4. Dallas
CHAPTER FOUR
Dallas
Sleep and I don’t spend much time together all night long.
I look at the clock every damn hour between midnight and five, listening to the old house breathe.
The wind makes the siding creak when it presses a little harder.
Rusty snores loud as a chainsaw, somehow carrying straight through my closed door as if he’s lying on my pillow instead of on the rug in the hallway.
And under it all, a hum I can’t shut off, one thought:
Faith Ross is asleep in my house.
Every time I drift off, my brain tosses up some image just to make sure I don’t get too comfortable.
Her wide green eyes in the snow when she looks up at me.
Her bare feet, red and wet. The way my old flannel swallows her whole, making her look more like the high school girl who used to steal my hoodies than the runaway bride who nearly totaled her car outside our gate.
By four thirty, I give up.
I roll out of bed, shove my legs into a pair of jeans, and drag a T-shirt over my head.
The hall is cold under my bare feet, familiar as the back of my hand.
I move quietly, out of habit. Years of sneaking in late from the barn or early for winter chores have taught me exactly where every floorboard will squeak.
I step over the bad one outside Nash’s room without thinking.
Light spills faint and warm from under one door near the middle of the hall.
Mom.
Of course she’s up. Maggie McCoy sees five a.m. every day, whether she wants to or not. On Christmas, she meets it with a ham already in the oven and cinnamon rolls halfway risen.
I pad past the guest room, Faith’s room, for now. The door is closed. I pause, my hand hovering halfway toward the knob. Curiosity tugs at me, stupid and strong.
Is she still asleep? Did she wake up and realize this is all a mistake? Did she sneak out and hike to town in my mother’s slippers?
The mental picture of Faith tromping down Old Mill Road in pink terry cloth slippers almost makes me smile.
I keep walking.
The kitchen is warm, the scent of coffee and rising dough lingering.
Mom stands at the counter in her Christmas apron, hair twisted up in a messy knot, hands deep in a bowl of something sticky.
The radio on the windowsill murmurs low, Bing Crosby crooning about a white Christmas as if he has any idea.
“Morning.”
Mom jumps, flour dust poofing off her fingers.
“Lord have mercy, Dallas,” she says, pressing a hand over her chest. “You trying to take ten years off my life, sneaking around like that?”
“Pretty sure my lurking skills are rusty,” I say. “You’re just jumpy.”
She squints at me, then shakes her head and turns back to the dough. “Yeah, I’m the issue…”
I grunt and head for the coffee pot, which is already half full because of course it is. Mom doesn’t believe in starting the day without caffeine and prayers, in that order.
“You’re up early,” she adds, casual in the way that means she’s not being casual at all. “Even for you.”
I pour a mug, black and strong. “Didn’t sleep much.”
“I noticed.” She keeps kneading, forearms working. “Heard you pacing around like a caged bull at two a.m.”
“Sorry,” I mutter.
“Didn’t say it was a problem,” she says. “Just means something’s on your mind…”
I sip my coffee, letting the heat burn a path down my throat, buying myself half a second. Might as well get it over with. She’s going to know sooner or later.
“Had a situation last night,” I say finally. “On the drive.”
Her hands still in the dough. “What kind of situation?”
The question is sharp. Too many years of being the first one called when a calf goes through a fence or a truck goes off the road.
“Nobody’s dead,” I say quickly. “Start there.”
She exhales. “That’s a start I like. Go on.”
I lean back against the counter, mug cradled in both hands, the picture of casual if you don’t look too close. “About eleven, maybe a little after, I’m on the porch. See headlights come off the highway too fast. Hear them hit the bend wrong.”
Mom’s eyes close, lips moving in a silent prayer. When she looks at me again, they’re sharper. “You went down?”
“Yeah. Navy pickup in the ditch, steam from under the hood.” I hesitate, watching her face. “Driver’s fine. Shaken, but fine.”
“Who?” she demands. “Some idiot from town? One of Hank Lawson’s workers?” Her mouth tightens. “If it’s them, I swear I’m calling the sheriff myself this time.”
“It wasn’t a Lawson,” I say. “It was… Faith.”
The dough forgets it’s supposed to be dough and turns into a weapon under her hands. She slams it once against the counter, flour leaping.
“Faith Ross?” she repeats. “As in Caroline’s girl. As in—”
“As in the one who used to live at this stove during high school, yeah,” I say. “That Faith.”
Mom stares at me, hands planted on the counter now, fingers buried in sticky dough.
“What is that girl doing driving out here in the middle of the night?” Her gaze flicks down the hall, toward the bedrooms. “And where is she now?”
