Page 4 of Meet Me at Christmas
“Driving’s not about controlling the vehicle. It’s about becoming one with it. Hug the curves slowly, then let her go on the straightaway, and when she gets too excited, lightly pump the brake. Don’t startle her. Easy does it…”
Her foot instinctively shifted to the brake while the car glided along the slick road. With a steadying breath, she pumped the pedal and then slowly pressed the gas to pull them around the next bend. Pride filled her as she maintained control. Only two more turns and they’d be there. Easy.
“Look out!” Mama cried.
Stella’s attention flew to the edge of the road and she sucked in a breath as a deer loped across their path in front of her. Without thinking, she jammed both feet on the brake to avoid hitting it. The animal gracefully darted into the nearby woods unharmed, but she barely had time to feel relief before the car slid off the road and landed with a thump in the ditch.
Christmas carols still playing, the headlights now two unmoving beams of yellow against the falling snow, Stella and Mama sat silently, their chests rising and falling from the near collision.
With shaking hands, Stella put the car in reverse and pressed the gas. The wheels spun wildly in place against the wet, muddy terrain. Pop’s voice whispered: “Don’t panic.” She shifted back into drive and tried to go forward. The car lurched a smidge but didn’t go anywhere.
“We’re stuck?” Mama asked, lines of apprehension showing on her face even in the darkness.
Stella gazed at the steering wheel, focusing on her breathing to calm her after such a start. Then she tried again to free them, but to no avail. Her temples began to pound, and she reached over and grabbed her cell phone. “I’ll get us a tow truck. Someone is sure to be in the area with all this going on.” She clicked open an app on her phone, but it wouldn’t load properly.
“What’s wrong?”
Stella tapped the screen. “The service is spotty.” She didn’t dare mention that she only had about ten percent battery, and her phone charger was back at the house. However, she was nearly certain they would be walking down this ditch to the market in a few minutes.
The Christmas music too jovial for the moment, the two of them stared out at the mixture of falling snow and ice, probably both thinking the same thing: what were they going to do? Pop would’ve had an answer. Getting through winter, and life, without him was a new reality they would both have to get used to.
Exhaustion from all the travel and her emotions started to overwhelm her, and Stella suddenly wanted to be back in her flat in London. Yet she had to keep going for Mama somehow. She tapped the screen of her phone again, trying unsuccessfully to get cell service. Reception wasn’t good out there on a regular day, and this little storm certainly wasn’t helping.
Mama put her face in her hands and started to cry.
“It’s okay,” Stella soothed her.
“Just get through this one moment,”Pop always said when she was having a rough time.
Stella blinked away her own tears, missing her father terribly but heeding his advice. “We’re warm, we’re safe, and we’re… fine.”
Mama rubbed her face and cleared her throat, evidently also trying to get herself together.
Just then, like some sort of miracle, the blinding headlights of a truck rounded the curve heading toward them. “Oh, oh! Someone’s coming!” Stella honked her horn and blinked her own headlights as she shielded her eyes from the brightness of the oncoming vehicle.
To her absolute relief, the truck slowed down and came to a stop beside them. Through the spots in her vision, a man in a tattered ball cap, jeans, and a thick leather coat with a woolly collar got out and marched over to them, his boots crunching against the icy road.
Stella rolled down her window. “Oh, thank you for checking on us. I’m so hap—”
She stopped in her tracks when the man leaned down into the car. She’d know those blue eyes anywhere. The breath suddenly drained from her lungs, and she lost the thought that had been on her lips.
Henry.
When their eyes met, his gaze was distant, the adorable lips that used to smile at her set in a straight line, unleashing a dagger’s stab to her heart, even after all these years. The hair peeking out from under his ball cap seemed to have fewer golden strands than it had when she’d seen him last, and his skin was more weathered, his boyish good looks replaced with a ruggedly handsome appearance. The boy she’d known her entire life, the one person she’d given herself to entirely, was now a man, making her suddenly question all the years she hadn’t spent with him. It felt as though time had slipped away from her, never to return.
His all-too-familiar spicy, cedar scent slithered through the air as if it were finding her, driving home the fact that they were face-to-face. She dug a fingernail into the thigh of her jeans to be sure this wasn’t a dream—or rather a nightmare she’d surface from with a wild gasp.
He grabbed the handle and flung open the door, shaking his head. “Y’all get in the truck,” he said, his voice so low she almost hadn’t heard it over the wind. Then he marched off through the falling snow and climbed into the driver’s side of his vehicle.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you about Henry,” Mama said in a near whisper while Stella rolled up the window and turned off the engine.
“That he’s back home?” Her blood ran through her veins like the ice outside. She exited and looked back at the car, wondering if waiting for another ride might be a better option than getting in a truck with Henry Dutton.
Three
Stella clutched her purse in her lap after she squeezed in beside Mama on the long bench seat of Henry’s old Chevy farm truck. She took in shallow breaths to avoid the truck’s familiar aroma of pine and soil that plunged her back into the long days they’d spent together in the fields of wildflowers on his family’s dairy farm.
Out of the corner of her eye, she tried to view him from the other side of Mama. She could make out the laugh lines around his square jaw and the slight squint at the corners of his eyes, but the darkness taking over the sky made it difficult to see the entirety of his expression. She looked away when the memory of his laughter slipped into her mind, punching her right in the gut. She’d always loved his laugh… She had enough to deal with without having to face him too.
