Christmas at the Riverview Inn

“It’s not funny!” Dom cried, making everything worse by touching it. “How do I get this out?”

“Cut it!” Max said with a straight face.

Dom gasped like a scandalized eighty-year old. “Never.”

“It’s just hair,” Josie said.

“To you,” he said.

“What is it to you?” Josie asked. “A crown?”

“Hockey hair,” Max whispered. “He’s been growing it out so that it blows behind him from underneath his helmet when he skates.”

“That’s why he’s growing a mullet?” Josie asked. “I thought he just didn’t realize how bad it looks.”

“This isn’t funny!” Dom yelled and then climbed into the truck and shut the door.

“It’s really funny,” Max said. “The kid went from not showering to, like, Hair Care King in the span of a week. Your mom still has whiplash. Come on,” he said, tugging on the tree they’d just chopped down. “Help me pull this to the truck.”

The bigger tree was already tied down and strapped to the truck. The smaller tree was soon wedged into the truck bed underneath the larger one.

Josie helped slam the truck gate and then braced herself, panting, against it.

“You need to get in shape,” Max said.

“I am in shape,” Josie cried. “Do you have any idea how many miles I walk in a day?”

“That’s city shape. You need to get in country shape.”

Josie rolled her eyes at him, but when she straightened up, her back protesting, she thought he might have a point. She pulled in big breaths of air that smelled so much like pine it left a taste in the back of her throat.

“Remember when Mom and I first moved here?” she asked.

“Of course.” He pulled off his gloves. They were new ones, a present from Josie on his birthday. She gave him a new pair every year. It was a thing. She remembered suddenly the feel of her small hands inside of his gloves the first winter that she and Mom had been here. The soft rawhide and the warmth. They were just gloves on a cold day, but they’d made her feel so safe.

And her giving him gloves every year was a thank-you for that feeling. For making her and Mom safe. For loving them so well.

“You were building the shed. And you let me work with you even though it freaked Mom out,” Josie said.

“You and I both needed to do something or we were going to lose our minds.”

“Well…” She shot him an arch look, indicating he’d already lost his mind.

“Fair,” he said with a smile.

“It was…it was the nicest thing anyone had done for me,” she told him.

“Josie,” he whispered, and Josie smiled.

“Have I said thank you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, thank you again.”

“It’s me that needs to thank you,” Max said. “You’re an adult now, so maybe you’ll understand it better or from a different angle, but…you saved me, too, kid.”

“Well, Mom—”

“You.”

“No crying, Max.” He probably wasn’t going to, but she smiled at him because she felt her own tears threaten.

They got into the truck, Dom in the back seat, having forgotten his hair emergency, seemed to be sound asleep. It was remarkable, all the things a teenage boy could do.

Max sat in the driver’s seat, his hands on the wheel. But he didn’t start the truck.

“What’s wrong?” Josie asked, her breath making plumes in the cold air.

“I know what I’m going to say isn’t going to make a difference. And I know that because nothing will make a difference until you decide that it will.”

Oh lord. Could he be any more Max?

“Max—”

He looked over at her and she stared straight out the window, not wanting to meet his eyes. To see what he so badly wanted her to see. “It’s not your fault Cameron left. It’s mine.”

Max had tried this before. To explain his anger when he found Cameron kissing her on her bed. Cameron’s hand on her knee, Josie so bombed.

He’d pushed Cameron out the door. And Cameron, embarrassed and desperate to make the Mitchell family happy, had gone.

But none of that would have happened if she hadn’t instigated the whole thing.

And it didn’t change the fact that Cameron hadn’t answered a single one of her emails. Or calls.

His voice was low and it was him—her found father. The man she’d decided to love as a father. It had been a choice on her part as much as it was on Max’s part to love her like a daughter and the power of that…it was life-changing.

“You know it’s not that simple,” she said.

“Well, it’s also not as simple as it all being your fault.”

“I know.”

“Then why haven’t you been back?”

“Work. Life. I mean…I’m kind of a big deal.” She made it a joke, hoping he’d laugh and tease her.

His silence stretched and stretched, and she knew this game of his. This silent waiting game. When she was a teenager and had come home late for curfew or smelling of beer or some other teenage infraction, Mom would lose her shit all over the place. They’d yell and push each other’s buttons until it was just total pandemonium. And then once Josie had been sent to her room, Max would wait a few minutes and come up and just…stand in the doorway. Silently waiting for her to talk. And she would yell and yell and then cry…and then ultimately…she would talk.