An Endless Christmas, page 12
“White chocolate mocha with nutmeg.” Micah set her drink in front of her.
“Did you get your traditional latte?”
“You know the Binders. We love shaking up tradition once in a while. I got a Frozen River.”
Katie eyed his mystery beverage.
“Coffee slush. Want a taste?”
“Cold coffee on a day like today?”
Micah moved the small Christmas decoration from the center of their round table to the side and reached for her hand. “You know what they say: cold coffee, warm heart.”
She didn’t take his hand.
“Okay. I deserved that,” he said. “I told you I wouldn’t push you. But I’ve done a lot of talking aimed at defusing your fears.”
She bristled.
“Not fears,” he said. “No. Resistance?”
Her bristles formed bristles.
“Katie”—he linked his fingers behind his neck—“I know these concerns are very real to you.”
“To me?” She sipped her mocha. It scalded her tongue like his words scalded her soul. “Did you bring me here to point out my weak spots?”
“No.” He seemed shocked. “Your strong places.”
She stared out the window, her jaw flirting with TMJ.
“This isn’t going well,” he said. “Can we call a Christmas truce, like they do in . . . in . . . ?”
“World wars?”
His expression was the blue-eyed version of a penitent cocker spaniel. She reached into her pocket and slid the photo across the table. When his eyes widened but he failed to say anything, she pointed to the neat lettering on the white margin: She said yes!
“Where did you find this?”
“Photo album in the hall. Don’t expect me to apologize for snooping. It was in a public place. Not hidden, as one might assume.” She amazed herself at her level, unembittered tone. Had she finally resigned herself to the only right decision?
He picked up the image and held it with a tenderness that ripped through her.
“I didn’t know Grandma Dodie still had any of these pictures around. That’s . . . wow.”
Katie clasped her hands in her lap to keep them from shaking. “You told me you’d never proposed to anyone but me.”
“Katie—”
“It’s not the proposing that matters to me. It’s that you lied. I don’t know that you’ve ever lied to me before. But now I have to wonder, as you can imagine.” She didn’t like the harsh edge that now crept into her voice. But she had no energy to correct it.
He laid the Polaroid on the table and slid it toward her. She didn’t touch it.
“Susie was . . .”
“Your fiancée.” Why would Katie have to coach him on that word?
“No.” He continued to stare at the photo.
“Micah, she”—Katie pointed to the individual words—“said yes.”
He lifted his eyes. “Not to marriage. To Jesus.” He swirled the slush in his drink. “I’d never had a best friend who proclaimed to be an atheist before I met Susie in college. We were in a lot of the same classes our junior year. History geeks. I think I might have been the first Jesus person who wanted to know how she thought, how she came to her conclusions. We had some interesting conversations those two years.”
“And then you fell in love.”
“Friend love. Sister love. Compassion kind of love.”
“I keep telling myself the only thing that matters is that I thought you’d been dishonest with me. It isn’t jealousy. No. Couldn’t be that,” Katie said. “We’ve both been attracted to other people in the past. But you’d never told me about this ‘her.’ And the look on your face in this picture is— What woman wouldn’t want to have someone feel that way about her?”
“I wasn’t trying to keep her from you, Katie.”
An edge of defensiveness in his response raised the hairs on Katie’s forearms.
He stared at the Polaroid again. “The subject never came up.”
“And that doesn’t sound at all like something a guy would say when trying to hide a past relationship? Look at the expression on your face in that picture. You obviously care deeply about her.”
“Like I said, as a friend . . .”
“A ‘friend’ you invited to your grandparents’ for Christmas.”
Micah curled the corner of the napkin resting under his drink. “I have a theory. I didn’t always think this, but listening, really listening to Susie during those long discussions made me consider what I’d been missing before.”
His calmness disarmed her. It always did. “Go on.”
“Change one letter in atheist, move it over a spot, and you can form the word athirst. Susie said she didn’t believe God exists, but at her core, she thirsted for Him. It took a lot of listening for me to figure that out. No, that’s wrong. For her to figure it out. My faith grew more during those two years than I can ever explain. She made me examine why I believed what I did, not just parrot what I’d heard from other people.”
Katie leaned back in her chair. You did that for me a few weeks after we met.
“I invited Susie to the cottage for Christmas,” Micah said, “because she needed a place and a time where the pieces would all come together for her. Away from school. I wanted her to talk to Courtney.”
“Courtney?”
“Courtney wrestled with some of the same issues in her high school years.”
That the perfect Binder family had “wrestled” with anything close to that kind of issue unclenched nerve endings around her heart.
“It wasn’t even at the candlelight service or when Grandpa Wilson recited the Christmas story from the book of Luke or when we prayed together as a family. No.” Micah looked out across the icy river. “She couldn’t get over what she called the ‘sustainability’ of our joy. At the bonfire she announced that she’d burned her last regret and intended to celebrate a perpetual Christmas every day for the rest of her life. An endless Christmas.”
“I can imagine how the family reacted.”
He turned to face Katie again and tapped the photo. “Like I did.”
