Must Love Christmas by Kelly Hunter

Author:Kelly Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781956387483
Publisher: Tule Publishing Group, LLC
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Thanksgiving wasn’t quite as challenging a day as Christmas, to Madeline’s way of thinking but it was challenging enough. She’d grown used to spending it alone, never mind her repeated attempts to connect with her father at some point during the day. She’d grown used to thinking her thanks rather than saying it out loud.

Thank you for this beautiful house and all the treasured memories that live within it. Thank you for my health, my life, and so many daily blessings.

She’d made plans, this Thanksgiving, and they were solo plans, but she was aiming for a fun and fruitful day of learning. Right after she made her traditional contact with her father.

She’d started off with phone calls, but he’d rarely picked up.

As a teenager she’d written him letters, but he’d never written back.

For a couple of years there she’d moved onto emails but they’d probably gone to spam.

These days she got all dressed up, full makeup and hair, and used her phone and halo lighting to make a video message that went straight to his phone. Last year he’d even written HAPPY THANKSGIVING back.

Never let it be said that give or take a thousand years or so, water couldn’t carve rock.

She dressed carefully, no digging into the family jewels today, opting instead for the diamond tennis bracelet her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday and the big pink teardrop pearl earrings she’d bought for herself on her twenty-first. She got a little daring with a pale pink velvet dress with wide shoulder straps and a shimmery pewter-colored, long-sleeved tee underneath and figured she could blame it on solitary-mountain living if need be.

She’d grown used to the idea that her father never pressed play on her messages anyway.

It was kinda liberating.

“Hey, Dad, happy Thanksgiving. I just wanted to call to say thank you so much for holding onto this place while I grew up and for giving me the opportunity to reconnect with it as an adult. These mountains are crazy beautiful and so is this home. I hope you like what I’ve done with it.”

She stood behind a chair in her mother’s sunroom, and instead of a hospital bed she’d added outrageous textured wallpaper etched with swirling florals and velvet club chairs in deepest bronze and stacks of books and a bigger table for jigsaw puzzles and a sideboard displaying a porcelain tea set in butter-yellow stripes. It was her English high tea room in the middle of Montana. Fresh, feminine, and over-the-top ridiculous. All it lacked was a vase full of blowsy roses and she’d already put in a standing weekly order for some with the florist, beginning next week. She smiled for the video, spontaneous and unscripted.

“I’ve been going through Mom’s stuff and Grandma Peggy’s things too and it’s been so cathartic. Did you know they collected artwork? Well, I’m sure you did but I never knew. Some of it is so beautiful and expensive too because I have all the notes of sale. So if there are any pieces here that you want, that you remember, just let me know.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.