Page 46 of Meet Me at Christmas
“Nope. It gives you your shield.”
Matthew scratched his head and then plopped down in the center of the clover. “What kind of shield?”
“The bravery shield. When you find a four-leaf clover, you become fearless. Nothing will scare you. Not Sunday school, not the teachers—nothing.” Henry reached down and plucked a clover and handed it to the boy. “It’s your lucky day.”
Matthew gasped, taking the four-leaf clover into his tiny hands.
“No one can stop you now. You’re invincible.”
“I am?”
“Yep. And the other kids might need you to help them. A few of them might be scared. Think you can walk in with me and help me keep everything under control?”
The little boy took Henry’s hand, and Henry delivered him to the classroom.
“I can take it from here,” Matthew said.
Henry raised is eyebrows. “You sure?”
“Yep.” The little boy held up the crumpled clover and then put it into his pocket.
“Okay, you take care of this room and I’ll make sure everything’s all right with the others.”
Stella knew right then that he’d be a wonderful father.
* * *
Mama opened the front door. “Hey, Henry!”
The ladder rattled against the gutter as he straightened it. He nodded a hello. Henry was a lot like her father in temperament—Pop had always loved him as a son. A tiny piece of her wanted to believe Pop had sent Henry back to them, but she knew it probably wasn’t true. And she still had her big secret looming, the guilt of leaving Henry unaware still pelting her from the inside.
Pop’s voice returned as if she hadn’t heard it the first time:“It’s what we do with all the other days that matters most.”
Mama beckoned Henry inside. “Come in out of the cold for a minute, and I’ll show you where the leak is.”
Henry entered and his gaze flickered to Stella. He flashed her a smile before he focused on Mama.
“See it there?” Mama pointed to the brown spot in the ceiling, a drip hanging precariously from the surface, ready to drop into the bucket any second.
“All right,” Henry said, rubbing the scruff on his face. He went back to the door. “I’ll take a look on the roof and see what I can find.”
“Thank you, dear.”
“Yes,” Stella added. “Thank you.”
While Mama went back to the ironing she’d been doing, Stella took a seat on the sofa, across from the fire, her mind full. What did she really want to happen at this point? Was she leading Henry on in some way, only to go back to her regular life and break his heart again? Could she withstand her own heartbreak? Christmas would end, and Stella’s work would resume. She’d fly out to some country that was inevitably too far away to keep in touch like she’d want to, and she and Henry would either drift apart or suffer some sort of dramatic split that wouldn’t do either of them any good.
Stella mentally paced through a normal day in her life: researching long hours, drinking cup after cup of coffee on trains and in the backs of cabs while she found commonalities in various studies, comparing her findings from the subjects in her research at whatever hospital she was visiting. She’d drop her things the minute she got home, the windows dark from the night sky, then under the yellow light of a foreign kitchen in whatever flat she was staying in for that month, she’d write.
In her adult life, there were no lingering remnants of the long days of her youth spent barefoot in the creek out back or bandaging her sore fingers from climbing trees with Henry all day. She barely remembered the wind in her hair from riding Delilah, the old horse on his farm, or holding her hand out the window of his truck. In the faraway places she traveled, the night sky was silent and still, unlike the star-filled skies of Tennessee with glimmering moonlight and lightning bugs.
Who was she really? And what did she want?Pop, I need you, she called out in her mind.
“You have everything you need for every decision you want to make,”he’d said once when she’d been trying to decide if she wanted to go away to science camp or spend her Saturdays working her first high school job.“But you have to reach out and grab the things you want and hold on to them.”
Henry came back into the house, his strong hands pink from the cold. “I think I found the issue. Looks like a shingle cracked in the snow and the seal under it is damaged.”
“Do you know how to fix it?” Stella asked, waving him into the living room.
