LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Oh! You’re keeping someone’s surprise pony until Christmas?”

      “Something like that. Look at you shivering. City gal.”

      He took his toque off, revealing a head of very thick silver hair. He placed it on her own head and pulled it tenderly over her ears, as if she was, indeed, twelve again and not twenty-three. This time, instead of terrifying her, the casual gesture made her feel deeply loved.

      He moved to her car, an economy model that had struggled a bit on the very long, snowy road that led to his place from the secondary highway. Her grandfather wrestled her suitcase out of the trunk. It was a big suitcase, filled with gifts and warm clothes, and her skates. The pond behind the house would be frozen over. The suitcase had wheels, but her grandpa chose to carry it and Noelle knew better than to insult him by offering to help.

      When they walked in the back door into the back porch, the smell of coffee was strong in the house, though she immediately missed the just-out-of-the-oven aroma of her grandmother’s Christmas baking.

      They shrugged out of jackets and boots, and left the suitcase there. Noelle pulled off her grandfather’s toque and smoothed her hair in the mirror. Her faintly freckled cheeks and nose were already pretty pink from being outside, but she knew herself to be an unremarkable woman. Mouse-brown hair, shoulder-length, straight as spaghetti, eyes that were neither brown nor blue but some muddy moss color in between, pixie-like features that could be made cute—not beautiful—with makeup, not that she bothered anymore.

      The dog had already settled in his bed by the wood heater when she got into the kitchen. While her grandfather added wood to the heater, Noelle looked around with fondness.

      The kitchen was nothing like the farmhouse kitchens that were all the rage in the home-decorating magazines right now. It had old, cracked linoleum on the floor, the paint was chipping off cabinets and the counters were cluttered with everything from engine pieces to old gloves. The windows were abundant but old, glazed over with frost inside the panes.

      Aside from the fact that her grandmother would not have tolerated those engine pieces on the counter, and would have had some Christmas decorations up, Noelle felt that sigh of homecoming intensify within her.

      Her grandfather and grandmother had raised her when her parents had died in an automobile accident when she was twelve. In all the world, this kitchen was the place she loved the most and felt the safest.

      “Tell me about the helicopter pad,” she said, taking a seat at the old table. The coffee had been brewing on the woodstove, and her grandfather plopped a mug down in front of her. She took a sip, and her eyes nearly crossed it was so strong. She reached hastily for the sugar pot.

      “Well, it really started when I was watching the news one night.” He took the seat across the table from her and regarded her with such unabashed affection that it melted her heart and the intensity of that feeling home grew.

      “There was this story about this girl—not here, mind, England or Vancouver—”

      Both equally foreign places to her grandfather.

      “—who was going to be all alone for Christmas, so she just put an ad on something like I-Sell and all these people answered her, and she chose a family to have Christmas with.”

      Her grandfather was beaming at her as if this fully explained the helicopter pad he was building in his cow pasture.

      “Go on.”

      “So I was on there anyway, trying to figure out how to put up a posting for my old junk in the barn, and I just had this thought that I missed Christmas the way it used to be.”

      “You and me and Grandma?” she said wistfully, thinking of music and baking and decorating, and neighbors dropping by.

      “Even before that. You know, TV was late coming to these parts. It was better without it. And a whole lot better without the interstate.”

      No point telling him again. Noelle waited.

      “Don’t even get me going on what cell phones are doing to the world.”

      “I won’t,” Noelle said, though in truth she knew it wouldn’t be long before she missed all her social media platforms. Or more to the point, relentlessly and guiltily spying on someone else’s newly exciting life through their prolific postings.

      “We used to have big gatherings at Christmas,” her grandfather said longingly. “When I was a boy, on Christmas Day the whole community would show up at the old hall, and there would be a Christmas concert, and dinner, and games. Those tables would be groaning under the weight of turkeys and hams and bowls of mashed spuds and pies. Oh, the pies! The women would try to outdo themselves on pies.

      “People sang, and talked together. They exchanged gifts with their neighbors. Not much, you see, a homemade whistle, a flour sack, bleached white and embroidered with something nice, like Bless This House. If you knew a family that was having a rough go, you made sure all the kids had a present, and that they got a big fat ham to take home.”

      Noelle’s sense of worry was gnawing at her again. As lovely a picture as he was painting, her grandfather had never been like this. Grandma had pretty much looked after Christmas, he’d done the outside decorating and hitched up the old horses for the mandatory Christmas sleigh ride, usually after much nagging! Until Grandma had died, he had never been given to reminiscing. He was pragmatic, not sentimental!

      “So,” he said, “I got me an email address and I just put a little ad on there, inviting people to an old-fashioned Christmas, if they wanted one.”

      “Here?” Noelle asked, stunned.

      “Well, sure. Can you think of a better place?”

      “Grandpa, you can’t invite strangers off the internet to your home!”

      He folded his arms across his plaid shirt. His craggy face got a stubborn look on it. “Well, too late for your good advice, little miss Dear Abby, I already done it.”

      “People replied?”

      “All kinds of them,” he said with satisfaction.

      “But how do you know if they’re good people?” Noelle asked. Was that faint hysteria in her voice?

      Her grandfather patted her hand. “Oh, Noelle, most folks are good. You’ve just lost a little faith because of that fella, Michael—”

      “Mitchell,” she corrected him weakly. She did not want to think of that “fella” with his newly exciting life right now!

      “Does this have something to do with the helicopter pad?” she whispered, full of trepidation.

      “Yup, indeed. Some kind of Mr. Typhoon is coming here.”

      “Tycoon?” she asked, despite herself.

      “Whatever.”

      “Oh, Grandpa!”

      “With his little girl, who lost her mommy.”

      “Grandpa! Tell me you didn’t send anyone any money.”

      “Well, I did send somebody money. Not the typhoon, someone else. They wanted to come to my Old-Fashioned Country Christmas, but my goodness, them people have had a run of bad luck. Couldn’t even put together the money for a tank of gasoline.”

      Noelle felt sick. How far had this gone? How many people had duped him out of his money? Her hopes for a healing Christmas were evaporating.

      Her grandpa was an absolute innocent in the high-tech world. All kinds of people out there were just waiting to prey on a lonely old man; all kinds of villains were trolling the internet to find the likes of her grandfather. She hoped he hadn’t spouted off to anyone else about having more money than he could use.

      “Grandpa,” she said gently. “It’s a hoax. If the tycoon hasn’t asked you for money yet, he will. You’re

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