“I’m going to come for Christmas, Gran,” she shouted into the phone, trying to hear over the din of the honking cars on Fifty-seventh Street.
“I know that, Dakota, my dear,” Gran replied. “I’ve been making up the rooms all morning.”
“But I almost didn’t make the trip, Gran,” Dakota said. “I was going to stay in New York and focus on my career.”
“Oh, pish,” said Gran. “I knew you’d reason it out. We’re going to have a grand visit. All my family together . . .” Her voice caught mid-sentence.
“Are you all right, Gran?”
“Of course, my dear,” she replied. “It’s just that the cats are very pleased about the way it’s all turning out. Hurry and get to the airport now. Don’t you dare miss that plane.”
“But, Gran, the flight doesn’t leave for eight hours,” said Dakota.
“Exactly right, then,” said Gran. “You better get there soon.”
Dakota ran through her packing list in her mind as she made her way over to the hotel. She wasn’t delighted about telling Sandra Stonehouse she’d changed her mind, not after making such a case for getting the internship. But the sacrifice she needed to make, she realized, was not skipping the holidays for work. It was sacrificing a cool opportunity for the higher priority of honoring her family.
The doorman waved as Dakota entered the lobby of her father’s building. She strode briskly through to the elevator, glancing at her watch. Her Gran’s travel worries rang in her ear and, combined with the realization that she needed to do laundry before she could pack, she figured she had three hours to be ready before Bess and Tom and Donny arrived. Maybe a quick stir-fry for supper, a bit of rice and veggies before a Christmas overload of carbs? Or maybe just order pizza? She fumbled around in her bag for her key, unlocking the door with one hand and using the other to dial up Sandra Stonehouse and prepare to plead for the internship after the New Year.
She stepped through the door, held her breath, and hit send to connect the call. She walked the few feet into the living area, startled to hear an unfamiliar ringtone.
“Dad! What are you doing?” Dakota was stunned to see James standing in front of his desk, his arms wrapped around Sandra Stonehouse, the jacket of her navy suit casually tossed over the back of the sofa, her handbag vibrating from the ringing of her cell phone.
“Dakota!” James jumped back but kept an arm on Sandra.
“Hello, you have reached voice mail for Sandra Stonehouse . . .” Dakota heard through the phone. “Guess I don’t need to leave a message now,” she said drily.
“I’d like you to meet my friend. My good friend. My girlfriend.” He cleared his throat. “Dakota, this is Sandra.”
Sandra smoothed out her clothes and made mad swiping motions around her mouth, certain she’d smeared lip gloss on her chin. She didn’t feel anywhere near as in control as she had that morning. Sandra managed a small wave in Dakota’s direction.
“Hello again,” she said quietly.
“Hiya,” said Dakota. “I was calling your office, but, apparently, you make house calls.” She avoided looking at her father, certain she could guess his expression.
Sandra reached over to pick up her jacket, but James shook his head.
“Dakota, I invited Sandra over to my home,” he said. He hadn’t wanted to interfere, so he’d waited until Dakota’s interview should be completed, and then, hearing Sandra’s voice, realized just how much he was going to miss her, even being away for just a few days. Spontaneously, he’d asked Sandra to join him for lunch, packed in between throwing together two salads. “I didn’t want to spring anything on you. Believe me, I would have preferred a nice get-to-know-you at a good restaurant. But you said you wouldn’t be home until the late afternoon.”
“Well, I had an epiphany,” said Dakota. “About Christmas.”
“Let’s hear it,” said James, sitting on the sofa and beckoning to Sandra to join him. She perched herself on the arm, her back stiff.
“This is awkward,” said Dakota, not wishing to sit down with the happy couple but not leaving the room, either. Even just a few months ago, she knew she’d have bolted out of the room, devastated to see her father kissing a woman who wasn’t her mother. Not that she actually wanted to see him kiss anyone, quite frankly. That was just too much.
