Sweet Christmas Kisses (98 page)

Jim and Cecilia gathered what they thought they would need, including the lunch Doreen had packed for them, and left the ranch for Gus’s place.

As Jim drove away from the Van Peter’s prosperous and well-cared for ranch, he tried to prepare himself for what he would find and wondered how much to tell Cecilia.

“Where we’re going next—to Gus’s place….”

“Yes?” his wife’s voice held curiosity, as if she were trying to read what he was thinking and feeling.

Even
he
didn’t know what he was thinking and feeling. “It’s nothing like the Muleshoe,” he said.

“I know. Doreen told me.”

He gave her a swift look, easing up on the gas pedal so that the car slowed. “Told you what? What did she tell you?”

Cecilia drew back. “That Gus was a hoarder, so there would be a ton of junk to go through. But I already knew that from Cam and his wife.”

“Oh, yeah.” He pressed on the accelerator again, picking up speed. “It’s a mess.”

He knew Cee had a million questions she wanted to ask, but he stared straight ahead at the narrow county road and set his jaw, knowing that his expression would discourage her from asking him anything else. He wished Gus hadn’t included Cee in his instructions. He didn’t want her to see what he’d come from, although he wasn’t sure why he cared at this point. After all, she was divorcing him.

Within ten minutes, they turned off the county road and shuddered over a cattle guard and past a shack with a caved-in roof. Out of the corner of his eye, Jim saw Cecilia turn and look at it, frowning as they bumped up the rutted lane to Gus’s small, decrepit ranch house. He took the long curve in front of the house and came to a stop before the sagging porch. Doreen had called a trash collection company to deliver a roll-off dumpster, which stood ready beside the house. A smaller bin for recycling stood beside it.

“So, this is it, hmm?” Jim could hear the dismay in Cee’s voice.

“Yes. We might as well go in and get started.”

They both stepped out. Jim took a box of black plastic construction clean-up bags and a couple of pairs of gloves from the trunk, glad he’d thought ahead and brought them along. Turning, he faced the house, noting the heart-breaking disrepair of the place. Paint that had sizzled for decades beneath the relentless Arizona summer sun was peeling off in long strips from the wooden siding. The roof sagged, as did the porch, which was pulling away from the house as if begging to fall over face-first and be put out of its misery.

 Before Cecilia stepped onto the porch, he placed a hand on her arm and said, “Let me go first. It looks like it’s ready to cave in.”

She nodded and stepped back while he climbed the shallow steps, tested the strength of the floor with a few experimental bounces. “I think it’s okay, but be careful.”

 “I will.” With cautious steps, she followed him and waited while he unlocked the door and pushed, meeting resistance from some obstacle blocking the door. He pushed harder, and Cee stepped forward to add her weight until they managed to open a gap wide enough to squeeze through. Finally, they stepped inside and surveyed the small room.

Just as Billie had said, it was jammed, floor to ceiling, with cardboard boxes spilling out books, magazines and newspapers. They were stacked everywhere, including on all the furniture except for one chair that faced an ancient television set. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust. It was a discouraging sight, and after Jim reached back to flip the switch for the overhead light, it looked even worse.

Cee stood in one place and turned in a circle, looking at everything. “Let’s go through the whole house so we can see what we’re dealing with.”

Mutely, Jim nodded, unable to put his sick dismay into words. He took the lead and followed what could only be described as a worn path. It wound through the mess to two small bedrooms and a bathroom. Someone—Doreen, Jim suspected—had made an effort to clean up the bathroom in case the toilet was needed.

 Jim stood, shoulders slumped, as he surveyed the mess. It was Cecilia who took a pair of gloves from his loose grasp and said, “Where do we start?”

When he turned to Cecilia, he could tell she was trying to read his face. Could she see that he was sick with dismay and sadness?

He dropped his eyes. “In the living room. We’ll have to go through each box.”

It took Cecilia a moment to ask her next question. Her voice was shaky. She had seen, he thought. “Do you have any idea what these papers we’re searching for will look like?” she asked.