“In the guest room,” I say. “Sleeping. She was half frozen, Ma. I couldn’t exactly send her back out on the highway.”
Mom’s jaw works. I can see the warring impulses behind her eyes as clear as if she spoke them. The one that wants to say, You did what? and the one that’s had a few years to learn the hard way that pushing too hard with your grown kids only drives them further.
She learned that lesson with Boone and Rose. That whole mess sanded her sharp edges down a notch.
“I see,” she says slowly. “So she… what? Comes by to wish us a Merry Christmas, gets lost in the ditch, and you scooped her up? That seems unlikely.”
“She didn’t exactly plan it,” I say. “Long story short? She ran away from her wedding.”
Mom’s eyebrows damn near take off for the ceiling. “Come again?”
I take another sip of coffee, letting the heat give my hands something to do.
“She was supposed to get married in the city yesterday. Had some kind of meltdown in the bridal suite. Left. Drove for here. Hit the ditch out front. That’s the short version.
She’s still half in shock when I got her in the house. ”
“Well,” Mom says finally. “That’s dramatic.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s one word for it.”
She turns back to the dough, kneading with more focus than necessary. “Did she say why?”
“Some.” I shrug. “Doesn’t love the guy, doesn’t love the life. Says she feels like a… I don’t know. An accessory in her dad’s world. Job she hates, man he chose, wedding she didn’t want. Panic attack, bolt, ditch.”
Mom makes a low noise in her throat, half sympathetic, half disapproving. “William Ross always did have a way of swallowing up everyone around him.”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “He did.”
The kitchen fills with the ghosts of conversations long past. William at this very table, talking big talk about investments and expansion and “modernizing Buckhorn.” Dad listening politely, letting it all roll off him.
Faith on the porch afterward, her hands tight around a mug of cocoa, telling me she’s proud of him, even when her voice shakes.
Mom shakes flour off her fingers and reaches for a baking dish.
“So you brought her in,” she says. “Gave her a bed.”
I tense, waiting for the lecture about boundaries, about my heart, about gossip. It doesn’t come. Instead, she sets the dish down with just a little more emphasis than necessary and looks at me square.
“You did the right thing,” she says. “Can’t leave anybody in a ditch on Christmas Eve.”
Some of the tension in my shoulders eases. “I figured Jesus wouldn’t approve.”
She snorts. “Jesus definitely wouldn’t approve of anyone leaving a girl in a wedding dress out to freeze, no matter what history there is.”
There it is. The out loud acknowledgement of the thing that has been pulsing under every word.
“She’s staying for now,” I say. “Just today. Until we can figure out the car and the roads. After that… I don’t know. That’s her business.”
Mom studies me for a long moment, weighing how much to say. Finally, she nods.
“All right. We’ll deal with today when today gets here. First order of business is Christmas morning with the kids. We’ll worry about runaways and broken hearts after the presents are opened.”
“Kids’ll lose their minds if there’s a stranger in the kitchen before stockings,” I mutter.
“Exactly,” she says. “Let them have their morning first. We’ll tell them… later. After I have more coffee.”
That’s as close as she’s going to get to I’m worried about you, but I’m not going to say it yet.
We move through the next half hour on autopilot.
I help her with the stockings, make sure the tree lights are still working, and check the fire in the living room.
Rusty follows me the whole time, nails clicking, giving me expectant looks, as if trying to say, It’s present time, right? I get a present, right?
“You’ll get your present when the girls get theirs,” I tell him. “You’re not special.”
He wags his stump of a tail anyway.
By the time the sky outside the kitchen windows shifts from black to gunmetal gray, I hear the first stirrings from down the hall.
Small bare feet on wood. A door creaks open.
“Daddy?”
I turn. Lila stands at the hall entrance, hair a rumpled halo, rubbing sleep from her eyes with the back of one fist. Her pink pajamas bunch at one ankle, one sleeve pushed up past her elbow.
“Merry Christmas, Beanpole.”
She blinks up at me, then at the tree in the living room, and suddenly she’s wide awake.
“Santa came,” she breathes.
“Oh, did he?” I say. “How can you tell?”
She points at the stockings, now fuller, and the pile under the tree that wasn’t there when she went to bed.
“He left footprints,” she whispers.
Mom comes around the corner, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
“He sure did,” she says. “And he ate the cookie you left out, too. Rusty almost did, but I warned him Santa would know.”
Rusty flops dramatically by the hearth, as if to say he’s been railroaded.
Lila giggles and runs to check the plate. Only crumbs and a chocolate smear remain.
“He liked it,” she says, satisfied.