A Little Christmas Spirit Page 8

  He’d always say it was her he loved and it meant nothing. Looking back, she realized it had actually meant something. He wasn’t ready to get married.

  “I always thought he was conceited,” Jen said.

  “And not half as smart as you,” put in Angie.

  Except Lexie hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong, so how smart was she, really? Well smart enough to say adios. Most mistakes deserved a second chance, but not cheating.

  “Darling, someone better will come along,” Mom said.

  “How will I recognize him?” Lexie said miserably. “Obviously, I don’t know how to pick the right man.”

  “You will after this,” her aunt assured her.

  “Try to think of it as an education in love,” said her mother.

  This particular education was ten times more costly than her college tuition. She was paying for it with her heart.

  She could still see him sitting there in their apartment living room, right next to her on the sofa. He’d taken both her hands in his and said, “Lex, I have something to tell you.”

  She’d wanted to say, “I have something to tell you, too.” After the latest deposit she’d made in their joint savings account, they finally had enough money for their dream wedding. She’d planned to tell him that and then mention the other little surprise that neither of them had planned on just yet. But the sadness in his eyes stopped her.

  “I’ve met someone,” he’d said.

  “Good riddance if he’s been cheating on you,” said her cousin Angie, bringing her back into the moment.

  “For sure,” Jen agreed.

  “I know it doesn’t look like it right now, but this is a blessing in disguise. You can do better. You deserve better,” said her mother.

  Yes, she did.

  “And next time you’ll know better,” put in Aunt Rose. “Take your time. Be picky. You owe it to yourself and the baby.”

  “Now, there’s something to celebrate,” said Jen. “I think we should have a baby shower.”

  “I think we should spend that money and go to Hawaii,” said Angie. “Let’s all go on your honeymoon!”

  “Good idea,” said her aunt. “You girls go and have a good time and forget about...”

  “He-who-shall-not-be-named,” said Jen.

  The three cousins did fly to Hawaii. They shared a room at a fancy resort, played on the beach and drank fancy drinks with little umbrellas in them—virgins for Lexie and the baby. The whole time she tried not to be jealous of the couples she saw walking the beach, holding hands. It should have been her.

  It would be someday, she told herself. But she was going to hold out for someone special, who understood the meaning of commitment.

  “There’s someone for everyone,” her mom kept telling her. “You’ll find yours. And the next time it will be the right choice because you’ll be wiser.”

  * * *

  Lexie was, indeed, wiser now, and she knew better than to get taken in by a handsome face. She was looking for more than a great smile and a beautiful body. She wanted a beautiful heart.

  Another store employee, a teenage boy with a crop of pimples, carried the ladder to her car for her, Brock bouncing along next to her as if he had springs in his shoes, chanting, “We got lights. We got lights.”

  The only thing they didn’t got was a rope to secure the ladder on the top of the car, which she now realized they needed.

  “I should have thought of that,” she said, frowning at the car and ladder, both of which had disappointed her.

  There was nothing for it but to hurry back inside the store to purchase some rope.

  “I’ll wait here,” her ladder Sherpa promised.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Come on, Brockie. Let’s go.”

  She took her son’s hand, and they hustled back across the parking lot. It had been salted to take care of ice and keep customers from slipping, but there were a few dips and dents in the asphalt.

  Lexie’s foot found one. Her ankle turned in a direction no ankle was ever meant to turn and, like a puppet with its strings cut, she went down, landing on her side. Ow. Ow, ow... No, more than ow. Paaain. And cold, hard ground, people (including her own son) gawking.

  Oh, and look, the stars had come out early. There they all were, dancing right in front of her eyes.

  8

  “Mommy, you fell!” Brock exclaimed, squatting down next to her and looking at her with concern.

  The ladder Sherpa joined them. “You okay, lady?”

  She would be if she could breathe. “I...oh...my...ankle.”

  “We can put a SuperBob bandage on it,” Brock said. “SuperBob makes everything better.”

