Must Love Mistletoe

Chapter 19

Tracy tried everything she could to control her anger. She wrapped herself up in a feather comforter, visualizing it as her buffer of nothingness, and watched five hours of television. When she found herself aiming the remote at the TV like a sword and viciously stabbing the buttons, she took herself to her bedroom and a book.

The letters in the sentences kept rearranging themselves, creating new words. Adultery. Disloyalty. Revenge. Like the feelings boiling up inside of her, they were all too big to write on a piece of paper and fold into something small enough to fit into her mental compartmented cabinet.

At dawn, she backed out of her driveway. The quiet street with its competing Christmas decorations didn’t lighten or appease her spirits. On her way, she passed The Perfect Christmas and saw old Charlie Baer in his Retired Citizen Service Patrol car parked out front, sipping from a cup of coffee. She was going so fast she didn’t think he had time to jot down her license number.

The three red lights she sped through, she took to be good omens.

Red matched her mood.

At her destination, it was beyond easy to find him. There was the car he’d used to drive away from 631 Walnut. It was a 1972 Corvette coupe, a car he’d coveted, and that she’d given to him after saving out of her paycheck for years. He’d probably cheated on her in that car.

She parked behind it and got out, breathing deeply through her nose. The cool air seemed to be swirling around her in a wild wind, and her heart pumped in time to match it. Despite the cold, her body felt too hot, though she was only in a pair of jeans and a thin T-shirt.

She couldn’t keep her gaze off that car.

The wind still twisting around her, she fumbled with the lock on the trunk of her old sedan, her hands shaking. It opened, and her gaze shifted from the Corvette to what was inside the deep well.

A couple of greasy rags. Some plastic oil containers. The windbreaker Dan had been looking for in August before a sailing trip. Half hidden beneath that, a crowbar.

She didn’t know why it was there.

Without thinking, she reached in and lifted its cold weight in her hand. Her palm folded comfortably around it. It was painted red. Like the stoplights. Like her mood. Like the color of her blood pumping with fierce anger through her body. It looked like permission.

Heading into the whirlwind, she strode around her back bumper and approached the Corvette, where it was hitched to the motor home, probably in preparation for the all-important Mexico trip that superseded a visit with the daughter he’d betrayed as much as he’d betrayed Tracy.

Get out before things get ugly.

She lifted her arms over her head and brought them down on the Corvette’s back windshield.

Glass shattered, cracks spiderwebbing from the point of impact. Like her heart had once been damaged.

The impact shuddered up her arm to her shoulder, but she ignored the little pain and strode through the tempest to the side window. This time she swung the crowbar like a bat. Another satisfying smash.

“Hey!”

She ignored the voice, but saw someone emerge from the RV parked nearby. It was a woman, in flannel pajama bottoms and a long sweatshirt. She had two inches of gray roots and a pillow crease across her face. It was like looking in a mirror. Tracy, post-Dan’s defection.

Walking around to the other side of the vehicle, she shot the woman a look. “I paid for this stupid car. He used it to leave me.” Bam! She took out the other side window.

“Oh,” the woman said, already retreating. “I never trust a single one of them.”

Neither had Tracy, she all at once understood. Not after what Kevin had done.

He emerged just as she was contemplating the front window. “Tracy. My God. What the hell are you doing?”

It was calm where she stood now, she realized. She’d made it into the eye of the storm. Yet she wasn’t calm. Her heart was pumping, the anger jumping, all the emotions that she’d been hiding, secreting, controlling for all these years were pouring into her blood. If someone took a picture of her right now, all they would capture was a flame.

“Tracy…”

She turned her head. Kevin had aged well, she thought idly. He was older than she. Thirty-four when he left her and Bailey, but he had no soft spots now. Lots of hair.

Get out before things get ugly.

But still no soul to speak of.

The wind picked up again. Maybe it picked up on her mood, too, because it seemed to come from the east now, a California Santa Ana gust that tasted like heat and sand on her tongue.

“Tracy…” He started to approach, halted when she lifted her crowbar again. There were others from the campground exiting their RVs, but when they saw that Kevin wasn’t coming nearer, they kept their distance too. He pushed a hand through his hair. “What’s this all about?”

She bared her teeth at him. “You shouldn’t have disrespected me. If you didn’t like what we had, if you were unhappy, you should have said something.” Her fingers tightened on the crowbar, then her arms dropped. The front window cracked.

“You should have followed through with the raising of your child”-her arms rose again-“because she never, ever got ugly.” Swak! Another crack ran through the glass.

“When you decided you didn’t want me anymore, instead of sneaking around behind my back and lying to me, the woman who’d married you and borne your child, you should have had the goddamn decency to treat me with honesty and kindness. You should have treated me like a person.” And as if the weight of the world aided her last swing, the crowbar crashed down, demolishing the windshield with a final shatter.

Someone in the small crowd of onlookers clapped.

Tracy just stared at the damaged car, its glass fragmented into thousands of pieces. No more than her heart was broken into, she realized, as all the painful misery she’d stored inside it leaked out.

Shaking his head, Kevin had just let Tracy drive away. Maybe he had just enough soul left to realize he deserved what she’d done. Now her wrist hurt, her shoulder, her chest. She focused on her physical pain instead of her emotional state, holding her right arm tight against her body and steering with her left as she took another route away from the campground. Some ice would help, and she’d get that later, but she had a stop to make first.