Of course, she’d noticed how much happier James had seemed lately, even if the economy had thrown a few obstacles at his business plan. In fact, Dakota had suspected that a new romance might have something to do with his new-and-improved demeanor. So, she’d already made up her mind, theoretically, to be happy for him when he finally came clean. Doing so wouldn’t alter the truth that she’d have preferred to see James with her mother. An impossibility, of course. Which meant it was cruel and selfish for her father to be lonely all the rest of his life just so Dakota would feel fine about it all. More than anything, she just wanted him to be happy. He deserved it.
She’d reasoned out all of these issues in her mind recently, and yet it took her by surprise how her stomach lurched to see her father kissing his girlfriend. And why did that girlfriend have to be Sandra Stonehouse? Dakota wanted to work for the woman! She still needed that internship at the V after the New Year, dammit.
“I was calling to take you up on that internship-after-the-New-Year thing,” she said. “I lost sight of a family commitment I had in Scotland.”
“Okay, we can arrange that,” said Sandra, inwardly delighted for James and yet desperately trying to tap her professional persona. It was hard enough to date a man who was haunted by memory and even more difficult to be gracious as he planned a holiday with all of his beloved Georgia’s dearest relatives. But she was holding on. Though now she’d just lost the lovely, long afternoon alone she’d been anticipating.
“What I just have to know,” continued Dakota, her arms folded in front of her and her oversized knitting bag causing her to lean over to one side. “Was hiring me something to do with my dad?”
“Hiring you had nothing whatsoever to do with your dad,” Sandra explained briskly. “I think you have some decent potential. Though there will never be any special treatment.”
“All right,” said Dakota. “I can live with that. By the way, it’s very nice to meet you.” Remember to be polite. That’s what her mother always said.
“Thank you,” said Sandra, slipping her suit jacket over her wrinkled white blouse.
“This is great,” said James, visibly relieved. “I’m so glad the two of you have met.”
Dakota gave her father a look, briefly concerned that he might lose his mind and invite Sandra to Scotland.
“By the way, Dad, Gran doesn’t think seven hours is enough time to catch our flight. So, we better get a move on,” said Dakota. “I’ll be in my room packing. No need for me to relive the horror of your good-byes. Some things are best left unimagined and unobserved.” Dakota picked up her knitting bag and flopped down on her bed. Part of her wanted to cry. Then again, as she stuffed jeans and sweaters into a duffel, she knew Gran wouldn’t permit her such self-indulgence. After all, she had a plane to catch.
chapter ten
So, this is how insomniacs feel, thought Dakota, as she shuffle d behind her father, grandparents, and uncle in Edinburgh Airport. From rushing around to get her warmest clothes stuffed into her suitcase, to being sandwiched between her snoring father and her uncle, whose head kept rolling onto her shoulder, Dakota hadn’t been able to sleep on the flight at all. Not even when she closed her eyes and counted to five hundred.
Instead, she knitted, stealthily, always careful not to wake anyone else up as she worked her stitches. She had a lot of extra gifts on the go, thanks to the yarn she’d picked up from Peri, and only a few days to finish before Christmas.
Dakota yawned as they waited for luggage, and as her father and Donny rented cars, paying only vague attention to her grandmother Bess listing out all the must-do chores as soon as they put a foot inside her mother-in-law’s house. The
truth was, although Dakota had spent every Christmas of her life in Pennsylvania with her grandparents, and several visits over the years to see her grandfather Tom’s mother in Scotland, she’d never actually been in a house with Bess and Gran at the same time. And everyone—from Gran, to her grandmother, to her mother when she’d been alive—made no secret of the fact that Gran and Bess merely tolerated each other. Barely.
“We’ll likely have to clean from top to bottom,” Bess was saying to Tom now. Her face was stern, as usual, which made it easy to overlook her wide eyes and high cheekbones. She was an attractive woman, Dakota’s grandmother, if ever she thought to relax. “I packed some Clorox wipes in case she follows me around and makes things difficult.”
“Now, now,” said Tom. “We’ve not even got there yet. If there’s a need to tidy, fine. But let’s not just rearrange for its own sake.”
