Baby It's Cold Outside (27 page)

I did a lot of things. Not all of them am I proud of. And none of them were very exciting.

He did do a lot of things—he cooked, and knew how to save a child from hypothermia, and could spot a heart attack, and soothe a horse, and…

I knew you were lonely, and I wanted to help.

What kind of man did that? Reached out to a person he didn’t know? Was he some sort of shrink?
I didn’t imagine that we’d meet. I just thought I’d let you know that someone cared until that someday when you’d meet someone else and stop writing. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. I never thought you’d fall in love with Alex.

Fall in love with Alex?

Alex made her feel as if someone were listening, but Jake had found her in a storm. Jake had made her feel like she was worth fighting a storm for.

At least Storm-House-Jake did.

She put her head down on the table. But the storm was over.

And Jake was gone.

Stomping sounded on the front porch. She lifted her head as Johnny plowed into the house, his cheeks rosy. “Sis! You’re okay!”

He unwound the snowy muffler from his face. “I’m sorry it took so long to get here. We wanted to wait until the storm passed, and then last night, well, we were all tucked in, see…but we figured you were okay.” He slapped his gloves together, snow chunking off them. “The house feels cold. Did you forget to feed the furnace?”

She stared at him. “What are you talking about? I just got home too. I thought…you didn’t know I wasn’t here?”

Johnny’s eyes widened. “No. We figured you headed home in the storm. Mother said you went to change clothes.”

“I went to get the star from Dottie’s house.”

“Dottie?”

“Dorothy Morgan? She lives in that old Victorian?”

“Right. Of course…but—you were there? You weren’t here?”

Did anyone care where she’d holed up in the storm? She stood up. “Is Mother okay?”

“She’s cooking up a frenzy at Thomas’s place. We’ve all been there since Thursday. They’re fixing Christmas dinner right now. Mama told me to run out and ask you what’s taking you so long.” He gave her a look. “You look tired.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to make sense of his words. “You mean you weren’t even worried about me? You didn’t wonder if I was okay out here?”

“Sorry. Should I have been worried? You’re a take-care-of-yourself gal, Violet. I didn’t know we were supposed to be worried.”

A-take-care-of-yourself gal.
Yep, that was her. Practically a man.

“Forget it. I…I’m tired. I think I’ll stay here. Don’t worry about me.”

“For Christmas?” Johnny’s eyes widened. “You want to be alone on Christmas?”

And right then, it hit her.

She
had
turned into Dottie. A woman who pushed all the people who loved her out of her life. Maybe out of pride, maybe out of shame, but still, she’d be alone on Christmas.

But Dottie didn’t want to be alone any more than Violet did. And it might take someone storming into her life, into her storm house to rescue her.

Not unlike Jake did for her.

“Mamma said to hurry—”

Violet rounded on him. “Johnny, just hold your horses. We’ll get there when we get there. I gotta change, and then you’re going to run me back over to Dottie’s house. She’s not spending one more Christmas alone.”

She turned back to the letters, began to collect them. One of them caught her eye. She picked it up and read the script.

Her heart stopped right there, a ball of heat in her chest.

It couldn’t be. She read the script again.

The storm had blown in a Christmas miracle.

* * * * *

“You’re still here?” Gordy opened his eyes. “I feel as if I’ve been trampled by an ox.” His chest burned, his arms soggy, his eyes weighted. And, across the room in a chair slouched Jake, looking as if he had been standing right behind him during the trampling.

Jake didn’t rouse at his word, as if he hadn’t heard him. Jake bore two days of whisker growth, a rumpled white shirt over a pair of jeans that looked like they’d belonged to Nelson, and enough sag in his face to know something despairing happened since Gordy had taken off for his house in the cold.

Like the fact that the last clear thing Gordy remembered was landing face down in a snowdrift. Or, the fact that he’d had a faint, dark memory of Jake and Violet shouting. And, the most glaring—Gordy was no longer at Dottie’s house.

Something sharp and antiseptic pinched his nose, and footfalls on linoleum outside his open door clipped past him down the hallway. With the squeal of the bed beneath him, Gordy put the pieces together.

As if to confirm, a nurse walked by, her dark hair pinned up under her cap, wearing a dark blue sweater over her uniform.

