Baby It's Cold Outside Read online

  “But I don’t want—”

  She’d held up her hand. “I don’t want you in my life, Jake. Go home. You delivered your message.” And, as if to confirm that indeed, she wasn’t at Storm House anymore, that she’d reverted to the soldier she was, she managed to say it all without a hitch in her voice.

  Then she’d gotten up and found herself a pew in the chapel and tucked the bundle of letters under her head. She slept there, curled in her coat, letting the creases of the pew pad draw into her face.

  She woke in the silence of the hospital, the gray of dawn sifting in through the windows of the chapel. The thunder of her heart propelled her to rise, and she shuffled back to Gordy’s hospital room, her breath tight.

  Please.

  Gordy was still with them, sleeping hard, looking old and drawn in the dusky light.

  Jake, however, had listened to her and left.

  Have a very merry Christmas.

  She flagged down Frank Duesy on his plow just as the sun cast gold over the waves of snow, turning it to gemstone.

  “Can I get a ride home?”

  He patted the bench seat next to him. “I gotta take another run out your direction anyway.”

  Violet tucked herself inside the cab, shivering.

  Jake hadn’t even said good-bye.

  It didn’t matter. She didn’t want him in her life.

  Really.

  Absolutely.

  She could probably sleep until the New Year. “Thanks, Frank,” she said as she stepped out of his cab. The sun had finally appeared, turning the sky a pale blue, cloudless. She stood for a moment, remembering the blue sky over the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles, after S.H.E.A.F had moved them there from London. A clear sky, without smoke or the debris of battle to mar it. A sky of hope.

  “You sure you don’t want me to run you to Johnny’s place?”

  “No. I’m sure my mother is worried.” She shut the door, waving to him. He saluted to her then continued down the highway out of town, snow rolling off the side of his shovel like waves.

  She had to hike through the drifts to the front door. The porch had protected it, but as she opened the front door—she expected at the least heat, if not the smells of Christmas day—a gasp of cold met her. The house shuddered as she shut the door behind her, caught in a silent chill.

  “Mother?”

  Her voice echoed against the walls of the house, and she listened, nothing but her heartbeat in her ears.

  Mother? I’m home. She heard her voice echo back to her as if it might be two years ago, the moment she’d arrived home from her service in Europe. She’d wore her dress uniform, carried her army-issue duffel bag over her shoulder.

  She hadn’t really expected anyone at the train station. Just a feeble hope put her mother, her brothers there.

  She’d braced herself for the fact that her father would be absent.

  Violet had stood in the foyer, letting the duffel fall from her shoulder to hit the wood floor. The daisy clock in the kitchen ticked out her heartbeat. Her home smelled the same—lemony cleanser, the fragrance of pot roast, the redolence of family life. She spotted new sofas, the cushions wrapped in plastic, and a fancy new television set in the family room where the Wurlitzer once sat. She walked into the kitchen and discovered it empty. No casserole in the oven, no fresh-baked molasses cookies in the jar.

  Water plinked into the sink from the rag hanging over the faucet.

  She watched it gather on the edge, drop into the porcelain, bleed down into the drain.

  “Violet?”

  The voice turned her, and she found a smile as her mother swept into the room. Frances hadn’t aged a day, it seemed, although as she drew closer, Violet could count more lines around her smile. “When did you get home?” She pulled her daughter close, and Violet closed her eyes, breathing in her mother’s smell, talc and rosewater.

  “Just now.”

  Frances held her at arm’s length. “I’m so sorry. I have it on my calendar for next week.” She pressed her hands against Violet’s face, her dark eyes softening. “You’re home. Finally.”

  Violet wove her fingers into her mother’s. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come home for Daddy’s funeral.”

  Frances’s eyes filled. “It happened so fast—Johnny didn’t make it home either. But I gave him your father’s watch, and that seemed to help. Johnny is so much like him, you know.”