“Are you implying something, Thomas?”
“Isn’t this fun, Grandma Bess?” Dakota jumped in, hoping to stop her grandparents before they launched into one of their mini-feuds. Bickering was such second nature to them that they no longer noticed. In a few minutes, she knew, her grandfather would make a joke and Bess would be amused and giggling. It was just their way.
Her uncle held up a set of keys and twirled them on his finger.
“You’re with me,” he said, pointing to Dakota. “Mom, Dad, you can ride with James.”
“Oh,” said Bess, taken aback. Although she’d grown fond of James during his many trips to bring Dakota to visit them, they’d never actually spent very long together. He’d always helped Tom with a chore or two, eaten his holiday dinner, then left Dakota to stay with them for a few days. She liked that, felt he understood how much she needed that space. It was awkward, in its way, this nagging resentment she felt about how hard her daughter, Georgia, worked at the yarn shop, about how alone she had been. All because James had left.
Georgia may have forgiven, thought Bess, but this mother had made it a point never to forget.
Half asleep, Dakota didn’t argue. She let her uncle grab her suitcase and roll it toward the cars as she followed. “See you later,” she mumbled, looking forward to the moment when she could sit down and get a little shut-eye.
Cold air blasted her face. “Wake up, sleepy,” said Donny, powering up the car window he’d just lowered to let in some fresh Scottish oxygen. “This is my big chance all week.”
“Huh?” Dakota was groggy, her face creased from balling up her coat to use as a makeshift pillow.
“Hanging out with my only niece,” said Donny, smoothly following the curve of the road, driving past compact cottages nestled a sprinkle of inches away from the road. “I’ll never get a minute alone with you if Mom and Gran get ahold of you.”
Dakota’s uncle Donny was her mother’s only sibling, a younger brother who long ago followed after his sister or waited at the front door until she came home from first grade, selling penny tickets to the puppet shows he rehearsed in the dining room.
“And then Mom would come along and be all anxious about some ladies coming over for tea,” Dakota’s mother once told her as they rode in the car to Pennsylvania for a Christmas visit. “Everything had to be just right in the house, didn’t it, Donny?”
Back when Dakota was a girl, Donny drove in to pick them up in his newly washed blue pickup every Christmas Eve. Until Georgia died and James was on the scene, and then Dakota no longer had her annual chitchat with her uncle in the car. She looked forward to those moments, knowing that Donny wouldn’t mind that she’d overloaded her suitcase with too many clothes and toys, unaccustomed to traveling. Before their trip to Scotland during the summer she turned thirteen, Dakota had hardly ever taken a trip other than to see her grandparents.
“Oh, you know,” Donny had said to whatever was at issue, shrugging. He was always the one trying to make the peace, Dakota remembered, sticking up for Georgia when Bess became fussed, and defending their mother when Georgia launched into complaint. “It all worked out in the end.”
He’d explained how the two Walker kids spent days constructing a not-so-sturdy outdoor headquarters away from their mother’s house, a lean-to consisting of sheets of plywood propped up against a tree and covered with an old tarp they found on a shelf in the barn.
“No doubt Dad had plans to use it again,” Donny said then. “Can’t afford to waste on a farm. But he didn’t say anything, even came over to watch us do our shows.”
“Sometimes,” Georgia had agreed. “But he was almost always working.”
“You’re always working, Mom,” Dakota had said that trip, when she was eight or nine. “And I don’t mind.” Her comment had killed the conversation for a bit, but then Donny found some other topic, and the chatter just started up again.
They’d made out okay. That’s what Donny always said on those car trips, clearly impressed with Georgia’s shop—he would stand in the shop, as Georgia collected paperwork from the back office that she’d catch up on the day after Christmas, and marvel at all the colors of yarn along the walls—and delighted by every joke Dakota made.
“Did it not used to be okay?” young Dakota would ask in reply, and wait patiently for a response that never came quite directly.