“Nurse? How long have I been here?”

She stopped. It seemed she looked familiar, but he didn’t know every face in town. She approached his bedside. “Oh, Mr. Lindholm, you just came in last night. You’ll be fine.” She patted his leg, but her voice had awakened Jake, who shook himself and sat up, yawning. He drew his hand down his face then scrubbed both hands over it.

“You look about how I feel,” Gordy said.

Jake looked at him. Gave a half-grin. “You’re a tough old geezer. Had to haul your carcass through the snow. What were you doing tramping around in the blizzard?”

Gordy looked away. Shook his head. “Doesn’t matter now.”

His golden opportunity, the storm house magic had passed. He wasn’t sure how he might land on Dottie’s doorstep again—not without a reason, and…

He didn’t know what to say, anyway. So he had a ring. He and Dottie would return to watching each other’s lights across the marsh, nothing but cold words on their lips as they avoided each other. Nothing would have changed.

Storm House was over. And with it, the capturing of the past, the reaching for the future.

“Really,” Jake said. “Because when the nurses undressed you, they found this in your pocket.” He held up the sock. “I made sure it wasn’t lost because it sure looks like a pretty ring.”

The ring. He met Jake’s eyes, but he was shaking his head, wearing a smirk. “Gord-o, you went out in the storm because you want to propose to your lady.”

“And nearly died doing it. What does that tell you?”

“That you’re a romantic.”

“And you need a good kick in the head.”

Jake spilled the ring into his hand. “She’ll say yes, if you ask her.”

“I don’t think so, Jake. Probably my old ticker knew that, was sending me a shot across the bow. Dottie and I…we’re like oil and water.”

“Naw. You and Dottie are just set in your ways. But you two saved Arnie. And you raised Nelson together. I was talking to some of the nurses around here. You didn’t tell me he earned a bronze star.”

“He received it after he died, but I never doubted he was a hero.”

Jake slid up his chair. “He wasn’t the only one who won a medal, was he, Gordy?”

“What did you do, go through my pockets?”

“I told you, the nurses gave me your belongings. A victory medal, from World War I? I didn’t know you served.”

“Just for a year.”

“And you were going to give the medal to Arnie, weren’t you?”

“The kid needed something for Christmas.”

Jake drew in a breath, nodded. “We met his mother and the sheriff at the hospital last night. I told her he was at Dottie’s. They headed over there to pick him up. I’m sure he’s back at home by now.”

“Arnie’s mother came to get him? That means Dottie’s alone on Christmas Day?” Oh, Gordy might as well just crack his chest open, let Jake take a good look inside for the tone of his voice.

Jake worried the ring around his index finger. “Tell her you love her, Gordy. Marry the woman.”

Gordy looked away. “I don’t understand it, Jake. Why put us in that house together? Why shake things up? Things were fine as they were.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Storm House. Being trapped in there only made me soft. It made me realize what I didn’t have. I was fine before I—”

“Before God brought you in from the cold? Before you remembered what it was like to have people in your life who might go out and find you in a snowdrift?”

“I didn’t need anyone looking for me.”

“Yes, you do. You do need people looking out for you. You’re so afraid that Dottie will turn away from you that you won’t even knock on her front door.”

“I blew it with her years ago.”

“Yeah, you did. But apparently God’s giving you a second chance.”

“By sending the storm?”

Jake smiled. “And, by sending me.”

“What are you talking about?”

Jake set the ring on the table. Then, he reached behind him and pulled out his wallet. “If you want to marry Dottie, Gordy, I can help with that.”

He was pulling something from his wallet, wearing an expression Nelson wore the day he arrived on Gordy’s doorstep, his enlistment card in hand.

Indeed. Jake flashed him an ID. His military ID.

Gordy stared at him. “You’re a priest?”

“A chaplain with the US Army. I’m currently on leave, but I believe I still have the power to marry you.”

“But—but what about Violet? You
lied
to her. What kind of chaplain does that?”

Jake’s smile fell. “A stupid, sinful one. One who wishes he could regret it.” Jake raked his hand through his hair. “I know I shouldn’t have read her letters, Gordy. Alex’s package came to me, and I was trying to figure out how to write his eulogy, so I read his mail, just to see who might be writing to him. She moved me, Gordy. And…” He closed his eyes, running his fingers across them before he stared at Gordy. “But I’m not sorry, and that’s the problem. I wish I could be.” His eyes were cracked, tired.

