The Christmas Hope(31)

What could I say? It was against my better judgment but Emily needed to do this. I’d just have to find a foster home for her tomorrow.

When we got home I sliced an apple and put it on a plate in front of Emily before making several slices of toast with jelly. Mark walked into the kitchen wearing a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck. He was so handsome. He bent down and hugged Emily At our core, Mark and I were still decent people and we wouldn’t allow the distance that was between us to hurt her in any way. Emily had eaten half of the apple when Mark saw Girl sitting by the back door. “All right, little miss,” he said, grabbing his coat. “Let’s go for a walk.” Girl began to prance in front of the door.

Mark opened the door and Girl bolted past him toward the woods that ended our property line. “Can I go with you?” Emily asked.

He zipped up her coat to her chin and pulled up the hood. It stood at a perfect point and she looked like a packed missile. Emily took hold of Mark’s hand and they walked toward the woods, an all-too-familiar sight when Sean was a little boy. He and Mark would tramp out toward the woods to “hunt” bear or lions, build a secret tree house that only men could know about, or collect leaves for me. “Man stuff,” Sean said time and again when I asked what he and his dad talked about. I watched Mark and wondered if he and Emily were talking about “girl stuff” this time around, or maybe about her mother.

“There’s so much sadness on this journey,” Pastor Burke had said at Sean’s funeral. “Life is short. Thank God, heaven is forever.” I watched as Mark and Emily walked toward the woods. Life is short but it feels so long for those of us who are left to live without someone we love.





“Did you live in a castle when you and Patricia got married?” Emily asked.

Mark shoved his hands into his coat pockets to warm them and shook his head. “Not unless a one-bedroom apartment is a castle. Is it?”

She shook her head to let him know it wasn’t. “Did you have lots of money?”

“No.”

“Then why’d she marry you?”

He laughed. “That’s a good question.”

She sat down on a log at the edge of the woods and put her chin in her hands. Mark sat down beside her. “I think Patricia’s pretty.”

“I think she is, too.”

She looked up at Mark. “Will she always be sad?”

Mark looked at her. Somehow she’d seen right through me and he knew it. “A part of her will always be sad, but she has memories of Sean and those are good memories, too. We had him for eighteen years, so that’s lots of memories.”

“My mom was my mom for five years.”

“You can have a lot of memories in five years.”

“Sometimes we’d skate up and down the street.” She thought for a moment. “But she wasn’t very good. She fell down a lot.” Girl sniffed around the log and followed the scent into the woods. The wind blew and Mark pushed her hair behind her ears. “Do they know each other?”

Mark didn’t understand. “Who?”

“My mom and Sean.”

“Yes, I think they do.” He put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her toward him. They watched Girl sniff around a tree in the woods and jump as a squirrel darted past her up the tree. Girl stood on her back legs and put her front paws on the tree, barking.

“Where do I go after I leave here?”

Mark was quiet. He didn’t know and he didn’t want to answer. “Patricia will find a really good foster home for you.”

“Can I stay here?”

Mark looked at her. Why would she want to stay in a home with two fractured people? “It’s not up to me,” he said. “The state has rules.”

“I promise I’ll be good.”

She looked up at Mark but he couldn’t look at her. He watched Girl through the trees. “You are a good girl,” Mark said. “But the state has rules and—”

“I’ll do the rules,” she said, throwing her arms around his neck. “I’ll do all the rules as long as I can stay here.” He put his arms around her and she pressed her face against his. “Please let me stay.”

Mark didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. “Let’s get back before we freeze through and through,” he said.





I had the kitchen clean and in order again when the back door opened. “We’re froze through and through,” Emily said, chattering her teeth.

I pulled off her coat, hat, and gloves and felt her hands. “Oh, my goodness, you are frozen.”

“Through and through,” she said.