Tanya Michaels - Mistletoe Mommy

It dawned on Adam that, in the past couple of years, he’d been far too passive. He’d felt guilty over not being there, so he defaulted to Sara’s opinion on everything as if he didn’t have a right to disagree with her. Though he wouldn’t undermine her by arguing a point in front of the kids, it was time he gave more thought to their lives and offered real input, not just financial support.

Since the television remote was on the coffee table, he flipped on the TV and went to one of those all-news channels. He wasn’t sure when exactly Eliza ducked out of the kitty den, but a bit later, Geoff and Morgan both appeared in front of him.

“I finished everything Brenna laid out for me,” Geoff said with satisfaction.

“I’m still playing with Ellie, but you said fifteen minutes,” Morgan reminded him. “It’s been fifteen.”

Already? In spite of himself, Adam’s gaze went to the window and the driveway beyond. “Where’s your sister?”

Geoff gave an exaggerated shrug, accompanied by a “women” eye roll. “Bathroom. Again.”

“Something’s wrong with her,” Morgan declared, her gamine face puckered with worry.

Adam was starting to agree. “Why don’t you guys go out in the yard and play with Zoe? I’ll take care of Eliza.”

After they’d done as suggested, he knocked lightly on the bathroom door. Unless he was mistaken, there was sniffling coming inside. “Eliza, honey? Are you okay?”

“No!” More pronounced sniffling. Then she muttered something too low to hear followed by an emphatic, “I want Mom!”

“I know you and your mother are a lot closer than you and I have been lately, but I want to change that.” He sat on the floor, feeling a bit stupid for baring his soul to a doorknob. “You can talk to me about anything, I promise.”

“Not about this! ” She sounded horrified, and her voice cracked. He felt powerless with his little girl crying on the other side of a locked door. “Could you please just get Mom on the phone? ”

Then it clicked. The likely reason she’d been so cranky and on the verge of tears, the way she’d been holding her stomach as if in pain. “Oh, honey. Are you-?”

“I don’t want to talk to you about it! I’d die of humiliation.”

Forget that he was specially trained in the workings of the human body; for this, a girl needed her mother. “Be right back!”

He returned to the living room and dialed Sara’s cell number, although it took him several tries to get it right. Why were his hands shaking? This was a natural biological process that all females went through. Yes, but she’s only…twelve.

How had twelve years passed already? He vividly remembered the day she was born, so much tinier than Geoff had been, how she’d seemed so fragile in Adam’s hands that he’d been scared he might hurt her. Then she’d screwed up her reddened face, opened her mouth and let loose with a yowl that had made the nurse and an exhausted Sara cringe but Adam laugh. He’d known then that something that could make such a ferocious noise wasn’t as frail as she looked.

Over the phone, his ex-wife’s recorded voice instructed him to leave a message.

“Sara? Oh, Sara, I wish you’d picked up! Look, it’s not an emergency per se-kids are fine-but call as soon as you get this, okay? Anytime day or night! Any time.”

It wasn’t until he disconnected that he realized he was panicking. He could have just told Sara what the issue was, but he was having trouble wrapping his mind around it. Preoccupied with the situation and what he should say to Eliza, he missed both the car outside and the steps on the porch. He jumped in surprise when the front door swung open and Brenna entered the living room.

“Oh, thank God, a woman! ” He darted forward and took hold of her hand.

Her eyebrows shot up. “Well, you get points for enthusiasm. Although you might want to practice being more discerning than that.”

“We’re having a crisis.” He dropped her hand, abashed. What had he been planning to do, drag her bodily down the hall and dump everything in her lap? “A, erm, female crisis.” He sounded more like a socially awkward seventh grader than a medical professional.

He tried again. “Apparently Eliza is…she’s started-”

“Oh!” Brenna clucked her tongue. “Poor baby. You want me to go talk to her?”

“Please.” He felt almost light-headed with relief.

Sitting on the couch, he listened as Brenna approached the closed door. Please don’t push her away, he silently advised Eliza. He knew she’d rather have Sara right now, understandably so, but he hoped that his daughter wouldn’t distance herself from others at her own expense.

After a moment, the door opened, and he heard the soft background murmur of female voices. And a few seconds later, Brenna returned, palming her keys.

“Eliza and I are going for a little shopping excursion. I can take her back to the lodge when we’re finished. Why don’t we just meet you there?”

“I can’t thank you enough.”

She flashed him a cheeky smile. “You can try. Tuesday night.”

“Thank you,” Eliza mumbled as they left the drugstore. “That was embarrassing, but it would have been worse with my dad.”

“You’re welcome. I realize that kids-young women,” she amended, unlocking the car doors, “probably hate it when adults say this, but I know how you feel. My mom wasn’t around for my first period, either.”

It had been mortifying. Even though Brenna had taken the same health classes as her peers and had, in theory, known what to expect, her first thought had been I’m bleeding to death! It had hurt.

“Where was your mom?”

“Don’t know,” Brenna confided. “Still don’t. She brought me to Mistletoe and married Fred just a few months later-Fred is Josh’s dad. Then she took off for the store and none of us ever saw her again, although Fred did find a note afterward.”

Eliza’s jaw dropped, her own misery temporarily forgotten. “She just left? And she didn’t even tell you goodbye? That’s way worse than being twenty minutes late for the sixth-grade graduation ceremony or being a no-show at the father-daughter volleyball picnic.”

Brenna knew that if Adam had missed an event for one of his kids, it had to have been something critical that kept him. He’d probably been off nobly saving a life, people around him yelling Clear! or Clamp! or Stat! the way they always did in medical dramas. But still, she empathized with the sense of loss the girl must have felt.

“Now that I’m older, I realize that even though her leaving hurt badly for a long time, it might have been for the best.” By the time they’d reached Mistletoe, Brenna had already become tense and brittle, afraid to form attachments. Who knew when they’d pick up and go again? How long a current boyfriend would last? When her mercurial mother might turn on her? “In fact, her disappearing like that might even have been her way of protecting me. Maybe she did it because she loved me.”

“Pfftt.” Eliza snorted. “Whatever. It still sucks.”

Brenna laughed. “Yeah. It still sucks.” She turned her key in the ignition, relieved when the car started. For what she’d paid to mortgage it out of the garage, the vehicle should be so finely tuned it could qualify for the Indy 500.

“You hungry?” Brenna asked. “We can swing by a drive-through somewhere.”

“Nah.”

“Forget dinner, then. What about just a chocolate milk shake? Great cure for cramps,” Brenna added. A decent milk shake helped keep her from killing anyone at the wrong time of the month.