22. Holly Creek Christmas
Holly Creek Christmas
Colt
Holly Creek at Christmas looked exactly the way I’d left it.
Main Street glittered with columns of white lights, and more twinkle lights overhead draped over the road.
Every storefront was adorned with themed wreaths, the air thick with pine needles and sugar cookies.
The town looked like someone had staged it for a card.
“Colt, your town is a snow globe.” Ivy gawked at it all, standing beside me, turning in a circle on the sidewalk.
She’d bought a new red wool coat and ankle booties with small heels for this trip because Montana cold fashion and upstate New York cold fashion were, apparently, completely different animals.
“Wait until you see the Christmas in July celebration. They do this twice a year.”
“Twice.”
“Holly Creek takes its holiday spirit very seriously.”
Flora’s Diner glowed in front of us, its windows frosted against the December sky. Through the glass, I could see the pie case, the chalkboard menu in Mom’s handwriting, the photos on the wall behind the register. It hadn’t changed much.
A hand-painted banner in the window read Flora’s Diner: 847 cookies sold with a running tally. While I could just make out Vivian’s Bakery with its own sign down the way: 862 cookies. Great to see the annual cookie war between them alive and well, and from the looks of it, Mom was losing.
But I was home now, for a visit, and could eat at least two dozen cookies today. Pretty sure Mom will win this year.
“Ready? Fair warning: my mother is going to cry when she sees us. She’s going to use my full name, which is Colt Jacob Calhoun, and you are not allowed to laugh.”
“I’ve survived a corrupt Congressman and a psychotic ex-boyfriend. I think I can handle your mother.” Ivy grinned and winked.
I grabbed our bags and led her inside Flora’s diner. The warmth hit me like a wall, with heat from the kitchen and fragrant roasted turkey, along with fresh bread and apples and cinnamon. My chest ached at it all, with the memories of holidays past.
“Colt Jacob Calhoun!”
Mom sprinted around the counter like a woman half her age, even with a slight limp.
Her apron had a dusting of flour. Her eyes, the color of mine, filled wet and glassy when she hit me at full speed and I caught her.
Picked her up even, and breathed her in—vanilla, sugar, and spice.
And a little dish soap. That was just Mom, and I almost regretted the years I had spent away.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Don’t you ‘Hi, Mom’ me.” She pulled back and held my face in both hands, studying me the way she always had—checking for damage, reading the terrain. Whatever she found this time made her expression loosen. “You look different.”
“Good different or bad different?”
“Older and wiser.” She caught sight of Ivy, snow melting in her blonde hair.
“Mom, this is Ivy.” I laced our fingers together as I brought her front and center with Flora.
She burst into fresh tears and wrapped Ivy in a hug that she hadn’t seen coming, but received with grace.
“Oh, honey.” Mom pulled back and cupped Ivy’s face. I watched Ivy’s composure wobble for just a second—because a woman hadn’t held her face like that since her own mother died. “You’re gorgeous. Colt, she’s gorgeous. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I said she was beautiful.”
“Sit. I’ll bring you cookies and hot cocoa. You must be starving from that flight out.”
“Yeah, I’ll take two dozen. There’s no way you’re losing this year.”
Chelsea and Maisy arrived with their husbands, and we filled the big corner booth in the back—the one that had held every birthday dinner and important Calhoun conversation in living memory.
Mom put out turkey and stuffing and three kinds of pie, and the evening moved the way it always did in this family: loud, voices overlapping, full of stories and laughter.
But I could feel the questions building. The ones nobody had asked yet because Mom had declared a moratorium on serious topics until after pie, and in this family, Mom’s pie rules were law.
After the last plate was cleared and coffee was poured, Mom settled into the booth beside me and said, in the quiet voice she used when the crying was about to start, “All right, Colt. Tell us everything.”
So I told them. Not the sanitized version.
The whole thing—about what happened on the ship.
Hiking and then arriving at the ODRR by bus with nothing but a duffel bag and a head full of static.
The steady work of learning to be useful again.
The ranch, the land, the way the broken pieces in me started to mend.
Especially after facing the Hollis family and meeting Ivy.
And then Seth Brewster. The threats. The night we were run off the road. Ivy’s courage through all of it.
She sat beside me with her hand on my leg under the table, squeezing, silently encouraging me through retelling all of it.
“I guess what I really ran from when I left town was Dad’s memory. Everyone revered him. A true hero here. I couldn’t measure up.” I wiped a single tear away.
The table went quiet when I finished. Chelsea had tears running down her face. Maisy was pale, processing. Mom stared at me with an expression I’d never seen before.
“Colt,” she said. “Can I say something?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
She reached across the table and took my hand.
“Your father spent his whole life taking care of this town. Every sick child, every midnight call. He never did it for the glory—he did it because that’s who he was.
A man who showed up.” She squeezed. “I see him in you, Colt. The way you protect people. The way you stayed when it would have been easier to leave. How you love so deeply.” Her chin trembled.
“Your father would have been so proud of you. And am too. But you need to be proud of yourself, because that’s all that matters. ”
The words hit me in the place I’d been guarding since I was twenty-one years old, believing I hadn’t earned the right to stand in my father’s shadow.
Ivy leaned into me. I put my arm around her and pulled her close and looked at my mother across the table.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“And thank you, Ivy, for loving my son. For being brave enough to love him through this time of his life. I’ve been praying for someone to reach the heart he locked up after the Navy. That was you.” Her voice broke. She pressed her lips together. Ivy’s eyes went glassy.
Ivy turned her face into my neck, and I felt the warm press of her tears against my skin, and it was the most sacred thing I’d ever felt in my life.
Later that night, after we all helped Mom clean up and close Flora’s for the night, and Mom finally stopped crying long enough, saying they were totally happy tears, Ivy and I stood at the window of Richard’s guesthouse, staring out at more snow falling.
Fat flakes drifted through the air, weighing down the pines even more.
I wrapped my arms around her waist. She leaned back into me.
“Your family is wonderful,” she said softly.
“Glad you approve.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Your mom held my hand. I haven’t felt that in a long time. A mother holding my hand.”
“I know.” I tightened my arms around her. There was nothing to say to that. Nothing that words could do that holding her couldn’t do better.
Snow and light caught her blue eyes, and the mole above her lip, and the way she looked at me like I was her world.
“Merry Christmas, Calhoun.”
“Merry Christmas, Wylde.”
I kissed her on Christmas Eve. For the first time since I’d left home all those years ago—young, restless, unproven, chasing something I couldn’t name—I wasn’t trying to get somewhere else. I wasn’t passing through. I was simply home in her arms.