Young men played football. Girls in bikini bottoms and sweatshirts wiggled their toes to the beat of their iPods. Young moms toted toddlers on one hip and mesh bags of sand toys on the other. Retired couples in L. L. Bean windbreakers lifted binoculars, training them toward the Pacific’s commuter lanes, where migrating whales could be spotted heading to Mexico for the winter.

Something odd struck him. He looked over at Tracy. “There’s no one our age.”

“What?”

“Out here.” He gestured toward the clean sweep of sand around them. “Our age group is missing.”

“No…” But Tracy’s voice trailed off as she scanned the beach. Then she shrugged. “All at work, I guess.”

“Busy putting kids through college, I suppose.”

“Or busy making money for those cutesy new wives and the new families they plan to make with them.” There was a hot, bitter snap to her words. She shoved her hands in her front pockets. “Now the old wives, they’re off looking for their decimated pride and shattered expectations while scrambling to figure out how they’re going to support themselves and their children on a single income.”

He blinked, startled into stopping. “Tracy-”

“I’m sorry.” Her voice cooled as quick as it had snapped. “That was uncalled for.”

She drew her hands from her pockets and crossed her arms over her chest, closing up again like a sea anemone touched by a painful finger. Pivoting south, she started trudging down the beach in the direction of the red-peaked roofs of the Hotel del Coronado, the wind blowing the tails of her shirt around her hips.

Dan hurried to catch up. “Is that-”

“By the way, I was thinking about Christmas gifts. Bailey’s taken care of and I’ve ordered a few for Harry off the Internet. A college sweatshirt, some gift cards, but if you-”

“I don’t want to talk about Harry.”

“I found this funny battery-operated fly-zapper shaped like a tennis racket for Bailey. I’m going to put it in her stocking, though I have a feeling the first annoyance she’ll use it on is Finn.”

The old wives, they’re off looking for their decimated pride and shattered expectations while scrambling to figure out how they’re going to support themselves and their children on a single income.

Dan couldn’t get the words out of his head as he trailed behind her. The wind changed direction, flattening her shirt to her back, her shoulder blades looking suddenly so fragile. When they’d met, she’d been working at the store full-time, but he knew she’d upped her part-time hours after her first husband left.

Because it was a family business, because she’d been almost fully running it with minimal help from her parents when they’d met, Dan had assumed it wasn’t a career she’d “scrambled” to put together, but a perfect opportunity for a newly single mother.

“Did you not want to work at The Perfect Christmas?” he asked. “Was there something else you wanted to do with your life?”

Continuing to churn through the sand, she glanced over at him. “What about you? You’re the one who left a big-shot stockbroker job to join me at the store.”

But that had been easy for him. When it came to choosing between a stress-full or a Tracy-full life, taking on comanagement of The Perfect Christmas after her parents’ death had been an obvious decision. “I get more satisfaction out of the store’s customers than any of those whose portfolios I used to fatten.”

He didn’t comment on his use of the present tense. Before she might have, a Frisbee landed at her feet.

Tracy stopped, stooped, and peeled the plastic disc off the sand. Without a word, she handed it over to him.

Without a word, he took it. She couldn’t throw a beanbag, and they both knew it. He swallowed a bittersweet smile as he took aim at the shirtless young man standing downwind. What would kill him was to lose moments just like this, when two people’s shared domestic intelligence made an everyday occurrence a ritual that strengthened the relationship’s bonds.

Except for all that domestic inside dope, he didn’t know everything he should about his wife. “Is there something you’d rather have been doing all these years?”

She’d turned to study the surf. Two more waves rushed in before she spoke. “Sometimes I think about the places where we get the items for the store. Remember those cranberry candles we had last year, the ones shaped like old-fashioned Santas? They were from Michigan. Sometimes I think about Michigan and its lakes that have waves like our ocean.”

For their honeymoon, they’d spent a week in San Francisco. But between the demands of the store and the kids, the fact that he’d moved like crazy growing up, and finally that they lived in a premier vacation destination, travel had never occurred to him. “Anyplace else?”

“Those little sugary-looking cottage ornaments are imported from Switzerland,” Tracy said. “I think about going there. And I can smell the history and the burning sun on the clay piñatas that we import from Mexico City.”

Dan shook his head. She had places she wanted to see that she’d never shared with him. Feelings too? Decimated pride and shattered expectations.

Digging into her first marriage and subsequent divorce had never been on his agenda. He’d thought she felt fairly neutral toward the other man. He’d told himself she was entitled to her privacy. Now he wondered if he’d been ducking her pain.

Was there some good way to bring it up?

He couldn’t think of one. “Tracy, about Kevin…” Though he watched closely, she didn’t even flinch.

“Why would you mention him?”

“He’s Bailey’s father.” Lame, but the best he could do. “When she was living at home, he would show up at the house on occasion-”

“On the occasion he felt bored,” she said, the words spitting like ice cubes onto the sand, “or some pang of guilt managed to bore its way through his unfeeling hide.”

Oh-kay. Not neutral. Definitely not neutral. Dan took a breath and plunged on. “It was obvious that Bailey was, uh, conflicted when it came to him, but how about you?”

Tracy turned her face toward him. A strand of windblown hair stuck to the corner of her mouth, and she drew it away with a finger. “How about me, what?”