  A couple who looked to be somewhere in their forties rushed up. “I’m a doctor,” said the man. “Are you hurt?”

  Her pride. “I’m fine,” she said, gritting her teeth. She’d endured unmedicated childbirth. She could survive anything. Deep breaths. No, pant.

  Never mind the breathing. Whimper.

  A large man with salt-and-pepper hair and a scruffy beard of the same color, wearing boots, jeans and an old army jacket trotted up to them. “What happened here?” he demanded. Was this Family Sam, himself?

  “She slipped,” said the woman.

  “We salted the parking lot. You couldn’t have slipped on ice,” the big man informed Lexie. Yep, Family Sam, worried about a lawsuit.

  “What about the rope?” asked the pimply teenager.

  “I was coming back in to get rope to tie down the ladder,” Lexie explained. And never mind the rope. She needed painkillers.

  “For God’s sake, go get some rope,” the big man growled at his employee. “Get Carl to help you tie it down. Here, let’s get her up,” he said to the doctor.

  “Can you stand?” the doctor asked Lexie.

  She bit down on her lip and nodded. She didn’t have much choice. She couldn’t lie there in the parking lot.

  They managed to get her up on her own two (at this point, one and a half) feet.

  “There, good as new,” said the big man.

  “Would you like me to examine it?” the doctor asked her.

  No, what she wanted was to get away. This was all so embarrassing. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “You might have a chip fracture,” the doctor warned.

  “She’s fine. Aren’t you?” The big man gave her a fatherly pat on the shoulder and smiled. He had a big, toothy grin. It made her think of the Big Bad Wolf. Grandpa, what big teeth you have!

  Lexie wasn’t one to make waves. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said. Except this nothing sure hurt.

  “Yes, you’re young,” said the big man, as if that made her invincible.

  The teenager was back, another man with him (not the handsome one with the hazel eyes). “Ah, there’s your rope. Get that ladder secured, boys. On the house,” the big man said to Lexie.

  “Thank you,” she said between gritted teeth.

  “It’s the least you can do, considering she slipped in your parking lot, Sam,” the woman with the doctor said, frowning at the big man.

  So it was indeed Family Sam himself to the rescue. Except Lexie was sure he was more concerned with avoiding an insurance claim than rescuing a hapless customer who took a spill in his parking lot.

  “You really should get that x-rayed,” the doctor advised her.

  She was aware of Family Sam’s fatherly smile fading. “If your insurance doesn’t cover it, you just send the bill to us,” he told Lexie and gave her another fatherly pat.

  “A lot cheaper than a lawsuit,” the woman taunted.

  “Let me help you to your car,” said Family Sam, edging Lexie away from the Good Samaritans. “You go home and put some ice on it, and it will be good as new.”

  She wasn’t so sure. Putting any weight
on her foot brought tears to her eyes and made her gasp.

  By the time she got home her ankle had swollen up like a softball. The doctor was right. She needed someone to look at it.

  “I’ll get you a SuperBob bandage,” Brock offered.

  “That’s very sweet of you,” she said, happy to encourage her son’s chivalry. But SuperBob wasn’t going to cut it.

  She called her friend Shannon. “Are you busy?”

  “Absolutely, binging on Hallmark holiday movies,” Shannon replied. “You and Brock want to come over and join me?”

  “Actually, I think I need a ride to the emergency room.” No way did she want to drive anymore and keep putting pressure on her poor, swollen right ankle.

  “The emergency room! Oh, no! What’s wrong? Is it Brock?”

  “No, he’s fine. It’s me. I fell in Family Sam’s parking lot and twisted my ankle. It’s kind of a mess, and I think I need to get it looked at. I’m sorry to bug you,” Lexie hurried on. “I just couldn’t think who else to call.”

  She sounded pathetic and desperate. She was.

  “I love bugs. I’ll be right over.”

