Page 79 of The Twelve Months of Christmas
“I’m good.”
“Yeah, I can see that. You look like you’re ready to lead the zombie apocalypse.”
She looked to where her daughter was happily playing with the dog and lowered her voice. “I guess I’m not sleeping very well. I worry.”
“What you need is some R and R.”
“I’ll book that flight to Hawaii right now.”
“There you go,” he said, pretending to take her seriously.
“I don’t want to leave Mom.”
“I bet she’d be fine without you for a few hours.”
Arianna shook her head. “But I wouldn’t be fine.”
“I bet you would be if someone was with her.”
“With her feeding tube, I wouldn’t trust anyone.”
“Not even a nurse? I am one, remember? A lot of ER experience, and before that I was a navy corpsman.”
“You were?”
She looked impressed. He liked that. “I was. I’m off on Thursday, got nothing planned. You go out and do something fun, and I’ll come over and hang with your mom and Sophie.”
In spite of his qualifications, she hesitated to say yes.
“I can handle it. And besides, you need to charge your batteries. You won’t be any help to your mom or your kid if you collapse from exhaustion.”
“I’m not exhausted,” she insisted. “Well, not totally.”
“Close enough to count. Hey, Sophie,” he said, “how about Buster and I come over later this week and hang with you and your grandma? We can play Sorry!”
“What’s that?” Sophie asked.
“A great board game,” he replied.
“Yes!” she said.
Arianna frowned at him. “That was...”
“A great idea,” he supplied. “It’s okay to admit it. I’ll be over at noon. Need me to pick up Sophie at school?”
“No, she rides the bus. She’s home by three thirty. You just have to pick her up at the bus stop.”
“Okay, then, we’re set.”
She thanked him and smiled at him. Gratefully. Yeah, he was the man.
Come Thursday he was right on time to shoo Arianna off. It was no hardship hanging with her mom. He enjoyed visiting with Mia, hearing about her life as a baker, of all the small trips she and her husband had taken in an old camper before they got pregnant, of the babies she’d lost before Arianna finally came. Of the time she baked a wedding cake for the mayor’s daughter. Alden also enjoyed teaching Sophie how to play Sorry!, the same game he and his siblings had played when they were kids. Mostly, he loved seeing how refreshed and happy Arianna looked when she came back in the door, bearing a take-out bag from Emperor’s Palace.
“Food!” cried Sophie, as if Alden had starved her.
“There’s enough for three,” Arianna offered. She looked sadly at her mom.
“You all go ahead,” Mia said. “It does smell good, though. I can hardly wait until I can have Chinese again.”
