Page 70 of Karma Kitty Christmas
Still, he was standing up behind his supply table and “observing” his class when she poked her head in, so that was something. He smiled gamely at her and snagged one of the last gifts from the table, moving to the open door while the students sat immersed in the last ten minutes ofHidden Figures, the happy math teacher’s best movie friend in the world.
“Happy holidays, Isaac,” Paula said with a shy smile. “I added you to my baking list this year.” She handed him a Christmas tin that he understood was full of cookies, mostly because he’d never been on the list before and had been envious as hell of the other people who had.
“Thank you!” Oh wow. His surprise and excitement weregenuine—but so was his relief, because he didn’t have to accept the gift empty-handed. “And you’ve been added to the knitting list.” He held out her package but didn’t quite relinquish it. “And you get the same talk that Roxy got—don’t expect something big at every holiday. Some days it’s a pom-pom for the end of your pencil, some days it’s a blanket—it all depends on what I feel like yarning.”
Paula chuckled and nodded her head. “Understood,” she said. Her gaze went sideways and got quietly sad. “I’m grateful to be on the list,” she said. Then, “It… it wasn’t because you were gay,” she added. “I know you thought that was why I didn’t like you, but that wasn’t it. It was… you and Roxy had your own secret club. You were funny and made all these exciting plans and… and I felt excluded.” She managed to meet his eyes. “We’re the same age, Isaac—it hurt that you guys thought of me as the Wicked Witch of the Math Department.”
He knew his mouth had fallen open, and he was stunned—not just by how much she had revealed, but by how much he had misunderstood. And how much she’d overheard—he and Roxy had apparently not been as adult in their immaturity asthey’d thought. And he felt compelled to make the same sort of confession.
“My late husband,” he said, “was… wasreallycontrolling. Those Wicked Witch comments you heard—one more person, even my boss, telling me what to do was… was going to make me hostile. It wasn’t your fault.” He gave her a small smile. “I’m so sorry we hurt your feelings.”
“I’m sorry your husband was shitty,” she said softly. “We had no idea. We thought you were in mourning, until this semester when….” She gave a little shrug. “You’ve beenreallyhappy this year.Tired, this last month, but happy.”
His lips quirked. “Want to see a picture?” he asked, and as she unwrapped her gift, he produced pictures on his phone. Blessing Noelle, of course, and Allegra holding her infant daughter, and finally, with a burst of trust, the picture Allegra had forwarded toeverybodyof Isaac and Luca asleep on the couch, the baby tucked up against Isaac’s shoulder.
“Aw,” Paula murmured. “Uncle Isaac.” And then she unwrapped the cardigan, brown with autumn-purple-and-orange trim, that he’d created using a pattern based on the sweaters Paula usually wore when the weather got chilly. Suddenly all talk of the baby disappeared as she wiped her red-rimmed eyes and said, “Oh, Isaac—Ireallylove this color. How did you know?”
THE RESTof the day was a blur—although he did remember Marcelle’s grateful hug when he opened his own gift and got a brown knit hat with Christmas lights dancing all over it, Isaac’s second-favorite item from the batch of repurposed alpaca that had changed his life that day in early May. In the end, he’d left his cleaned, orderly room with an empty briefcase, because he’d gotten his grades in, and a clean conscience, because everybody who’d tried had passed.
He and Roxy had plans to get their families together on Christmas Eve, which was in three days, and Isaac, Allegra, and Luca would be all about Christmas prep between Saturday morning and that ring on the doorbell.
He arrived home to find Allegra facedown on the couch, her hand draped over the end to rest on the baby’s stomach, while lights from the Christmas tree twinkled in the background. The original glass ornaments had all been destroyed in the first week—Euclid had beenunmercifulin his takedown of the shiny silver things. In their place was a sparce peppering of emergency wooden and stuffed ornaments that could be knocked off (and some of them were on the ground already) but not defeated. The baby, awake in her infant carrier, was facing the twinkling lights, but her actual focus was up, into the face of Isaac’s contented, drooling cat, who kept licking her downy little head like she was the bald kitten of his dreams.
“Uhm…,” Isaac started, but Allegra raised her hand to shush him.
“Don’t jinx it,” she mumbled. “They’ve been staring at each other for an hour. It’s been blissful.”
Okay, then.
Isaac quietly set his briefcase down by the entryway and slid off his loafers. Then he hit the head, grabbed a handful of grapes from the fridge, and came back into the living room, silent as a, well, cat.
“Okay, honey,” he murmured. “You go to bed now. It’s Uncle Isaac’s turn.”
Allegra didn’t argue, just shuffled off to get some uninterrupted sleep. Isaac peered at the baby again, who was now blowing bubbles at the cat, who purred back.
Well, alrighty. With a burst of optimism, Isaac picked up his knitting and grabbed the remote, turning on Christmas music while he worked.
While it was much too early for real smiles or actual laughing from a creature that was basically a boiled potato for another few weeks, Isaac watched as Blessing Noelle’s eyes fluttered shut and she began to sleep, right there, in the middle of the living room, under the cat’s watchful eye.
It was literally a Christmas miracle.
AND ITlasted. When Luca got home that night, Isaac was in the kitchen, cooking, while Blessing sat in her car carrier on the kitchen island and Euclid stared at her some more.
“Oh my God!” Luca said, taking in the scene. “And seriously—what are we having for dinner? It smells amazing!”
“Baked chicken,” Isaac told him promptly. “With a butternut squash soup.”
“Oh wow, what’s the occasion?”
“This,” Isaac said, giving him a happy buss on the cheek. “My boyfriend, a happy baby, a sleeping mom, and my idiot karma kitten, who apparently has magic baby powers that I’m not going to question.”
Luca put his hands on Isaac’s hips and stopped him for a better kiss, which Isaac didn’t object to at all.
“Mmm…,” Luca murmured. “I missed those. We need more of those. When does that happen?”
Isaac chuckled. “I seem to recall that Christmas vacation was like a sex oasis in the desert of the school year. Since we did pretty good in that department before the baby came, I’m going to hope we get a little bit of that mojo back.”
“Ooh….” Luca waggled his eyebrows. “Sometimes it’s just knowing you want it as much as I do that makes the wait worth it.”
