Chapter 3 Holly
HOLLY
It had snowed in the night.
In the gray light of early morning, Holly stretched in bed and curled her toes, luxuriously warm and lazy-feeling.
She lay back and gazed up at the fluffy line of snow on the windowsill of her childhood bedroom.
Her gauzy curtains were drawn back, letting in the soft predawn light.
She could happily lie here forever, cozy and comfortable beneath a pile of quilts, watching the light grow slowly in her bedroom and imagining the entire farm buried under a cool blanket of pristine white snow—
Her lazy drowsing was interrupted by a brisk rap on her bedroom door.
“It’s oh six hundred, rise and shine, sweetheart!” bellowed out the drill sergeant voice of her dad, retired colonel Douglas Porter.
From under the covers, next to Holly’s stomach, something warm wriggled and let out a muffled, squeaky bark.
Holly hastily reached a hand down, groped for Cupcake, and wrapped her hand around his muzzle.
“What?” the voice of her dad said through the door in a different tone.
“I said it’s a snow day!” Holly called back, although she was so burrowed down in the covers to get a grip on Cupcake that she was speaking through a mouthful of quilt.
“All the more work to do! Breakfast’s on the table in fifteen minutes!” With that, the Colonel’s footsteps clumped off toward the stairs.
Holly sat up, carefully releasing her grasp on Cupcake. The small dog squirmed into her lap and poked his nose out from under the quilt to look up at her quizzically.
“Good morning,” Holly told him. “You know, there’s a ‘no pets in the beds’ rule in this house, not that you care.”
Dad had been out at the Christmas tree farm when she came home yesterday, and then he’d gone out to deliver trees and hadn’t gotten back until late, by which time Cupcake had been introduced to Rocket and was curled up on the foot of Holly’s bed.
She hadn’t intended to just ... not tell Dad that they had a second dog now, but she also didn’t really want to have that conversation when it was the end of a long day and they were both cranky and tired.
She had made it a problem for future Holly.
Unfortunately future Holly had become present Holly.
She also hadn’t intended for Cupcake to end up under the covers with her, but well, the house got chilly at night, and when she turned around from changing for bed, there he was, snuggled down among her blankets looking hopeful.
It had seemed like a good way to keep him quiet and make sure she knew exactly where he was. Now here they were.
“Stay there,” Holly told him, climbing out of bed.
She stripped out of her pajamas in the chilly air. Cupcake showed no inclination to leave, burrowing into the warm spot in the bed.
“I can relate,” she told him as she hopped into her jeans and pulled on a sports bra and sweater. “The thing is, when Dad says fifteen minutes, he means it. We aren’t getting a lazy snow day morning unless I pretend to be sick.” Briefly, she thought about it.
Instead, she looked out the window at the fluffy flakes drifting down while she gave her hair a few quick whacks with a brush and tied it back. A shower could wait until after the chores were done. She was just going to get all gross and sweaty snowblowing anyway.
Snow was great for business, though. Nothing brought people out to buy Christmas trees like a fresh, photogenic blanket of snow on everything.
“Come on, let’s see how you feel about snow, Cup—”
She turned around and discovered that she was talking to a dog-shaped dent in the bed.
“Cupcake?!”
The door of her room was still shut, she reassured herself with a hasty glance. So he was in here.
Somewhere.
The room was a messy combination of her teenage decor and the things she’d brought back from the city, when she had arrived in September with all her belongings in two suitcases along with a few boxes she had mailed ahead to herself.
Despite being the second oldest, Holly had been one of the last of her sisters to move out, since she had been helping out on the tree farm and then helping during Mom’s final illness.
She’d moved out for good five years ago, but the room remained like a time capsule of her teenage self.
There were all her old posters on the walls, her doll collection on the shelves, books and games from her youth—all the stuff she’d kind of vaguely thought she ought to do something about, but there never seemed to be any time, or any point.
Now it was mixed in with half-unpacked boxes and other clutter. There were a lot of places for a small dog to vanish. Uneasily, Holly realized that she didn’t know how Cupcake was about chewing on things or messing in new places. She thought she heard rustling from somewhere.
“Cupcake! Come out!” she whisper-hissed, crouching down to look under the bed.
She finally retrieved him from the closet and separated him from a bra he had somehow become tangled up in. Apparently dog-proofing her room needed to be a priority. But first she needed to introduce Cupcake to her dad.