Micah retrieved his wallet from his back pocket. Hadn’t he paid before picking up the coffees? He slid a small piece of paper from a plastic compartment and unfolded it. “I’d show you on my phone if Grandma hadn’t confiscated it.” Did his small smile mean the tension between them could let up a little?
“It’s us.” Katie looked at the photocopied image of the two of them standing ankle-deep in the Gulf of Mexico. It looked like the beach at Bradenton.
He flipped the photo from the Christmas album around so both pictures faced her. “Which one looks like a man happy for his friend and which one looks like a man happy because he’s deliriously in love?”
She hesitated, captivated by what she saw. “I pick this one.” She held the beach picture.
Micah didn’t play the role of debate victor. If anything, he looked more sober than ever.
“Why do you put up with my doubts about myself . . . or about you?” Katie asked. “And just so you know, I’m officially apologizing for misreading this latest one.” She cupped her hands around the still-too-hot-to-drink coffee container. And please don’t say, “I’m wondering the same thing.”
“I got a crash course in patience from Susie. Maybe that was the wrong illustration. I only meant that she might never have found what she was thirsting for if I’d rushed her through the thought process that eventually brought her to that beautiful conclusion.”
“So, I’m your next project?”
“You’re the love of my life. I think you’re trying to tell yourself that’s not possible. The stories and reasons and pursuits are completely different, but that’s where Susie stayed for a long time. Once she began to entertain the idea that God existed, she fought the concept that He found her lovable, redeemable.”
“Are history teachers always this insightful and relational? I thought they were more facts-oriented.” Katie placed the photo back into her pocket and reached across the table toward him.
“I’m not a history teacher.”
“Not yet.” Her comment netted a sigh that ended with his kiss on the back of her hand.
“Christmas truce, then?” He didn’t let go of her hand while waiting for an answer.
“Truce.”
“I need a hug,” he said.
“Me too.”
“Let’s go get diapers.”
“Because that’s perfectly logical and linear thinking.” She laughed.
“Perfectly. Hug. Huggies. The babies need diapers. We’d better get back before they think we eloped.”
For a fraction of a second, eloping sounded perfectly logical and linear.
THEY EXITED THE Daily Grind arm in arm, which turned into a quick hug—nowhere near the twenty seconds necessary to release enough naturally occurring oxytocin to make Katie trust Micah more. When she read about the hug-length connection on the Internet, it confirmed what she’d learned in nursing school. She hoped to add practical anecdotal evidence to support the claim.
Micah opened the passenger door of the rental car for Katie. She’d have to trust him more not because of the length of a hug, but because it made sense.
“How far is the store?”
“Grandma and Grandpa much prefer a quaint corner grocery store a few blocks off Main Street.”
“I know,” she said. “We stopped there yesterday for milk.”
“But with the volume of diapers we need, I think we’d better head to the SuperStore. It’s out by the high school. Eight or ten minutes. Maybe a little more with this traffic. Why don’t people stay home on Christmas Eve?”
“We didn’t.”
“Point taken. Let’s weave through the back way. You’ll see more of the town and we’ll miss some of the day crowd from the Cities. The big Victorians and Queen Annes in the residential area are impressive. A lot of them are bed-and-breakfasts. Stillwater’s a big wedding destination town, if you hadn’t noticed. You’ll love the view of the church steeples from the higher elevation. You haven’t seen the historic Stillwater Steps yet.”
“Rhonda mentioned them.”
“Five sets of them built into the steep hills. Have you seen the Lowell Inn?”
“We were going to go there yesterday, but ran out of time. Or was that the place where we needed reservations?”
“I love a town with history in it.”
Maybe that helped explain his interest in her. And he hadn’t even seen the full report on her mangled family history. He’d asked. Was she ready for that kind of vulnerability yet? A post-grad student could create a compelling dissertation out of a family line that found it impossible to make marriage work. Katie pushed the thought aside. She couldn’t afford to let her thoughts drift there. Not if she intended to keep their makeshift Christmas truce, as promised.
The eight or ten minutes to get to the SuperStore turned into considerably more with a sightseeing guide behind the wheel. But they eventually filled the backseat of the small car with infant waste management aids and three brooms and made their way back through town toward the cottage. Katie could almost smell the roast turkey. They’d skipped lunch. But she was sure there were leftovers of some kind that could tide them over until the evening meal.
“Tell me the story about your grandmother measuring the snow depth,” she said as Micah turned off of the highway onto Lubber’s Lane.
“Family joke. Years ago, Grandma Dodie decided she was tired of the women doing all the cleanup after meals. So she said we’d go by snowfall depth. She’d use a measuring stick to see what the snow total was. Anything closest to an odd number meant the men cleaned up. Closest to an even number of inches meant it was the women’s turn.”
“I heard that part. You men are mighty unlucky. It seems as if it’s been an odd number a lot this week.”
“Grandma has two yardsticks. She sawed off the first inch on one of them.”
“Does she know you know that?”
“Laughs about it. But still goes through the routine. Years with no snow cover create a problem for her.”
“How often does that happen up here?”
“Not often.”
“And no one complains?” No, not that family. “Micah?” He’d leaned toward the steering wheel, gripping it hard.
