Page 3 of Christmas With A Stranger

"Badly, but I manage."

"Good. Then you're better than Dolores." She says the name like she's spitting a seed. "Counts cards, that woman. Meaner than a snake. And twice as ugly, God love her."

I stop walking, one hand on my knee, because it comes up out of me too fast to manage. "God love her," I get out.

"Somebody's got to." Hildie's delighted with herself, mouth twitching. "Won't be me."

I straighten up, still laughing, and look at my mother.

We come around the far end of the loop. Hildie's head turns toward the water.

"See him?" She points. "He comes every afternoon. The maintenance man feeds him. He's not supposed to."

The words are nearly the exact same, in the exact same order, three minutes later, and it lands in my stomach with a pang. I look at my mother.

"Is that right?" Mom says, offering the same lean, same tilt of her head. She doesn't glance at me or steer Hildie toward remembering that she already told us that.

Hildie offers a few other quips as we make our way around. My father would have loved her. She was funny before, a little irreverent, but I think she's funnier now. I love that she has absolutely no filter. Dad always said he loved ill-behaved women.

For one stupid second, I can hear him saying it.

This is our third Christmas without him. Apparently that still isn’t long enough for a thought like that not to catch. I swallow back the little frog in my throat.

The side doors swing open on that wall of cool air again. Hildie takes the lead down the hallway, sure of her own direction, and turns toward her room. Mom and I fall in behind her.

The door's already open when we reach the room.

There's a man in the chair by the window, ankle crossed over the opposite knee. He's wearing worn jeans way too well and cowboy boots that are legitimately worn, not like a fashion statement. He's up before the three of us are all the way through the doorway.

Hildie makes a sound I haven't heard from her all afternoon. It isn't a word and comes from somewhere farther back in her throat. She opens into a smile before she's even all the way in. She lets go of Mom's arm and goes straight to him.

"You're here." She says it again, like it's still a surprise. "You're here."

He gets an arm around her and takes her weight when she leans into him. My chest swells a little. Whoever he is, she genuinely loves him.

Then I take him in, and I take my time with it, because he's busy with Hildie and nobody in this room is watching me look. He's tall enough that she has to tip her whole head back to see his face, and he's built the way men get from lifting things for a living instead of for a mirror.

He's deliciously wide through the shoulders and lean through the hips. His flannel sleeves are rolled to the elbow over brown, corded forearms dusted with hair the sun has bleached nearly white.

The hair on his head is the same kind of blond, the kind the sun does to a person over years. It’s shoved back like he dragged his hand through it on the walk in. There's a line straight across his forehead, pale above it where a hat lives and weathered below, and a few days of stubble roughens the line of his jaw.

When he finally glances up, his eyes are a warm, dark brown, and they rest on me for one unhurried second before they go back to her. That second travels the whole length of my spine and settles low in my stomach. I have to study the carpet until I can breathe normally again.

Mom goes in for a hug once they release, and I realize she knows him, too. Why hasn't she told me about this beautiful specimen that loves her friend so?

"Mackie, this is Carson. He's Hildie's nephew."

He puts out a hand. Mine disappears into it. He's got a rough palm, but a careful grip. "Nice to meet you."

His thumb rests across my knuckles for the length of the handshake, dry and rough as the strike strip on a matchbook. I have the completely inappropriate thought, in the doorway of a memory care room set to eighty-something degrees, that I would like to know exactly how that hand feels everywhere else.

I take mine back before my face can tell on me, and my eyes go to the hat sitting on the coffee table beside the sofa.

"There a horse in the parking lot?"

"Not this trip." He smiles when he says it, and there it is, a dimple I wasn't ready for. He doesn't carry it any further. So I do.

"Probably best in this town? People drive like maniacs on the Tamiami Trail."