Gently, if possible.
With Cupcake tucked in the crook of her arm, she padded downstairs in her woolen sock feet.
The living room was dim and quiet. Rocket was missing from her bed by the radiator, which meant she was probably either begging in the kitchen, or outside playing in the snow.
A delicious smell of frying bacon filled the air.
Dad was a good cook, even if his cooking skills ran toward quantity over variety.
Now that it was just the two of them, they ate in the kitchen at the kitchen island.
The big, heavy dining room table, which during her childhood growing up with four sisters had always been piled with homework and projects, now gathered dust except at holidays.
But the kitchen was bright and cheery. A radio played Christmas carols on the windowsill, and Dad was wearing his favorite apron, the one that said GRILL INSTRUCTOR with two crossed barbecue forks.
He was stirring pancake batter. Her plate was at her place, loaded with eggs and perfectly cooked bacon.
And it was her favorite plate, the one she liked best from the household collection of mismatched china.
She had learned from looking it up online that the pattern was called Snow Plum, and she’d thought about getting a full set of it, but there was something fun about having a perfectly unique plate, the only one like it in all the kitchen.
It was a nice change from the solid-colored, matching, mass-produced IKEA dishes she’d had back at her city apartment.
“Morning, Dad.” She hurried to the door, Cupcake wrapped firmly in both arms as the small dog began to squirm.
“Whatcha doing, bean?” her dad asked.
Holly opened the door and crouched down, shivering as a blast of cold wind hit her.
She placed Cupcake on the ground. His instant reaction to the cold and the snow was an emphatic NOPE.
Holly caught him as he tried to dart between her legs and put him firmly in the relatively snow-free area near the door.
He gave her a look of absolute betrayal before scuttling along the side of the house to find a place to do his business.
Holly squinted after him. Now she was worried he was going to get lost and end up in a snowbank and she’d have to go retrieve him.
She became aware that her dad had loomed up behind her, holding a spatula, and was leaning over her to stare after Cupcake.
“What in the Sam hill is that?” At least he sounded more curious than upset.
“It’s a .... dog,” Holly sighed.
After the bare minimum of leg-lifting against the side of the house, Cupcake sprinted back to her. Holly scooped him up again, straightened, and turned around to face the music.
“A dog?” her dad said, staring skeptically as Cupcake’s anime-hairstyle head swiveled toward the pancakes. “Are you sure? What in the heck happened to it?”
“He’s supposed to look like that. He’s a crested hairless.”
“A crested hairless what?”
“Dog,” Holly said again, patiently.
“Does this—erm—dog have a name?”
“Yes,” Holly said, bracing herself. “He’s called Cupcake.”
Reacting to his name, and possibly also to the closeness of the pancakes, Cupcake wagged his tail against her chest and looked up at her adoringly.
Her dad continued to stare for a long moment at Holly and the dog, and then he said, “Well, your sister named her gerbil Princess Whiskers.”
“I didn’t name him, I swear. We could rename him, maybe?”
“I knew a guy once with a Chihuahua named Killer,” her dad said.
“We’re not calling him Killer, Dad.”
Her dad shrugged and returned to flipping pancakes with one final look of disbelief, while Holly went to get the bag of small-dog food she had picked up yesterday, and poured out some for Cupcake in a bowl on the floor.
“Has he met Rocket yet?” her dad asked from the stove.
“Yeah, they met yesterday. They seem to get along okay. I was thinking Rocket might like to have another dog around,” Holly said hopefully.
“Uh-huh. You know, it seems like we had a conversation about how you definitely, absolutely weren’t getting a dog at that event.”
“I’m not a kid, Dad,” she said more sharply than she intended. “I can have a pet if I want to.”
Her dad raised the spatula in tacit acceptance. “Didn’t say you weren’t. The problem is, you said you wouldn’t, and then you did. You know how I feel about keeping your word.”
I got flustered and adopted a dog to distract myself and everyone else from the fact that I just kissed the hot maintenance guy under the mistletoe ... probably wouldn’t help her situation. “He just looked so lonely. And nobody else was interested.”
“Well,” her dad said gruffly, “your bacon’s getting cold, and there’s a stack of pancakes about to land with your name on it.”
Holly accepted the peace offering for what it was. “Oh, are those this year’s blueberries from the farm?” She had helped pick them herself.
“Figured a snow day deserved a treat.”