“How…how did the divorce affect you?”

In the ensuing silence, his gut churned in nervous anticipation.

“You know those carved jewelry boxes we have at the store? The ones that require opening a dozen latched and hidden doors to get to the prize inside?”

Dan nodded, wondering for a moment what country they came from and if that was another of Tracy’s dream destinations. “You have to know the secret to get to the center.”

“Right. Well, after the divorce was at last final, that’s where I put my feelings about it. Locked and hidden away behind a dozen secret doors.”

With a password that she would never share with him, he realized in dismay.

For some reason, he remembered again her trembling hand on Harry’s college comforter. Their son had already been making jokes with his roommate, helping set up the other boy’s computer as his mother blurred around the edges in front of their eyes.

Had that been Dan’s mistake too? Had he been laughing, joking, hooking up computer wires when the connection he should have been making at that moment was with his wife?

Shit. He wanted to shout, to scream, to shake her. Because while he’d definitely found out more about this woman, this love of his life, he felt as if she was farther away than ever before.


Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 12

In 1955, a newspaper misprint directed children who wanted to call Santa Claus to the Continental Air Defense Command instead. Realizing the error, the Director of Operations had his staff check the radar data in order to provide children with updates on Santa’s position in the skies throughout Christmas Eve.

Chapter 12

Propped against the headboard, Trin lay on Bailey’s bed, studying Kurt Cobain’s face on the poster pinned to the opposite wall. “I think Finn used to wear black eyeliner like our grunge-band buddy here. I remember his eyes always seemed to smolder.”

Still smoldered, Bailey thought, as she rummaged through her closet for something to wear on their date. “It’s the thick eyelashes,” she said, glancing over at the other woman. “It’s unfair that I got puny blond ones and his are so dark.”

Trin crossed her ankles. “So what’s the occasion of this dinner of yours?”

“Heck if I know.” Was it only to ensure they could have a private chat without interruption? She wasn’t certain. In his grandmother’s kitchen, Finn had set the night, she’d agreed, and then been ecstatically happy that he’d left it at that and let her leave the house without fulfilling the other part of their bargain: that she’d tell him why she’d run ten years ago.

And that embarrassing, sloppily emotional interlude in the Jacobson kitchen was something she’d been trying to distance herself from too. It had started with watching Finn fall on the dark street. Then only gotten worse at the sight of his torn skin. He’d assured her it was nothing, but it was enough to give her perfect recall of the infamous assassination attempt video. Though his face was never shown, and his name kept secret by the government agency that employed him, now she knew it was he who had taken the second bullet. She knew it was his shattered sunglasses, his puddle of blood.

Finn who could have died.

Once again, the thought gave her that weird, weightless feeling in her stomach and she pressed against it hard. He’s okay, she reminded herself. Just fine.

She knew that for a fact, because that day and the day before he’d shown up at The Perfect Christmas as promised. With little direction on her part, he’d reorganized the back room, replenished stock, donned the Santa suit at the appropriate hour. With the additional, very capable help, she’d been able to relax a little.

A surprised Byron had caught her humming to the store’s background music. And, funny, she’d been recalling old memories of The Perfect Christmas when he’d pointed it out. Not the chaos of the post-Christmas sale or the endless summer shifts she’d spent at the cash register as a restless teen. These memories were of quiet afternoons when she’d stood on a stepladder to help her grandmother rearrange the Christmas villages on the shelves. Of poring over product catalogs with her grandfather, Bailey on his lap, the warmth of his chest at her back. He’d had a special fountain pen that he’d let her use to circle pretty things that caught her eye.

Then her parents had divorced and everything changed, including her feelings toward The Perfect Christmas.

Refocusing on the issue at hand, Bailey slid some hangers along the closet pole. A dress for a dinner date. A dinner date during which it was unlikely she’d be able to duck the question of why she’d run away a decade ago.

Not that she couldn’t answer. It wasn’t such a big deal, was it? But still it felt as if looking back with Finn would let him see other things she didn’t want him to know.

Like how strong she was pulled toward the man he had become.

Like how much she had once loved the young man he had been.

Like how hard it had been to turn her back on him then.

“We were just kids, right?” she said aloud. “Nobody expects those kinds of feelings to last forever.”

“Hmm.” Trin palmed the head of her sleeping son, who was sprawled over his mother’s body in toddler abandon. “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

Flushing at what she’d revealed, Bailey shoved a blouse farther down the pole. “Did I invite you over here?” she muttered. “Because I forget.”

“You walked away from me too, Bay,” Trin said, her voice quiet. “All those years growing up, you were the yin to my yang.”

Bailey swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. “Wouldn’t that be the trang to your trin?”

“See, that cleverness is just one of the many reasons why we got along so well together. You were my best friend since preschool. There have been times over the years I’ve needed you. Times I could have helped you too.”

Bailey’s hand, lingering on a blue sleeve, moved to a black one, her mood sliding toward funereal. After she’d left early for college that summer, she’d never spent another night in her childhood home until now. “I had to make a clean break,” she tried to explain. “As clean as I could, anyway.”

She heard Trin sigh, then listened to the other woman roll off the bed to stand behind her. “Not that dress. You look lousy in black.”