  Violet watched as her mother put her purse on the table, pulled off her gloves.

  No, she didn’t know. Johnny wasn’t at all like Daddy save his dark hair, the mischief in his eyes. He didn’t have a mechanical bone in his body. She, however, was identical to her father.

  Her voice shook. “Daddy promised me that watch, Mother.”

  Frances opened the icebox, pulled out a casserole. “It’s a good thing Thomas and June are coming over for dinner. I made extra.”

  “Mother, the watch. Why did you give it to Johnny?”

  Frances glanced at her. “It’s a man’s watch, Violet. It doesn’t keep time, anyway.”

  It has its own mind, Vi, just like you.

  “Go change out of those clothes and put on something pretty.” Frances picked up a match to light the oven, smiled at her. “We’re going to have a celebration.”

  A celebration because June was expecting.

  And, oh yeah, that Violet had made it home from war.

  Probably, it only felt that way.

  “Mother?” Violet now called again as she dumped the package of letters onto the kitchen table and shucked off her coat. The electricity had probably stopped the coal stoker in their house too. She stopped at the foot of the stairs and called again.

  Had her mother not made it home from the dance hall? Then again, Violet had taken the Plymouth.

  The Plymouth. She’d have to ask Frank to pry the car out of the tree. Maybe after he’d gotten the roads cleared. She could park it in the garage, try to repair the radiator, the damage to the headlights.

  It would probably never run the same again, however.

  Mother had probably headed home with June and Thomas. Violet should probably get her boots on, find her snowshoes, and hike back into town, but first she needed to get the stove running, find something to eat, and…

  And read those letters. She wanted to see what kind of things she wrote, decide just how embarrassed she should be.

  How transparent had she been to Alex, really? She’d told him about her life here in Frost, but had she told him how the news of her father’s passing had turned her inside out? That she couldn’t dance but longed to?

  Had she told him about the watch? And the fact that sometimes, when she lay in her bed, she wondered why she wasn’t like other women?

  Oh, shoot. Of course she did. She closed her eyes, shaking her head against the brutal truth. Jake knew her life. He knew her secrets. He knew her dreams.

  Yeah, now she felt naked.

  Pulling on her jacket, she headed downstairs to the cellar, thankful for the stairway her father put in. The coalman poured the coal in through another opening in the house, but it allowed them to access the furnace through the kitchen.

  She checked the clinker then added paper and fuel to the center and lit it.

  The paper flamed, then the coal began to burn. She shut the door. The heat would rise through the grate in the parlor. Maybe she’d take a pillow and blanket and park herself on top of it, try to press some warmth back into her brittle bones.

  Returning to the kitchen, she found cheese and mincemeat and made herself a sandwich. Then, pouring a glass of milk, she retrieved the letters.

  A bath would come next, but not until she had some real heat in the house.

  She poured the contents of the envelope on the table then started to fish through it. Her early letters were thinner, probably less of herself in them as she talked about life at Fort Meade, or in London. Her last letters, however, contained the challenges of seeing so many people without family, without homes,
without hope. She’d hated the brutality of war, wondered if there might be anything good waiting for her.

  She read her last letter, sent from Berlin, a month before she shipped home. She’d been transferred to working in the chow line at one of the refugee camps, alongside the Red Cross workers. Meal after meager meal she handed to sallow, starving mothers, their children even more saggy beside them.

  She simply longed to return home, to be safe, and away from the suffering. And yes, she’d hated herself for her weakness.

  Getting up, she left her lunch and went upstairs to her room. She’d kept Alex’s letters too, in a drawer in her desk. She fished them out then brought them back to the kitchen table and began to sort through them. Only a fool would not have noticed the change in handwriting, but then again, a gal not looking closely might not have noticed.

  Thinking of you, Jake had written on his first card, sent from Minneapolis.

  Stay safe, he’d written on another, featuring photos from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.

  From New York City, he’d chosen a card of the Metropolitan Opera House. This reminded me of Versailles, he’d written.