“No, but they’ll probably be in an old World War II ammunition box. That’s where Gus always kept important things. The coin collection and other things…. I have no idea. Didn’t even know he collected coins.”

Cecilia nodded and flipped open the first box.

****

Doreen Van Peter looked at the two eager-eyed children standing before her and wondered what to do next. She hadn’t been around kids for a long time except for visits with her two and a half year old twin grandsons, and being with them consisted more of attempts to keep them from grievous bodily harm than anything else. As promised Ryan and Yvonne had been taken on a horseback ride around the ranch, which they had loved.  After lunch, they had helped her decorate more Christmas cookies and explored the house. Now they sat in the living room looking bored. She had called them to her in the hope that a brilliant idea would occur to her. It hadn’t. Unless….

“Would you two like to help me get out the Christmas decorations?”

“Sure,” Ryan responded, with one of the short answers she was learning was typical with him.

“Yes, yes. When can we start? Right now?” Yvonne gave an enthusiastic little hop.

Within half an hour, they had four large plastic bins open in the middle of the living room, the contents spread out on the floor as they discussed what should go where.

Yvonne looped a long strand of tinsel garland around her neck several times. It draped to her knees and she took one end in each hand, twirling them and watching the way they glittered as they whirled past her face. Ryan was being more helpful. Having discovered the Christmas train set, he was busy putting the pieces of track together in the corner of the room Doreen had indicated.

“Ryan has a train set,” Yvonne announced. “Daddy’s gonna help him set it up now that the court said he and mom can’t get a Vorce and he moved back home.”

“Yvonne, shut up,” Ryan said. He stood up and came over to her. Chastened, she dropped her head and looked at the floor.

“It’s okay, kids, I won’t let on that I know,” Doreen assured them. She was wildly curious to learn more, but she knew she couldn’t pry. The information did explain the odd constraint she’d noticed between Jimmy and his wife, though. In spite of being married, they just didn’t seem to be comfortable with each other—explainable if they were on the verge of divorce. She would sure like to know why the court had said they couldn’t get one.

Quickly, she changed the subject. “It’s great to have your dad back in Lucky Break. My son, Cam, and all of his other friends have missed him. They used to have fun playing football together.”

Ryan stared at her. “My dad played football?”

“Yes. He was the best quarterback Lucky Break High School has ever had.”

“
My
dad?”

“Here, I’ll show you.” Dropping the set of lights she’d been untangling back into one of the bins, she searched the built-in bookcase between the two big windows until she found the high school yearbook from Cam and Jim’s senior year. Flipping it open to the sports section, she showed the photos to Jim’s children.

“Is that my daddy?” Yvonne asked, pointing to a picture of the quarterback with a ball in hand, arm stretched up and high over his head, ready to launch it in a pass.

“That’s him.” She flipped to the back and showed them the index where they could find his name and every page on which he appeared.

They sat side by side on the couch, eagerly looking up each one and asking Doreen about them. She told them everything she could remember about his growing up years, careful to avoid any mention of his family. These children obviously knew very little about their father’s background, and she wasn’t going to be the one to enlighten them.

“He was over here all the time during high school. In fact, I had wall-to-wall teenagers in my house for years.”

“What did they do?” Ryan asked.

“Ate mostly,” she said with a sigh, remembering the rafts of pizza and mountains of cookies they could go through in a single day. “They always cleaned up the kitchen, though.”

When the children had examined every picture of their father and read every word about him, with many explanations from Doreen about what the captions meant, they returned to work and had most of the Christmas decorations up before she had to start dinner. As she and the children worked together, she thought back through the years to the happy days when her house was filled with teenagers making memories.

She knew that at least some of those memories were happy ones for Jimmy, but he had obviously never shared any of them with his children. She doubted that he’d told Cecilia, either. He had nothing to be ashamed of—but she wondered if he knew that.

