A Cliché Christmas(2)
“Nan—”
“I just got off the phone with Savannah’s mom. I told her I could get you here.”
My chest felt like Nan’s pressure cooker about to explode. I slumped against the back of my chair.
“You did say you wanted to help Savannah, right?”
My patience was a thin wire—one on which Nan was turning pirouettes like an overeager ballerina. “Why do I need to be in Lenox to help a little girl with cancer?”
“Because I put you in charge of our biggest fund-raiser. The Christmas pageant. Now, I gotta run, darlin’. See you in a few weeks!” The screen on my phone went black.
Face in palm, I sighed the sigh synonymous with defeat. I’d just been bamboozled by my seventy-year-old Nan.
Two days before Thanksgiving I loaded up my convertible. My roommate and best friend, Cara, stood in her yoga wear watching me drag a giant suitcase down the stairs of our apartment building. Some best friend she was at zero dark thirty.
“You’ll really be gone a month?”
I squinted in the dim light of the parking lot. “Yes, and thank you so much for helping me.”
My suitcase refused to be squished into the trunk with the other bags so I shoved it into the backseat. Cara walked around to the driver’s side door and rubbed her arms with her perfectly manicured hands.
“It’s so chilly this morning.”
“Cara, it’s sixty-four degrees. It is not cold.”
“Well, it’s cold to me. I didn’t grow up in some lumberjack town in the hills of Oregon.”
“You mean mountains.” It was a discussion we’d had at least a dozen times.
“Same thing.” She gripped my shoulders with her bony fingers. “Now, give me a hug. I’m gonna miss you!”
Hugging Cara was like embracing a fence post. She was tiny but solid. Owning a popular yoga studio does that to a body—or at least that’s what I imagined it does to a body. I had no personal experience.
Planting myself into the front seat, I plugged in my iPhone and scrolled through my apps. It was going to be a very long thirteen hours.
“Maybe you’ll meet some hot guy while you’re home.”
“There hasn’t been a hot guy in Lenox since—” I snapped my lips shut. No, I wouldn’t think of him. “Well, it’s been a long time.”
Cara whipped her silky blond ponytail over her right shoulder, a mischievous gleam flickering in her eyes. “A lot could have changed.”
“Not nearly enough. Love you.”
“Love you, too. Drive safe!”
I pulled out of the apartment complex a minute later and headed for the closest coffee drive-thru. Since it was LA, that meant the next corner. Someone really ought to invent the gallon-size insulated travel mug. I had checked the weather multiple times over the last few days. Even though the forecast still called for clear skies, I couldn’t shake the unsettled nerves in my gut when I thought of driving over the pass. The roads could still be icy.
How had I let Nan talk me into this trip? For the millionth time that morning, I thought about the sunsets, sandals, and surf that I was trading in for slush, snow, and scarves. I picked up my phone and tapped the “Play” icon on my screen.
At least Mary Higgins Clark would keep me company on my long trip home.
I hoped that if I kept my stops to a minimum, I could get over the pass before nightfall. But as the sun dipped below the horizon, I rounded yet another slushy corner. Over the next ten miles, the thermometer in my car alerted me to temperature drops. The wind chill hovered just below freezing.
Nan’s house was still an hour or so away. I yawned and cracked the window, and a blast of frigid air raked icy fingers through my hair.
I focused on a blinking sign up ahead.
It read “Chains Required from This Point On.”
My stomach scraped against the floorboards. “No, no, no!”
I had chains with me for emergencies, but putting them on after sunset when I hadn’t messed with them in almost seven years was not going to be fun.
Pulling off to the side of the road and switching my hazard lights on, I took a shaky breath. Hello, roadside nightmare. Nice to meet you.
And in this nightmare two things would happen before I wrangled the chains onto my tires: one, frostbite, and two, hypothermia. The order was irrelevant.
I trudged through the dirty slush to my trunk, pushed several pieces of luggage around, grabbed the clunky chain bag. I felt like I was playing some sort of twisted real-life game of Tetris. I finally located the bag and gave a hearty tug on the handle, only it snagged on a suitcase. I tugged hard—hard—harder. And with one final yank, I was catapulted to the soggy ground. Dirty, slushy snow soaked into the seat of my jeans quicker than I could curse.
I stood and kicked the chain bag toward a tire. Headlights illuminated the paved shoulder, blinding me. I couldn’t see the car or the driver. Shading my eyes with my forearm, I imagined that I was in one of those gruesome horror movies: deserted highways, masked men, chainsaws. Is this going to be my end, God? Really? I would have liked something a bit more original.
“You need help?”
He didn’t sound like a murderer, but what did I know?
“Um . . .”
Mary Higgins Clark would know what to do. Although my reaction time mimicked that of a blind tortoise.