the years, I’m pretty sure this is just called family.”

Reese giggled and snuggled closer into him. After a minute or

two, she sighed sleepily and told him, “I’ve never heard this song before.”

“No?”

“Uh-uh. But I like it.”

“Stick with me, kiddo. Okay, here’s our turnoff to start up the

mountain toward Sugarloaf.”

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“Alrightie!” she exclaimed, plucking two strange-looking gloves

from her coat pocket. “Ah, Damie.”

“What are those?” he said with a laugh.

“I can’t believe I forgot to replace these stupid things. I can’t meet your family, wearing these gloves!” she added as she tucked the bright orange, pink, and teal plaid mitten back into one pocket, and the purple and red one into the other.

WHEN REESE AWOKE, ROSEMARY Clooney softly crooned “It

Came upon the Midnight Clear,” and the heavy snow outside looked

as though it had been dumped by the barrelfuls over the roof of the car. They appeared to be the only travelers on the winding road, and Damian drove along at a conservative twenty-eight miles per hour as the high beams cut through the dance of thick, white confetti in front of them.

“Nice nap?” he asked as she squirmed upright in the passenger

seat.

“Mm-hmm. Are we almost there?”

“About ten minutes.”

“It looks like the roads are pretty clear, all things considered. Has it been scary?”

Damian chuckled. “I learned to drive in Vermont, remember?

Snow on the roads doesn’t scare me.”

“Well, I grew up in northern California mostly. If a fog sets in, I’m your girl.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. We’ve actually passed a couple of snow-

plows going both directions, so I think we should be fine all the way to the turnoff.”

She glanced at the clock on the dash. The glowing blue light told her it was nearly eleven p.m.

“Did you call and tell them we were running late?”

“I guess I should have,” he said with the lift of his shoulder.

“They’ll probably figure we decided to wait until morning.”

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“Do you have a key, or will we have to wake them?” Reese blinked

as she spotted something up ahead, and she squinted for a better

look. “Damian, what is that?”

“What’s . . . what?”

“Up there on the side of the road. Do you see it?”

The beam of the headlights caught it in just that moment. An

animal of some kind. A really big animal!

“I don’t see—”

“No, look out!” she screamed just as the animal moved into the

path of their car.

Damian jammed on the brakes, and the car spun sideways. It

all seemed to evolve in slow motion as the grind of rubber sailing through snow and ice nearly drowned out her own screams and

Rosemary Clooney’s now-surreal soft, crisp undertones. The side

and front airbags deployed and popped noisily at the exact moment the Mercedes crashed with a hard, sickening thump against the side of the large deer with the bad sense to cross in front of a car on a snowy mountain road at midnight.

Reese could barely breathe, and she frantically swatted at the

bags pressing in on her while Clooney continued her serenade. It

struck her strangely funny all of a sudden, as the white dust of the airbags cascaded over them inside the car and the thick white snow fell outside, that the soundtrack to the collision was soft and stunningly crisp, and—in her head, at least—became “It Came upon the

Midnight Deer.” She tried not to laugh, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Reese?” Damian sounded muffled and raspy. “Reese? Are you all

right?”

Her heart began to race, and she reached over and felt for his

arm. When she found it, she grabbed hold. “Damian? I’m okay. Are

you?”

“I think so,” he replied.

They pawed at the airbags, pushing them away until they finally

looked one another directly in the face. Reese gasped when she spotted one lone trickle of blood winding its way down Damian’s pow-

der-white face.

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“You’re bleeding,” she said. She blindly felt around for the package of tissues she recalled tossing to the console between them, and she quickly wrapped her fingers around it. Pulling one out of the package, she twisted a tissue around her index finger and patted his eyebrow while noisily puffing to remove the airbag powder from her lip gloss. “Pfft. Pffffftt.”

The stereo, completely unaware that anything out of the ordi-

nary had occurred, skipped to the next song. “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby elicited a chuckle from Reese. So much for dreaming of snow for Christmas.

Damian arched his clean eyebrow, and one corner of his mouth

twitched slightly. “Was I delirious before, or did I hear you . . .
laughing
?” he asked as she tended to the gash.

“Pffft. . . . Pfft. . . . What do you mean?”

“When I came to, I thought I heard you laughing.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, and she spat out a few more puffs in an

effort to blow her lips clean. “Yeah. It was that song that was on before, the Rosemary Clooney song.”

“What song was it?”

“‘It Came upon the Midnight Clear.” But in my head, what I heard

was . . . and you probably won’t think it’s very funny . . . but . . . well

. . . in my head, she was singing “It Came upon the Midnight
Deer
.’”

Damian regarded her seriously for a long moment, and she pre-

pared herself for the observation that was almost sure to follow—the one she always expected, but thankfully, never came from Damian:

Sometimes you can be so inappropriate. What is wrong with you?

I just don’t understand what makes you tick! Laughing after a head-on
collision?

But once again he astonished her to the very core when Damian

snickered suddenly and then guffawed . . . snorted . . . gasped for air

. . . and continued to laugh hysterically.

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On the third day of Christmas,

Murphy’s Law gave to me . . .

three wrenched necks,

two mismatched gloves,

and a big rockin’ Harry Winston ring.

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3

No doubt due to the combination of poor weather condi-

tions and an elevation of more than seven thousand feet in

the San Bernardino Mountains, Siri offered no assistance to them

whatsoever. Reese’s phone had only one bar, and she couldn’t con-

nect either, which made the fact that the rear wheels of the car spun in the snow without gaining traction even more troubling.

“What should we do?” she asked him, and Damian wished he had

an answer for her.

“Well, we’re only a couple of miles away from the road that leads toward the house, and not too far from there is a small general store that used to have a pay phone outside.”

“Okay. Let’s go then.”

“I think you should stay here,” he suggested. “Run the heater and stay warm. I’ll hoof it and get back to you as soon as I can.”

Reese’s perfect little turned-up nose crinkled as she looked at

him, her face bunched up like a fist. “You can’t leave me out here, Damian. I want to go with you.”

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“You’re going to trudge through a foot of snow in those suede

boots of yours, Reese?” he admonished her, and he snapped the top of her button-up boot where it folded just over her knee. “They have three-inch heels on them.”

“Four and a half.”

He sighed. “Just stay here. Lock the doors. I won’t be gone long.”

“It’s cold,” she whimpered.