Everyone knew where the Crown Palms condominium complex was located. Not only was Coronado just that small, but it had a reputation as the singles haven in town.

She cruised the parking lot until she located Dan’s car. Pulling up behind the vehicle, she braked and climbed out of her sedan.

They’d bought his Volvo three years ago because it was loaded with safety features and they had a new driver. Though the air bags had never once deployed, Harry had managed to dent the front fender, scrape the back one, and snap off the radio antenna four times. Compared to the experience of their friends, they’d considered themselves lucky.

Tracy ran her fingers over the cold white metal…and then she moved on, forcing her leaden feet along the meandering, pebbled paths that led through the lush garden setting of the complex’s three-story buildings. It was still quite early, still quiet, but as she passed the orgy-sized hot tub and the Olympic pool, she noticed a man and a woman already swimming laps. Another woman, wrapped in a sunny yellow beach robe, was adjusting a lounge chair to catch the first rays of the sun. Under her arm was a glossy fashion magazine.

A spurt of resentment nudged aside the throbbing pain from Tracy’s arm. Oh, wouldn’t that be nice? A morning swimming or sunning, with nothing more pressing than daydreaming about a runway wardrobe. A morning without trying to accomplish some of the chores a five-bedroom, four-bathroom house piled up before heading off to open the downtown store. A morning without having to cajole a zombie-eyed teenager out of bed, out of his room, out the front door with his backpack, his homework, his sports bag.

Did he have enough gas to get to school?

Lunch money?

Anything close to qualifying as “breakfast” in his stomach?

With a sneer, Tracy watched the other woman stretch out on the lounger. Yeah, wouldn’t that be the life? she thought.

And then realized it could be her life.

The store was running along fine without her. The zombie teenager was a college student living on his own. Most of the five bedrooms and four bathrooms at 631 Walnut went unused. Unneeded.

Like herself?

Brushing away the paralyzing thought, she turned from the pool and scanned the nearby doors. Dan had given her his condominium number when he’d first moved out. She’d never thought of needing to know it.

She’d never forgotten it either.

Determining it to be in the next building, she set forward on heavy legs, nodding as she encountered other people along the path. Ignoring their curious glances.

What, didn’t she make the height requirement for all the fun rides here in DivorceLand?

Up ahead, a door on the ground floor opened. A man slipped out, the back of his hair in a pillow-mussed disarray. She watched as he spoke to the lush-bodied, dark-haired woman who stood on the other side of the threshold, holding a short apricot-colored robe closed at the throat.

It looked as if these two had just taken their turn on the Sex-o-Coaster.

The man, wearing long, silky basketball shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops, turned to leave.

Tracy gasped.

Dan’s head whipped her way. Their gazes met.

What had the woman at the campground said?

I never trust a single one of them.

He shoved a hand through his already messy hair. Bedhead hair. “Trace.” He hurried toward her and she found herself frozen, staring at his tan, muscular legs, seeing him swimming laps in that pool. Visualizing him pulling himself up and over the side to lie wet and gorgeous on the lounger beside that woman and her magazine.

Or that woman in her apricot robe.

“What are you doing here?” Dan said. “Has something happened? Is someone hurt?”

She shifted her gaze to his face. Concerned eyes. “What?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “I was fixing Brenda’s shower. It wasn’t draining. Were you looking for me at my place? Tracy?”

When she didn’t answer, he touched her right arm.

She gasped again, in pain this time, and rocketed back.

“What’s happened?” His gaze traveled down to her hand. “And why the hell are you carting around a crowbar?”

Her fingers tightened on the heavy metal. Why was she carrying it? Why had she brought it with her? She’d walked past the Volvo without that burning compulsion she’d felt to damage her Kevin’s Corvette. But surely she didn’t have it to hurt Dan, though thinking of him riding the rails with that…that bitch by the door made her want to do something violent.

“Trace?” Dan stepped closer. His fingertips brushed her cheek in a gesture so tender that tears stung her eyes. “What’s going on? What’s with the crowbar? You can tell me.”

She could tell him, she realized, as the emotion that had broken free of her locked heart at the campground rose from her leaden feet and heavy legs to fill her chest. He had been fixing that woman’s shower drain. It was the kind of thing Dan would do. Cheating on her was not.

“Trace?” His voice sounded bewildered and just the tiniest bit scared.

As she’d been when he’d left her. Or the shell that had been she. When Harry had gone to college she’d felt as empty as his bedroom, with only that stony nut of her heart rattling around inside her bones for company. That’s how small and hard it had become, over all the years of protecting herself from getting hurt again.

But instead of opening up to Dan she’d closed further in, and lost him in her blindness to his hopes, dreams, and dissatisfactions.

She held the crowbar out to him. “It’s evidence,” she said. Did he understand it was all who she was? The best, the worst, the pain, the joy, the criminal, the saint? “It’s evidence that I have a heart after all. That there’s life still in me. That I want to spend the rest of it with you.”

That she could bounce.

Bailey Sullivan’s Vintage Christmas

Facts & Fun Calendar

December 20

The first outdoor electrically lighted Christmas tree on the West Coast was at the Hotel del Coronado in December 1904.