All I Want for Christmas by Rebekah Pace

Author:Rebekah Pace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Level 4 Press, Inc.
Published: 2021-09-27T13:56:59+00:00

22

That night, as the sounds of their sleeping children rose and fell from the seats behind them, Fran and James sat awake, looking up at the night sky through the open sunroof. The stars were out. The breeze was chilly enough for them to share a light blanket.

“Good sleeping weather,” James whispered to Fran.

“I can’t sleep, but it is a beautiful night.”

He turned to her. “Why can’t you sleep?” He glanced at the family photo album in her lap, the one that had been saved from the fire.

She met his eyes. “Because I don’t want the day to end. It was perfect.”

He smiled. “Yeah, it was.”

Fran sighed. “It felt like . . . it felt like things were normal again.”

James fumbled beneath the blanket to find her hand.

“I’d forgotten what that was like,” she continued, a tinge of sadness and amazement in her voice. She opened the photo album. “Remember this trip, James?” She ran her finger along the edges of a picture. James was sitting with the kids, who were young enough to have missing teeth and pigtails, laughing around an evening campfire with golden embers, their toasted marshmallows suspended over the flames.

“Yeah,” he said. “I remember. We used to go camping a lot back then. We couldn’t afford real vacations.”

She said to him, “Those camping trips were the most fun.”

“We’ll get there again,” he told her.

“I hope so.” She was quiet and reflective. “I wonder how our kids are doing.”

“They’re weathering it.”

“They shouldn’t have to.”

“I know, but right now we don’t have much of a choice.”

“You know, I want to talk to them. Have an honest, open talk about how they’re feeling, but . . . I’m afraid to. There are so many moments that feel like a live wire, or like I’m about to explode.” She removed the picture from the photo album. “But today was rare. A gift. We all got to exhale, just be us, you know? Be a family.” She folded the picture and slipped it into her wallet to always have it with her.

“Fran?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?”

She met his eyes.

“What are you afraid of?”

Fran glanced into the rearview mirror to see their kids snuggled underneath shared blankets. She remembered asking Stacy and Jay about their friends, how embarrassed the two felt about things. She remembered when the kids’ questions about the house stopped one day, and she wondered then what they were thinking. She never asked them because she had no answers for them.

She didn’t answer James.

***

The weekend ended with questions about Monday morning. James vowed to find a place for them to stay that day, and as it turned out, he would have to. When he was paying for breakfast, the server, a middle-aged woman with tired eyes, took his money and said quietly, “Listen, I don’t want you to get in no trouble, but you can’t live in the parking lot.” Her eyes shifted as if she’d stolen something from him.

James took in a small, sharp breath. The words were equally assaulting and alarming.

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