****

“This might take longer than I’d thought,” Jim muttered as he chucked the twentieth box he’d gone through into the recycling dumpster. They had cleared out much of the living room, with only a wall of boxes left standing before the fireplace. All they’d found so far was issue after issue of newspapers and magazines dating back ten years or more. Jim couldn’t imagine why Gus had saved them. He had to stop and swallow down his guilt more than once that he hadn’t ever come to visit Gus, hadn’t known he was in such a state.

When he reentered the house, Jim found that Cecilia had removed the five boxes in front of the fireplace that made up the top row and was staring at the mantelpiece.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, coming up beside her. “What did you find? Oh….”

“Is that your mother, Jim?” Cecilia asked, turning hurt eyes to him. “I’ve never seen a picture of her before.”

“I don’t have any. I didn’t even know Gus had this one.”

Cecilia picked it up and gazed at it. “What were you, about twelve years old? So solemn, even then. I’d recognize that expression anywhere.”

He didn’t respond, and Cecilia continued, “I can see where Yvonne got her winsome smile and dimples. Your mother was beautiful, Jim.”

“Yes. Yes, she was.” Jim took the picture from her, gazed at it for a moment, then tossed it onto a trash pile they would later bag up and transfer outside.

She snatched it out again. “Jim! We need to save that for the kids. They’ll want to know what your mother looked like. She was their grandmother, after all.”

“No.” Without meeting her gaze, he jerked open one of the boxes she had taken down and began sifting through the contents. “I don’t want them to know anything about her.”

“Whyever not? She’s been gone for many years, hasn’t she? Knowing something about her couldn’t hurt—”

“No!”

There had been a time when that one solid word would have stopped Cecilia from pursuing anything further, but Jim could see she was past that now. During the months and weeks since she had filed for divorce, she had discovered the strength he’d always known she’d had. She was not going to knuckle under.

“There might be family history, medical history, they would need to know,” she persisted. “There might be characteristics she passed on to them.”

“God, I hope not.” Frustrated, Jim ran his hand through his hair. “Drop it, Cee.”

Cecilia clapped her hands onto her hips and faced him down. “No. She was their grandmother, for goodness’ sake. They need to know about her. The only thing I know is that her name was Irene. If you won’t tell me anything, I’ll have to ask around town. There have to be people who remember her, have memories of her.”

“I can guarantee you there are.” His voice was bitter.

Cecilia had never heard the kind of hostility in Jim’s voice that she heard now, but she didn’t let it stop her questions.

“Was she active in the community?” she asked.

He snorted, a harsh derisive sound. “You could say that.”

“Then someone will remember her, and—”

“Everyone remembers her, Cee,” Jim said, turning on her fiercely. “She was the town drunk.”

“What?”

He grabbed the photograph and pushed it up to her face. “See? See how her eyes aren’t focused? She was drunk when Gus took this picture, Cecilia. She was always drunk.”

“Oh, Jim. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“No. I never wanted you to know. What she was like. What my life was like. You heard Doreen say I was skinny? It was more than that. I was starved. I never had a decent meal unless it was at Doreen’s house or at school. Sometimes I stole food. I could strip old man Russell’s pomegranate bush bare in about twenty seconds.” He jabbed a finger at her. “That’s why our pantry is always full, Cecilia. Our kids will never be hungry the way I was. Never again.”

When Cecilia started to speak, he held up a hand to stop her. With the air of someone who was determined to finish what he had started, Jim shoved the picture back into her hands and said, “My mother…my mother was also the town hooker.”

“What?” Cee could feel the color draining from her face. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. She had sex with men for money. Can I make it any more clear than that?”

Cee stared at him, unable to find words for the sick revulsion that rolled through her body. It must have shown on her face because Jim’s hard gaze fixed on her and he said, “That’s why I never told you. I never wanted to see the look I’m seeing right now.”

Cecilia couldn’t deny that she was shocked. How could she not be? What must it have been like for Jim, growing up in a small town with a mother who had such a reputation?

“What’s more—“ Jim stopped, then seemed to force himself to go on. “What’s more, my father was apparently one of her johns. And I don’t know which one.”

This time when he took the photograph from her, Cecilia let it slip from her lax fingers and watched numbly as he lobbed it onto the trash pile once again.