LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Six

      She never should have said she’d have the inventory finished by Friday. She should have asked for another day at least. As much as she required his expertise, she’d just made it a point to accommodate Erik’s schedule any way she could.

      Had she been thinking, she would have realized how impossible that deadline was. But she’d been too rattled by the needs she’d felt in his arms and the kiss he’d dismissed as inconsequential to consider everything else she’d committed to do before Friday—which happened to be Tyler’s last day at his current school.

      Given the occasion, guilt over not having kept her word to Erik would have to wait. Her little boy was not taking this latest transition well at all.

      The familiar faces and routines at Pine Ridge Day School were the last constants in the life they were leaving behind. As a child, she’d had considerable practice dealing with such separations. Her parents’ nomadic lifestyle had made a new school or two every year her norm, and they’d tried to ease those transitions. But her little boy had never known that sort of instability. Even after his father had died, she’d managed to protect him from the biggest upheavals and keep his routine as consistent as possible. Until they’d had to move, anyway.

      As she’d feared he would, he started missing his playmates the minute he’d fastened himself into his car seat in the back of their car and they’d pulled out from the portico.

      A quick glance in her rearview mirror caught his pensive expression. He looked the way he had driving away from their old house a couple of weeks ago. Solemn and a little uncertain.

      “We can always come back for a visit, Ty,” she assured him, heading for the freeway and the ferry. “Just because you’ll be going to a new school doesn’t mean you won’t ever see your old teachers or classmates again.”

      “They’ll still be there?”

      “They’ll still be there,” she promised. It wouldn’t be like when he’d lost his dad. There wasn’t that sort of finality to this parting. She needed him to understand that. “We can come back after the holiday to say hi, if you want.”

      “Will the tree be there, too?”

      The tree. Ten feet of pine studded with a thousand white lights and draped with paper chains and cutouts of students’ handprints. It graced the main building’s foyer.

      “The tree won’t be there, honey. Everyone takes Christmas trees down after the holiday. But everything else will be the same.”

      “Nuh-uh,” he replied, picking at the knee of his khaki uniform pants. “I won’t be there anymore.”

      No, she thought with a sigh. He wouldn’t be, and the silence that followed hinted at how very much that new change disturbed him.

      Thinking the Christmas carols playing on the radio might distract him, she turned the volume up over the hum of the heater and encouraged him to sing along.

      That didn’t work. Neither did any of her other attempts to console, cajole or otherwise ease away his dispirited expression.

      Fighting discouragement herself, she finally conceded that she had no idea just then how to make everything better for her little boy.

      That disheartening fact had just registered when her eyes widened on what should have been nothing more than the dusk-gray shapes of the road, the woods and the distant rectangle of Harbor Market & Sporting Goods.

      Peering past the headlights, she heard Tyler’s sudden “Oh. Wow!”

      Wow, indeed.

      The market stood glittery bright in the encroaching dark. Every pillar, post and eave, its roofline, even the chimney had been outlined with twinkling white lights. The bare branches of the apple tree at the near end had been wrapped in peppermint stripes of white lights and red. It was the snowman beyond it, though, that had her attention. Glowing blue-white, his top hat cocked at an angle, the tall, grinning Frosty stood as bold and impressive as the only person she knew who would have put it there.