Cara Colter - Snowbound With The Single Dad

“Yes.” Noelle hesitated, and then asked, “I wondered why you didn’t have any decorations up yet?”

“I thought it would be good to do it together.”

Even though she had never helped with things like putting the outside lights up, she loved the idea of them working together to re-create Christmases like the ones they had always enjoyed.

“That sounds fun. I’m so looking forward to the break. I’ll be here now until just after New Year’s.”

“Ah, good. Good. Everybody else will leave Boxing Day, so we’ll have a bit of time for just you and me.”

“What do you mean everybody?” she asked, surprised.

“Oh, my goodness, Ellie,” he said, calling her by his pet name for her, “wait until I show you what I’ve gone and done. Have you ever heard of Me-Sell?”

She cocked her head at him quizzically.

“You know, the place on the interstate where you put the ads up?”

“The internet? Oh, you mean I-Sell? That huge online classified ad site?”

“That’s it!”

The thought of her grandpa on I-Sell gave her pause. He still heated his house with wood. He received two channels on his old television set—if he fiddled with the rabbit ears on top of it long enough. He did not own a cell phone, not that there was signal anywhere near here. He and Grandma had never had a computer, never mind the internet.

“I go down to the library in the village and use the interstate,” he said.

“Internet,” she corrected him weakly.

“Whatever. I decided to sell some of my old machines out in the barn. Just taking up space. Ed down the road got a pretty penny for his. He did it all on I-Sell.”

“Do you need money?” she asked, appalled that somehow this had passed her by in their weekly telephone conversations. She got out here to visit him at least once a month. Why hadn’t she noticed he was pinching his pennies? Had her own double heartbreak made her that self-involved?

“Good grief, no! Got more money than I know what to do with since I sold off most of the land except for this little parcel around the home place.”

Another of the recent heartbreaking losses had been that decision to sell off most of the land that had been in the McGregor family for generations. There was no one left to work it. In her fantasies, Noelle had hoped one day she and Mitchell would buy it back.

They came over a little rise, and both of them paused. There it sat, the home place, prettier than a Christmas card. Surrounded by mounds of white snow was a large two-story house, pale yellow with deep indigo shutters, a porch wrapping around the whole lower floor, smoke chugging out the rock chimney.

If her grandmother had been alive, the house would have been decorated by now, December 21. There would have been lights along the roofline and a huge wreath on the front door, the word HOPE peeking out from under a big red bow. The huge blue spruce in the front yard would have been dripping with lights. But this year there was not a single decoration, and it made Noelle’s eyes smart, even if her grandfather had waited for her to do it.

Behind the house was a barn, once red, now mostly gray. In the near distance the foothills, snow dusted, rolled away from them, and in the far distance the peaks of the Rockies were jagged and white against a bright blue sky.

They passed the barn on the way to the house, and two large gray horses with feathered feet and dappled rumps came running out of a paddock behind it.

“Hello, Fred, hello, Ned,” she said affectionately.

Noelle went over to the fence and held out her hand. Fred blew a warm cloud of moist air onto her hand. She reached up to touch his nose, but just as she did, a tiny little horse, as black as Smiley, exploded through the snow from behind the barn, and the other two took off, snorting and blowing.

The tiny horse, having successfully chased away the competition, strained its neck to reach over the fence, and nipped at where her fingers dangled.

She snatched them away, and the pony gave an indignant shake of its scruffy black mane and charged off in the direction it had come.

“Who—or what—is that?” she asked.

“That’s Gidget,” her grandfather said. “She seems like a nasty little piece of work, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to find a pony close to Christmas.”

“A pony for Christmas?”

Noelle shot her grandfather a look. Again, she had the terrifying thought her grandfather might be slipping, that maybe he thought she was a little girl again.

“She’s a Christmas surprise.”

“Oh! You’re keeping someone’s surprise pony until Christmas?”

“Something like that. Look at you shivering. City gal.”

He took his toque off, revealing a head of very thick silver hair. He placed it on her own head and pulled it tenderly over her ears, as if she was, indeed, twelve again and not twenty-three. This time, instead of terrifying her, the casual gesture made her feel deeply loved.

He moved to her car, an economy model that had struggled a bit on the very long, snowy road that led to his place from the secondary highway. Her grandfather wrestled her suitcase out of the trunk. It was a big suitcase, filled with gifts and warm clothes, and her skates. The pond behind the house would be frozen over. The suitcase had wheels, but her grandpa chose to carry it and Noelle knew better than to insult him by offering to help.

When they walked in the back door into the back porch, the smell of coffee was strong in the house, though she immediately missed the just-out-of-the-oven aroma of her grandmother’s Christmas baking.

They shrugged out of jackets and boots, and left the suitcase there. Noelle pulled off her grandfather’s toque and smoothed her hair in the mirror. Her faintly freckled cheeks and nose were already pretty pink from being outside, but she knew herself to be an unremarkable woman. Mouse-brown hair, shoulder-length, straight as spaghetti, eyes that were neither brown nor blue but some muddy moss color in between, pixie-like features that could be made cute—not beautiful—with makeup, not that she bothered anymore.

The dog had already settled in his bed by the wood heater when she got into the kitchen. While her grandfather added wood to the heater, Noelle looked around with fondness.

The kitchen was nothing like the farmhouse kitchens that were all the rage in the home-decorating magazines right now. It had old, cracked linoleum on the floor, the paint was chipping off cabinets and the counters were cluttered with everything from engine pieces to old gloves. The windows were abundant but old, glazed over with frost inside the panes.

Aside from the fact that her grandmother would not have tolerated those engine pieces on the counter, and would have had some Christmas decorations up, Noelle felt that sigh of homecoming intensify within her.

Her grandfather and grandmother had raised her when her parents had died in an automobile accident when she was twelve. In all the world, this kitchen was the place she loved the most and felt the safest.

“Tell me about the helicopter pad,” she said, taking a seat at the old table. The coffee had been brewing on the woodstove, and her grandfather plopped a mug down in front of her. She took a sip, and her eyes nearly crossed it was so strong. She reached hastily for the sugar pot.

“Well, it really started when I was watching the news one night.” He took the seat across the table from her and regarded her with such unabashed affection that it melted her heart and the intensity of that feeling home grew.

“There was this story about this girl—not here, mind, England or Vancouver—”

Both equally foreign places to her grandfather.

“—who was going to be all alone for Christmas, so she just put an ad on something like I-Sell and all these people answered her, and she chose a family to have Christmas with.”