“Chloe,” she said, lowering her voice, “was Stuart’s girlfriend. They broke up three months ago, and he . . . well, he’s such a sweet guy . . . he took it so hard. She was terrible to him. Terrible. Last night was the first night in a long time that I saw a spark of the old Stuart, when you were sitting there with him.”
“I . . . what?”
“Stuart has such a good heart,” she went on, oblivious to the fact that I had frozen, a bite of cake halfway to my mouth. “When his father, and Rachel’s father, my ex-husband, left, he was just twelve. But you should have seen how he helped me and how he was with Rachel. He’s such a good guy.”
I didn’t know where to begin. There was something shockingly awkward about discussing Stuart’s breakup with his mom. The expression is: a boy’s best friend is his mother. It’s not: a boy’s best pimp is his mother. It’s that way for a reason.
Even worse, if it could get any worse, which it apparently could . . . I was the balm that had healed her son’s wounds. Her Christmas miracle. She was going to keep me here forever, stuffing me with cake and dressing me in oversize sweatshirts. I would be Bride of Flobie.
“You live in Richmond, right?” she chattered on. “That’s, what, a two- or three-hour drive. . . . ”
I was thinking about locking myself in the bathroom again, when Rachel came bounding in the doorway and skidding up to me in her slippers. She climbed halfway up onto my lap and studied my eyes up close. She still needed a bath.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “Why are you crying?”
“She misses her family,” Debbie said. “It’s Christmas, and she can’t see them because of the snow.”
“We’ll take care of you,” Rachel said, taking my hand and doing that adorable “let me tell you a secret” voice that little kids can get away with. In the light of her mother’s recent comments, though, it seemed kind of threatening.
“That’s nice, Rachel,” Debbie said. “Why don’t you go and brush your teeth like a big girl? Jubilee here can brush her teeth.”
Can, but hadn’t. No toothbrush in my backpack. I was really not at my best when I packed.
I heard the front door open, and a moment later, Stuart arrived in the kitchen with the snowsuit.
“I just had to look at two hundred photos on a digital picture frame,” he said. “Two hundred. Mrs. Henderson really wanted me to know just how amazing it was that it could hold two hundred photos. Did I mention that there were two hundred of them? Anyway.”
He set the snowsuit down, then excused himself to go change his jeans, which were soaked from the snow.
“Don’t you worry,” Debbie said, as he left. “I’m going to take the little miss to go play outside so you can relax. You and Stuart both got terrible chills last night. You’re staying in here and keeping warm at least until we can find out about your train. I promised your mom I would look after you. So you and Stuart stay in here and hang out. Have some nice hot chocolate, something to eat, cuddle up under a blanket . . . ”
Under any other circumstances, I would have assumed that that last sentence meant, “Cuddle up under two separate blankets, spaced several feet apart, possibly with a lightly chained wolf between you,” because that’s what parents always mean. I got a feeling from Debbie that she was fine with the situation, however we wanted to roll. If we felt the need to sit on the sofa and share a blanket to conserve body heat, she was not going to object. In fact, she was likely to turn down the heat and hide all the blankets but one. She took the snowsuit and went off in search of Rachel.
It was so alarming, I temporarily forgot my trauma.
“You look spooked,” Stuart said when he returned. “Has my mom been scaring you?”
I laughed a little too hard and coughed on my cake, and Stuart gave me the same look that he’d given me at the Waffle House the night before, when I was rambling on about tangential Swedishness and my bad cell-phone reception. But, like last night, he didn’t comment on my behavior. He just got himself a cup of coffee and watched me from the corner of his eye.
“She’s taking my sister out for a while,” he said. “So it’s just going to be us. What do you want to do?”
I put more cake in my mouth and fell silent.
Chapter Ten
Five minutes later, we were in the living room, the tiny Flobie Santa Village twinkling away. Stuart and I sat on the sofa, but not, as Debbie had probably hoped, snuggling under the same blanket. We had two separate ones, and I sat with my legs tucked up, forming a protective knee barrier. Upstairs, I could hear the muffled cries of Rachel as she was shoved into a snowsuit.
I watched Stuart carefully. He still looked handsome. Not in the same way as Noah. Noah wasn’t flawless. He had no single amazing feature. Instead, he had a confluence of agreeable aspects that were accepted by one and all to add up to one very attractive whole, perfectly packaged in the right clothes. He wasn’t a clothes snob, but Noah had a weird way of predicting what was coming next. Like he’d start wearing his shirts with one side tucked in and one side loose, and then you’d get a catalog, and every guy in it would have his shirt like that. He was always one step ahead.
There was nothing stylish about Stuart. He probably had only a slight interest in his clothes and, I was guessing, absolutely no clue that there were options on how shirts and jeans were worn. He pulled off his sweater, revealing a plain red T-shirt underneath. It would have been too generic for Noah, but there was no self-consciousness in Stuart, so it looked right. And even though it was loose, I could see that he was pretty muscular. Some guys surprise you like that.
If he had any knowledge whatsoever of what his mom was planning, he showed no sign of it. He was making amusing comments about Rachel’s gifts, and I was smiling a stiff smile, pretending I was listening.
“Stuart!” Debbie called. “Can you come up here? Rachel’s stuck.”
“Be right back,” he said.
He took the steps two at a time, and I got off the sofa and went over and examined the Flobie pieces. Maybe if I could talk to Debbie about their potential value, she would stop talking to me about Stuart. Of course, that plan could backfire and make her like me more.
There was a mumbled family conference going on upstairs. I wasn’t sure what had happened with Rachel and the snowsuit, but it sounded pretty complex. Stuart was saying, “Maybe if we turn her upside down . . . ”