  Had he ever been there? She had written to him about it…. Oh, he was too clever.

  More postcards—of flowers in Washington, DC and then more of Minneapolis, one from London.

  What did he do that he traveled so much?

  I did a lot of things. Not all of them am I proud of. And none of them were very exciting.

  He did do a lot of things—he cooked, and knew how to save a child from hypothermia, and could spot a heart attack, and soothe a horse, and…

  I knew you were lonely, and I wanted to help.

  What kind of man did that? Reached out to a person he didn’t know? Was he some sort of shrink? I didn’t imagine that we’d meet. I just thought I’d let you know that someone cared until that someday when you’d meet someone else and stop writing. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. I never thought you’d fall in love with Alex.

  Fall in love with Alex?

  Alex made her feel as if someone were listening, but Jake had found her in a storm. Jake had made her feel like she was worth fighting a storm for.

  At least Storm-House-Jake did.

  She put her head down on the table. But the storm was over.

  And Jake was gone.

  Stomping sounded on the front porch. She lifted her head as Johnny plowed into the house, his cheeks rosy. “Sis! You’re okay!”

  He unwound the snowy muffler from his face. “I’m sorry it took so long to get here. We wanted to wait until the storm passed, and then last night, well, we were all tucked in, see…but we figured you were okay.” He slapped his gloves together, snow chunking off them. “The house feels cold. Did you forget to feed the furnace?”

  She stared at him. “What are you talking about? I just got home too. I thought…you didn’t know I wasn’t here?”

  Johnny’s eyes widened. “No. We figured you headed home in the storm. Mother said you went to change clothes.”

  “I went to get the star from Dottie’s house.”

  “Dottie?”

  “Dorothy Morgan? She lives in that old Victorian?”

  “Right. Of course…but—you were there? You weren’t here?”

  Did anyone care where she’d holed up in the storm? She stood up. “Is Mother okay?”

  “She’s cooking up a frenzy at Thomas’s place. We’ve all been there since Thursday. They’re fixing Christmas dinner right now. Mama told me to run out and ask you what’s taking you so long.” He gave her a look. “You look tired.”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to make sense of his words. “You mean you weren’t even worried about me? You didn’t wonder if I was okay out here?”

  “Sorry. Should I have been worried? You’re a take-care-of-yourself gal, Violet. I didn’t know we were supposed to be worried.”

  A-take-care-of-yourself gal. Yep, that was her. Practically a man.

  “Forget it. I…I’m tired. I think I’ll stay here. Don’t worry about me.”

  “For Christmas?” Johnny’s eyes widened. “You want to be alone on Christmas?”

  And right then, it hit her.

  She had turned into Dottie. A woman who pushed all the people who loved her out of her life. Maybe out of pride, maybe out of shame, but still, she’d be alone on Christmas.

  But Dottie didn’t want to be alone any more than Violet did. And it might take someone storming into her life, into her storm house to rescue her.

  Not unlike Jake did for her.

  “Mamma said to hurry—”

  Violet rounded on him. “Johnny, just hold your horses. We’ll get there when we get there. I gotta change, and then you’re going to run me back over to Dottie’s house. She’s not spending one more Christmas alone.”

  She turned back to the letters, began to collect them. One of them caught her eye. She picked it up and read the script.

  Her heart stopped right there, a ball of heat in her chest.

  It couldn’t be. She read the script again.

  The storm had blown in a Christmas miracle.

  * * * * *

  “You’re still here?” Gordy opened his eyes. “I feel as if I’ve been trampled by an ox.” His chest burned, his arms soggy, his eyes weighted. And, across the room in a chair slouched Jake, looking as if he had been standing right behind him during the trampling.

  Jake didn’t rouse at his word, as if he hadn’t heard him. Jake bore two days of whisker growth, a rumpled white shirt over a pair of jeans that looked like they’d belonged to Nelson, and enough sag in his face to know something despairing happened since Gordy had taken off for his house in the cold.