  True to her word, Shannon was at Lexie’s house in less than fifteen minutes. Brock let her in, informing her that Mommy fell, and she hurried to where Lexie sat, icing her injury.

  “I hope it’s just a sprain,” Lexie said, lifting the package of frozen peas for show-and-tell. Although, she was beginning to have her doubts. She’d sprained her ankle once in PE in middle school, trying out for the volleyball team. (Which was when she realized she wasn’t and didn’t want to be a jock.) It hadn’t felt anything like this.

  “Mommy says it hurts,” Brock offered.

  Shannon took one look at the purple balloon at the end of Lexie’s leg with its tiny cartoon character bandage and made a face. “I bet it does. You definitely need to go to the emergency room,” she told Lexie. “Guess what?” she said to Brock. “We get to take your mom to the hospital. She’s got a big owie, and we’re going to have a doctor fix it.”

  Lexie got her coat back on and Brock all bundled up, and then, with Shannon’s help, hop-hobbled out to her car, which looked almost as old as Lexie’s. Teaching was a noble profession, but not the way to get rich quick. Or even slow.

  “After the doctor makes you better, can we put up our Christmas lights?” Brock asked. “May we?” he quickly corrected himself.

  “Let’s talk about that when we get back,” Lexie said. Maybe Family Sam would send someone over to hang her lights. Maybe he’d feel bad enough or at least worried enough to offer that service for free.

  Woodland General Hospital was a twenty-five-year-old facility but had tried to disguise its age with a fresh coat of paint. The emergency room had updated flooring and new chairs in the waiting area—just enough window dressing to tell patients We’re on top of things.

  The waiting area was sparsely populated, with a couple in their early twenties seated side by side, both wearing sweatshirts over pajama bottoms and busy on their phones, and two older women, maybe sisters, looking at them in disgust. Whether the problem was the pj’s or the phones or the fact that neither looked sick, who knew?

  One of the women did give Lexie a sympathetic look as she limped over after giving her information at the reception desk and getting a lovely plastic bracelet. Between the limp and the yelps, she looked pretty pathetic.

  “Who knows?” Shannon said as they settled into their chairs with the stiff, Naugahyde cushions. “You might meet a gorgeous nurse. Or a doctor.”

  “Emergency-room speed dating?” Lexie joked, with a smile and a shake of her head.

  “Stranger things have happened, and speed dating is better than no dating. Someone’s getting happy doing Eventbrite singles’ events. Not me, though. So far that’s been a bust.”

  Which was a mystery to Lexie. With her pretty face and great curves her friend should have been a regular man magnet.

  Shannon sighed. “I tend to meet my men...hmmm. Where do I meet men? Oh, yeah. Nowhere. I swear, I don’t think there’s one decent single man in this whole town.”

  “There’s got to be some somewhere.”

  “I don’t know. It’s like mining for gold when the mine’s gone dry. Or dead. Or whatever it is mines do.”

  “There’s always Bumble or Hinge,” Lexie said, pushing away the memory of her failed matchup attempts.

  Shannon rolled her eyes. “Been there, done that. They always look so promising until you scratch beneath the surface. I found one cheater with a white no-tan line where his wedding ring had been, one condescending mansplainer, one stoner who asked to borrow money so he could pay for our drinks. And a partridge in a pear tree.”

  “There are still good men out there,” Lexie insisted.

  “Let me know when you find one, and ask him if he’s got a brother.”

  “Grandpa Stanley is a good man,” piped up Brock, who wasn’t so busy playing an educational game on his tablet that he couldn’t keep track of the conversation.

  “Grandpa Stanley?” Shannon asked.

  “Our neighbor,” Lexie explained. “He’s an older man.”

  “How much older?”

  “Way much older.”

  “Oh, well. Hold out for a doctor, then.”

  The nurse who settled them in their curtained cubicle looked barely out of high school let alone college, the doctor was a woman, and the X-ray technician was middle-aged and wore a wedding ring.