“Katie, do you see lights behind the cottage? Flashing lights?”
THE AMBULANCE HAD backed up to the door. Micah careened around it and parked between the cottage and the barn.
“What happened?” Micah asked his uncle Paul, who brandished a snow shovel and was running toward the front of the house.
“They have to bring him out through the front entrance. Grab a shovel! We’ll clear a path for the gurney.”
Micah’s dad caught up and handed Micah a spare snow shovel. “Dad’s unresponsive. Don’t know what happened. Just pray.”
Katie didn’t wait to be told. Micah had left the keys in the car. She pulled it behind the barn when the ambulance driver needed the space to swing around to face the lane. She grabbed the keys and made her way around the barn and to the now-vacated back door. She’d forgotten the diapers in the car. She headed for the commotion, aware of how quickly one critical need could overtake another.
The Binder women clustered around Grandma Dodie at the far end of the family room. Near the fireplace, paramedics worked on Grandpa Wilson, flat on the floor, colorless, unmoving.
Katie put her arm around the nearest Binder woman—Deb. “What happened?”
“Nobody knows. We were all in the kitchen. The men were in the rec room playing pool with the kids.”
“The boys and I were napping,” Courtney said. “I thought he was too. I didn’t hear anything.”
“Grandma was peeling potatoes.” Allie rubbed the back of Grandma Dodie’s shoulders as she talked. The older woman rocked slightly, one hand over her mouth, the other arm angled across her chest. Soft kitten-mewing sobs marked her breaths.
A paramedic looked up at the women. “Can we get a list of his medications?”
“Cabinet to the right of the sink,” Grandma Dodie squeezed out.
Katie bolted for the kitchen. “I’ll get them. I’m a nurse practitioner.” As if it takes a professional to retrieve a handful of prescriptions. Good grief. It’s true what they say—you think you’ll be the calm one because of your medical training, until it’s someone close to you.
She expected to have to sort between Grandma Dodie’s and Grandpa Wilson’s prescription bottles, but each of them had a small zippered plastic bag. Marked. She grabbed his and glanced at the names on the bottles as she flew back to the scene.
Katie rattled off the names of the prescriptions, then called back to Grandma Dodie, “Did he take any vitamins or herbal supplements? Anything other than these prescriptions?”
Rhonda shook her head. She must have suggested a few home remedies that were refused in the past.
Grandma leaned forward, “No. I—” Her words caught on the way out. “I told him, at this age, there was no point in taking Geritol anymore.” The sentence brought on tears that had probably been brewing since the family found him unconscious.
She had plenty of comforters. Katie hovered in the space between the women and the paramedics, far enough out of their way to let them do what they did best, but close enough to assist if needed.
“Katie?” Grandma Dodie called to her, her voice little more than a whisper.
She kept the activity in her peripheral vision but bent down to Micah’s grandmother. “What?”
“What are they doing?”
“All the right things,” Katie said, her longing to ease this time for all of them so strong it threatened to suffocate her. She drew a measured breath. “They’re checking and rechecking his vitals, getting him as stable as possible for transfer to the hospital. They have a routine, and it’s all purposeful.” She reached down to grasp Grandma Dodie’s hand. “They’re moving as fast as they can and treating him with the respect he deserves.”
“Is he . . . awake?”
Katie glanced away, swallowing her own tears. “No. But he’s breathing on his own. They have oxygen started, but he’s breathing. The oxygen will help him.”
One baby, then another started crying in the room down the hall. Life coming and going.
Courtney stood from where she’d been sitting on the floor at Grandma Dodie’s feet. She hugged her grandmother and skirted around the paramedics to get to her children. Deb followed her. “She might need help.”
“Do the younger girls know?” Katie asked.
Allie said, “Tim told Bella and Elisa to hold the fort in the barn addition until we came to get them. Brogan went out there a few minutes ago to entertain them with his juggling.”
Juggling. Circus. The lights from the Christmas tree threw curious patterns on the faces of the two men and one woman bent over Grandpa, now Great-grandpa Wilson. And in the background? Christmas music. Katie inched toward the paramedics. “Anything I can tell the family?”
“I thought you were family,” the female said.
“Almost. Practically. He’s my . . . my pre-fiancé’s grandfather.” She’d regret that choice of words in the middle of the night.
The woman raised one eyebrow, then said, “Transporting now.” The paramedics raised the transport gurney to its full height and locked it into place. “Tell his wife she can meet us at the hospital,” the man said, then lowered his voice further. “Don’t have her follow the ambulance. We’ll be moving at a pretty good clip. That can be hard on loved ones.”
“Understood. Thank you. Can his wife give him a kiss?”
The paramedic nodded. “But only her. We have to move.”
“Grandma Dodie? Do you want to tell him you love him and give him a kiss before they take off for the hospital?”
“Make it quick, ma’am,” the female paramedic said. “The doctors are waiting for him.”
Grandma Dodie leaned in and kissed him on the top of his head. “I’ll kiss him full on the lips when he comes through this,” she announced.
The medical professionals exchanged a glance Katie hoped Grandma Dodie hadn’t seen.