  Like the fact that the last clear thing Gordy remembered was landing face down in a snowdrift. Or, the fact that he’d had a faint, dark memory of Jake and Violet shouting. And, the most glaring—Gordy was no longer at Dottie’s house.

  Something sharp and antiseptic pinched his nose, and footfalls on linoleum outside his open door clipped past him down the hallway. With the squeal of the bed beneath him, Gordy put the pieces together.

  As if to confirm, a nurse walked by, her dark hair pinned up under her cap, wearing a dark blue sweater over her uniform.

  “Nurse? How long have I been here?”

  She stopped. It seemed she looked familiar, but he didn’t know every face in town. She approached his bedside. “Oh, Mr. Lindholm, you just came in last night. You’ll be fine.” She patted his leg, but her voice had awakened Jake, who shook himself and sat up, yawning. He drew his hand down his face then scrubbed both hands over it.

  “You look about how I feel,” Gordy said.

  Jake looked at him. Gave a half-grin. “You’re a tough old geezer. Had to haul your carcass through the snow. What were you doing tramping around in the blizzard?”

  Gordy looked away. Shook his head. “Doesn’t matter now.”

  His golden opportunity, the storm house magic had passed. He wasn’t sure how he might land on Dottie’s doorstep again—not without a reason, and…

  He didn’t know what to say, anyway. So he had a ring. He and Dottie would return to watching each other’s lights across the marsh, nothing but cold words on their lips as they avoided each other. Nothing would have changed.

  Storm House was over. And with it, the capturing of the past, the reaching for the future.

  “Really,” Jake said. “Because when the nurses undressed you, they found this in your pocket.” He held up the sock. “I made sure it wasn’t lost because it sure looks like a pretty ring.”

  The ring. He met Jake’s eyes, but he was shaking his head, wearing a smirk. “Gord-o, you went out in the storm because you want to propose to your lady.”

  “And nearly died doing it. What does that tell you?”

  “That you’re a romantic.”

  “And you need a good kick in the head.”

  Jake spilled the ring into his hand. “She’ll say yes,
if you ask her.”

  “I don’t think so, Jake. Probably my old ticker knew that, was sending me a shot across the bow. Dottie and I…we’re like oil and water.”

  “Naw. You and Dottie are just set in your ways. But you two saved Arnie. And you raised Nelson together. I was talking to some of the nurses around here. You didn’t tell me he earned a bronze star.”

  “He received it after he died, but I never doubted he was a hero.”

  Jake slid up his chair. “He wasn’t the only one who won a medal, was he, Gordy?”

  “What did you do, go through my pockets?”

  “I told you, the nurses gave me your belongings. A victory medal, from World War I? I didn’t know you served.”

  “Just for a year.”

  “And you were going to give the medal to Arnie, weren’t you?”

  “The kid needed something for Christmas.”

  Jake drew in a breath, nodded. “We met his mother and the sheriff at the hospital last night. I told her he was at Dottie’s. They headed over there to pick him up. I’m sure he’s back at home by now.”

  “Arnie’s mother came to get him? That means Dottie’s alone on Christmas Day?” Oh, Gordy might as well just crack his chest open, let Jake take a good look inside for the tone of his voice.

  Jake worried the ring around his index finger. “Tell her you love her, Gordy. Marry the woman.”

  Gordy looked away. “I don’t understand it, Jake. Why put us in that house together? Why shake things up? Things were fine as they were.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Storm House. Being trapped in there only made me soft. It made me realize what I didn’t have. I was fine before I—”

  “Before God brought you in from the cold? Before you remembered what it was like to have people in your life who might go out and find you in a snowdrift?”

  “I didn’t need anyone looking for me.”

  “Yes, you do. You do need people looking out for you. You’re so afraid that Dottie will turn away from you that you won’t even knock on her front door.”