  “Strike three,” Shannon said after he’d finished with them.

  “That’s okay. I’m not desperate.”

  “I am. It’s been way too long since I’ve had s-e-x.”

  “What’s that?” Brock asked.

  “Nothing you’d be interested in,” Lexie told him.

  “I just read about a new dating app,” Shannon said.

  “Yeah?” Lexie prompted.

  Shannon brought the site up on her phone. “‘Chemistry you can’t flunk,’” she read. “‘We’ll find your perfect match.’”

  “I’m not sure there is such a thing,” Lexie said.

  She’d revved up her hope after the father fail had left and tried one of those sites but had quickly learned that people weren’t exactly truthful about themselves online. The real thing rarely matched his picture, which was usually off by several years or pounds, and those dates often lacked conversation. Which always surprised her when it seemed the same men could chat up a storm from the safety of their keyboards. She’d finally concluded that if anything was going to happen for her, it would have to happen organically.

  Whatever that meant.

  The lack of eligible men on the hospital staff wasn’t the bad news. The bad news was the result of the X-ray. Lexie did, indeed, have a chip fracture. This discovery was followed by the gift of a blue walking boot that was big and clunky and made her feel like Frankenstein’s monster as she walked out of the hospital.

  It could be worse. Her insurance would not only cover the visit and the boot but also a visit to a specialist, which would be next on the list.

  “I can take you after school tomorrow if they can fit you in,” Shannon said as they left with Lexie’s new fashion accessory, a referral and a prescription for pain meds.

  “Thanks.” Lexie sighed. “I guess I should be grateful I didn’t break it.”

  “I’m hungry,” Brock announced.

  “We’d better stop at Daisy’s Dairy Delights on the way home,” Shannon said. “My treat. How does a burger and a chocolate-mint shake sound?” she asked Brock.

  “Yay!” he cheered.

  So after picking up Lexie’s pain meds, which Lexie was determined to take only at night and only for a couple of days, they fueled up at Daisy’s.

  “Thanks for coming to the rescue,” she said when Shannon finally dropped them off.

>   “Happy to do it. I remember what it was like being new in town. Do you need a lift to school tomorrow? You sure aren’t going to be able to drive wearing that thing.”

  “We can walk. It’s only a couple of blocks,” Lexie said. And it was, after all, a walking boot.

  “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow. I’ll pick you up,” Shannon insisted.

  It was going to be bad enough wearing the boot around the classroom. Lexie took her up on the offer.

  “Can we hang up our Christmas lights now?” Brock asked as Lexie hung up their coats. “May we?” he corrected himself.

  Trying to climb up the ladder (still on her car roof) with the big boot didn’t seem like a wise idea. Lexie’s spirits, already a little low, took the elevator to the basement. Bad enough she had this stupid fracture. Now she had to disappoint her son.

  Temporarily, she told herself. She’d find someone to hang the lights. Check with the hardware store. Put out a call on the Fairwood community page on Facebook. Maybe she could ask one of the teachers at school. Perhaps Ed Murrow would be willing to help her out. He was probably around fifty and seemed pretty handy, surely not too old to go up a ladder.

  “Can we?”

  She didn’t bother to correct his grammar. Somehow, it didn’t seem right when she had to disappoint him.

  “Not today, honey. I can’t go up a ladder with my hurt foot.” Lexie stuck out her walking boot as a visual reminder. “But I’m sure we can find someone to help us later this week,” she added, falling back on her mother’s child-rearing philosophy that if you had to deprive a child of a treat you needed to have Option Number Two handy.

  Option Number Two offered hope to take away the sting of disappointment. Anyway, they still had plenty of time until Christmas. The window of Christmas-light opportunity was far from closing.

  Brock wasn’t on board with Option Number Two. His eyebrows took a dip right along with the corners of his mouth.

  “Oh, no. Here comes Prince Thundercloud. We don’t like to see him, do we?” Lexie said. “He makes Mommy sad.”