Page 31 of Mistletoe Dreams
Looking back, he wondered if maybe he'd allowed those comments to color his attitude at times. Maybe that's why he'dnever gone to Hannah when she had been there during the summer and talked to her. Maybe his mom had made comments and made him feel like he wasn't good enough, or she was better than them. Maybe that's where he had gotten that idea to begin with.
Maybe, unconsciously, he had been doing that with Mason.
"I think Hannah is a really great person, and maybe you're right that she's a little bit out of my league, because she is generous and has a beautiful heart, and is better at seeing the good in people than I am, but I don't think just because she's a doctor or just because she's accomplished things makes her better than me. I agree with our founding fathers—all men are created equal."
"Oh, I didn't mean it like that," his mom said.
He nodded and set the glass down with a clank. If she didn't mean it like that, he wasn't sure exactly how she did mean it, but he didn't ask.
"I'd really love to see you two get together. I guess... I guess I said it the way I did because I didn't want you to be disappointed if you don't. Which... in hindsight is probably not a very good way to go about it, is it?" His mother moved closer, and he put his arm around her shoulders.
"I suppose we all have things we can work on. I know it's a lot easier for me to be less judgmental about your parenting skills when I look at myself and see the mistakes that I've made. It's really easy to pick apart someone else when we haven't done it ourselves."
"I think that's your roundabout way of saying that I was an okay mom after all," his mom said, a little twinkle in her eyes as she looked up at him.
"Yeah. You were better than okay. You loved me, no matter how dumb I acted sometimes, and that definitely counts for something in my book."
"You were always a good son. And you're a good son now. And you have a really awesome son of your own. And... I'm so thankful you're here. I guess I didn't realize how lonely I was until the two of you moved in."
"Well, good. Because I'm happy to be here too." It was getting a little mushy, and it was making him a little bit uncomfortable, but his mother was smiling, and he didn't pull away. She really had done her best. And she definitely had made some sacrifices for him, which at the time, he hadn't appreciated or even noticed. That seemed to be the thing with parenting. It was a type of job that didn't get appreciated until years after it was done. In fact, a child had a tendency to really not appreciate their parents as they were going through the parenting process.
Well, he could correct it now, because his mom really was a wonderful person. And she might've been jumping the gun a little bit about things between Hannah and him, but it made him think about how much he admired and appreciated Hannah.
“Ben?”
“Yeah?”
“I just want you to remember one thing for me, okay?”
“What’s that?”
“Life is shorter than you think it is.”
Chapter Fourteen
Hannah hummed softly along to the Christmas music playing out of the speaker in her living room, as she hung another bulb on the tree.
All of her gram's antique Christmas decorations had been in the attic, and she'd been slowly bringing them down and putting them up in her spare time.
Outside, a few stray snow flurries fell past the front porch light, as the lights twinkled in her living room and the scent of her Cowboy Butter Meatloaf hung in the air. It had been one of her grandma’s cherished recipes and, while Hannah’s didn’t taste exactly like she remembered, it had been pretty good.
Her tree was almost completely done, decked the way her grandma always had it, and it fit perfectly with her memories.
She smiled, glancing over at the Christmas town sitting on the buffet, which had been her favorite decoration of all time when she was younger.
In her memories, it was sparkling and beautiful and very valuable, but in reality, as she looked at it through the eyes of an adult, the sparkly ice was just aluminum foil, thefigures in the town were plastic and probably cheap. But the warmth that it exuded, the glow of the lights in each tiny house, the snow-covered trees, and the little hill where one figure raced down on a toboggan still gave the warmth and charm of a small-town Christmas the way it had in her youth.
She stepped back, reaching for her hot chocolate and taking a small sip, savoring the sweet goodness as she studied the tree with approval.
Her gram would have been proud of her. She couldn't have done it better.
As "Deck the Halls" stopped playing and there was a pause between songs, she could hear the faint sound of a chainsaw.
Glancing at her watch, she saw it was almost nine o'clock and had been dark for several hours. But Ben and Mason were still down by the river, working with the lights from his truck headlights, she assumed.
The two had been at it every night that week except for one, which Hannah had learned the next day had been the night that Ben had needed to work late.
She was glad that she had been able to offer him something that he had been able to do with Mason, and Mason, for his part, had come into the medical center every afternoon full of things to talk about that he and his dad had been doing, the creation of a fishing spot on the river being the most exciting.