As was his voice. “You were in war. You know how it is. Three days of rain and mindless shelling while you hide in your slit trench. I’d listen to the 88s and then the P-47s dive-bombing us, and I was the one who had to keep everyone calm. I’m pulling the wounded out of the trenches, I’m comforting the dying, then I’m handing out chocolate in foxholes. And every day, I’m watching men lose their arms, their legs, their lives, and I have no idea the condition of their souls. It’s worse watching a man bleed out—not knowing if he’s right with God, ready to meet his maker. It’s a wretched thing to watch someone who is broken of body, but worse to watch a man broken in spirit, but unable to reach out for God’s grace.”

“That’s what broke you, wasn’t it?” Gordy said it softly, because he knew it would hurt.

Jake met his eyes. Nodded. “Helpless. It was too much for me. I couldn’t bear not being able to save lives, and the darkness found me.” He leaned back, ran his hands on his pants.

“I remember once, after a battle, looking up and thinking, if I could turn off the war, shut my ears to it all, the sunset could transport me away. Copper sunset silhouetting the birch trees against the indigo sky. A pale fingertip moon above as if God had given it a stamp of approval. All that beauty against so much loss. The paradox could take my breath away.”

He looked at Gordy then. “Not unlike grace. Powerful. Unexpected. God’s salvation against the blackness of our souls.”

“Christmas,” Gordy said softly.

“Storm House,” Jake said. He clasped his hands together, tucked them between his knees, drew in a breath. “Once you get a taste of grace, it’s so overwhelming it can bring you to tears. Especially when you’re caught in the darkest night. Or the cruelest storm. That’s what Violet’s letters were to me. A storm house.”

A storm house. Yes, Gordy understood that. Perhaps Dottie, the light across the marsh, had been his storm house for years.

Jake looked at his hands. “I couldn’t help but write to her. And I couldn’t stop. But the lying ate at my soul.”

“Which is why you came to Frost.”

“The truth is, I was hoping that, somehow, she’d know that it wasn’t Alex but me writing to her. And that there was someone behind the postcards who truly cared. I told myself that maybe, for her, my postcards were grace too.”

Gordy drew in a long breath. “I heard her tell you to leave.”

Jake pressed his hands together. Nodded. “I probably should get home. I have soldiers I need to check in on at the VA hospital, broken men who are spending this holiday alone.”

“Like Violet.”

He looked up, and Gordy raised an eyebrow.

“And Dottie,” Jake said slowly.

Gordy reached out, picked up the ring. “So, Rev, what are we going to do?”

Jake shook his head. “Violet doesn’t want me.”

Gordy smiled. “Good grief, son, don’t you know anything about women? Go tell the nurses that I want to check out of this hotel.”

* * * * *

Dottie should have known it would come to an end. Of course it would, because every time she believed in something, when she starting thinking that she and God might be even, He reminded her of her sins.

Her mistakes.

Her losses.

She sat on the sofa, her legs curled to herself, tucked under a quilt. She’d sat there most of the night, watching the flames flicker out and die in the hearth, listening to the blizzard blow itself out, staring at the lights of the Christmas tree.

Watching the lone package underneath. Why hadn’t she given it to Arnie before he left? A stupid gift, really. What had she been thinking, caught up in the drama of the storm house, thinking the child would want a gift from her?

He’d practically flown into his mother’s arms, couldn’t wait to leave her home.

And Violet and Jake certainly hadn’t returned. Not that she expected them, really. They had their own families, their own lives.

Lives in which she wasn’t included.

Dottie’s stomach rumbled. She still had the ham casserole she could heat up, really celebrate the day of Christ’s birth.

She lowered her head to her knees.
Please let Gordy be okay.

Okay, fine. She had to talk to God. Because frankly, she had no one else.

Or…

Mama, look what Santa brought me!
Nelson came in through the mudroom, holding a package wrapped in burlap, his bright blue eyes gleaming. Dottie’s heart stopped then swelled in her throat as she watched Nelson unwrap the burlap. A boxed train set sat inside, and he pulled it out, piece by piece, barely able to contain his joy.