Daddy's Girls (71)

They had a long talk about forgiveness, and she tried to explain why she couldn’t forgive Peter, and Kate understood. She’d had her own problems trying to forgive her father for hiding their mother for thirty-nine years.

    She and Thad had dinner alone on Christmas Eve, and went to church, and then went back to her father’s house, where they lived now. They had just moved in. It didn’t feel like theirs yet, but there was more space. And it was familiar to her, since it was the house she had grown up in. She couldn’t believe how small her bedroom had been, and she had shared it with Gemma. Caroline had an even smaller one down the hall. It felt like a major luxury to have the house to themselves. Thad was building a much bigger house on his new land.

They went to look at the progress on the house on Christmas Day, and spent the rest of the time tucked into their home, talking and making love. At the end of the day, he looked at Kate, naked in his arms, and told her how much he loved her.

“This was the best Christmas of my life,” he said to her.

“Mine too.” She smiled at him. He had given her something no one else had before. When she looked into his eyes, she knew she was loved.





Chapter 16


When Peter and the kids woke up in Tahoe on the morning of New Year’s Eve, they looked out the window and saw that a blizzard had started. They could hear the dynamite being set off on the mountain to prevent avalanches. They were planning to go home that day, and Peter wondered if the roads were passable. And if so, he knew they wouldn’t be for much longer. He had promised to have them home to their mother by dinnertime.

“We’d better go,” he said, looking worried.

“Should we stay?” Morgan asked him. “Is it safe to go?”

“I think if we go now, we’ll get through. I don’t want to upset your mom and bring you home tomorrow. Get packed. I’ll go pay the bill.” He was back twenty minutes later and they were ready. The snow was swirling in the heavy winds outside. It was eight in the morning, and normally it would only take them four hours to get back to Marin.

They were about to get in their car when Morgan looked at him. “We should get something for Mom at the gift shop.” He was about to object to the delay, when Billy looked at him mournfully.

    “You didn’t buy her a Christmas present, Dad, and you’ve been wearing the sweater from her a lot.”

“Okay, okay.” They rushed to the gift shop, and looked around. There was nothing she’d want, and everything had the hotel logo on it. Suddenly Morgan picked up a yellow teddy bear, and handed it to her father. It had a name tag that said Buttercup. “She won’t want that,” he objected.

“It’ll look nice in her bedroom,” Morgan insisted. They paid for it and rushed back to the car. Their skis were on the rack on top of the car, their bags in the trunk. The kids had bought candy and snacks in the gift shop, and they were on the road ten minutes later, heading toward the highway. The snowplows were ahead of them, and the roads were still relatively clear. It took them an hour and a half in spite of that to get over the mountain, and the snow was still falling steadily. His GPS told him the roads were passable, so they kept going and didn’t turn back. By noon, they had made little progress. Peter said nothing to them, and kept driving and focusing on the road, while Morgan manned the radio, and Billy watched a movie on his iPad with earphones. They were perfectly happy. At one o’clock they stopped for lunch. They were starving. They had been on the road for four and a half hours and were halfway there. He figured they’d make it by five if they were lucky.

They bought sandwiches at a truck stop, and took them back to the car and kept driving. The trip seemed to go on for hours. They finally got to Sacramento at five o’clock and hit heavy fog, and had to slow down to a snail’s pace.

    “Call your mom and tell her we’ll be a little late, so she doesn’t worry,” he told Morgan. She took out her phone and it was dead.

“I forgot my charger in Tahoe,” she said, and so had Billy, and his phone was dead too. Peter took his out of his pocket and handed it to Morgan, and she laughed. “Yours is dead too, Dad.”

“Okay, we’ll get there when we get there.” It was nearly seven by the time the fog cleared, and they kept going and finally picked up speed.

Caroline was at the house in Marin, watching the Weather Channel. She could see that there was a blizzard in Tahoe. There had been a record snowfall, the roads were closed by then, and there had been an avalanche in Tahoe that morning. She’d been trying to call her children all day, and their phones were off, and so was Peter’s. She could imagine them under an avalanche, or buried in a snowdrift somewhere, or freezing in a car that had run out of gas or crashed into something. Only the worst possible scenarios crossed her mind, all of them involving death from hypothermia, carbon monoxide, or suffocation.

At seven o’clock, she was panicked. It was New Year’s Eve and Peter was never late. If he was going to be ten minutes late, he called her. She called the hotel and they had checked out at eight A.M. She wondered if a drunk had hit them and killed them all instantly, or they were in comas in a hospital somewhere and didn’t have her number on them. She was watching the news with tears running down her cheeks when the doorbell rang at eight o’clock. She ran to the door, and there they were, tired, rumpled, hungry. Peter could hardly see from driving in snow all day. They stumbled into the house and she hugged them.