Dakota enjoyed her uncle Donny, admired his easygoing, quiet way. “If your father hadn’t come along,” he’d said to her one holiday, “I’d have wanted to raise you myself.” Donny Walker hadn’t strayed far, returning after college and a year tree planting out West, to help manage the family farm in Pennsylvania. He had never married, confiding in her during the last visit that there weren’t a lot of women vying for a chance to be a farm wife. He’d purchased more and more land next to her grandparents, experimenting with organic crops, and had a series of local restaurants as clients. But as Dakota well knew from the yarn shop, being innovative didn’t always equate with financial success. The Walkers were far from poor, to be certain, but they were far from rich.
“So, spill it,” said her uncle now. “Tell an old farmer all about the life of a twenty-year-old in the big city.”
Dakota grinned. That was one good thing about being an only child: She was always voted most popular.
“I love school,” she began. “Stressed about the shop. Business could be better. Plus Peri’s got a job offer in Paris, of all places—don’t tell, okay?—and I just saw that guy Roberto I dated in Rome. He’s still cute! So, that was weird. Then Catherine got engaged, to that guy’s father, so we’ll be seeing each other maybe a lot. Or not. But definitely at the wedding, which is now a double wedding with Anita, on New Year’s. Oh, and I discovered that the woman who was almost my boss is actually Dad’s secret girlfriend. But she insists that has nothing to do with it.”
“I think I need you to write this all down for me,” said her uncle, winking. “You’re a born storyteller. Just like your mom. She was good at making up stories when she and I were kids.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, fun stuff, sometimes, when I was scared,” said Donny. “About an invisible frog who lived at Gran’s and ate bad dreams. I liked the idea of him, that frog. Georgia invented lots of adventures for him, told me he lived in the pond out back. But her cleverness wasn’t just make-believe. She was also smart about getting us out of scrapes.”
Albums, T-shirts, and a Walkman were all on Donny’s Christmas list, taped to the outside of the white refrigerator in Bess’s tidy but tiny farmhouse kitchen. And the top item—on there almost as a joke—was not something that could be bought in the store.
LEARN TO DRIVE!
That’s what her little brother wanted in his stocking. True, he’d been around farm equipment all his life, but he’d never actually been out on the street. Didn’t know how to parallel park, for example. Not that Georgia was very good at that part of driving, either, having been at the wheel for only a year. She’d had some near misses, almost hitting a cyclist who was biking along the side of the road. Good thing she’d been going about ten miles an
hour, agitated by the sudden appearance of snow.
She’d had an errand after school, to pick up some supplies for the farm at the hardware store, and her father let her borrow the truck to drive to school, taking Donny along, of course. The car would have been even better, because it had a cassette player and she’d just borrowed the new John Cougar album from her friend Cathy. But wheels were better than the bus any day. Of course Cathy, waiting for her at the side entrance of the high school with her typewritten column for the school paper, immediately begged for a ride home upon seeing Georgia in the truck. Georgia felt cool about it until Cathy began shrieking as a man on a bike got closer.
“Be careful!” she shouted, then sighed loudly as they passed him. “You should think about moving to the city, like Philly or New York. Nobody drives there at all.”
“I think Georgia’s a great driver,” said Donny, as Georgia flashed him a thumbs-up in the rearview mirror.
Sometimes Donny was annoying, but other moments he was useful to have around, Georgia thought. That was part of the reason why she decided she’d grant his Christmas wish, even though he was barely fourteen. Besides, she had to watch her budget, and this gift was free. A girl had to watch her pennies, she knew, especially if she hoped to afford Dartmouth.
The problem was that Georgia and Donny would have to run their lessons on the sly. That was made all the more challenging because it always seemed like her mother was hovering about, listening in on conversations and trying to noodle her way into everything.
“She just wants to be involved,” her dad had insisted more than once, when Georgia took her complaints out to the barn.
“She just wants to criticize,” Georgia would insist.
“You don’t know quite everything,” Tom said. “Not yet, anyway.”
Well, what Georgia did know was that Donny wanted to learn how to run a car, and she was going to teach him. Their plan was to pretend to go to bed at a normal time, then sneak out at midnight.