Page 12 of The Alien Reindeer's Bounty
“Oh yeah? Your mom liked it too.”
“Did you and my dad play in the woods together?”
“No, sweetie. We weren’t friends back then.” She kept her voice neutral. The Beckers were great and loved their granddaughter with everything in their hearts, and Ruby soaked up the Jamie stories. One day, probably soon, she would realize that Odessa never really knew her father.
Well, Odessa knew Jamie; they went to school as kids, and once bumped into each other at the same party, but they were never really friends. Jamie had been on the football team and had always been surrounded by his friends, all on various sports teams. What the athlete Jamie Becker had in common with the nerdy Odessa Muller was a handful of shared classes in their small high school.
Their relationship began years after graduation, with Jamie on leave from Afghanistan, and it consisted of one night hooking up at the local bar and a busted condom. A few days later, Jamie was back in Afghanistan and Odessa assumed that was that.
Six weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant and an IED took Jamie’s life.
“I’m going to find the coolest pinecone.” The back door slammed as Ruby rushed into the yard.
“Within sight of the house, kiddo!” Odessa shouted.
She loaded up the dishwasher and wiped down the counters, letting the mundane tasks clear her head. She’d like to think that Jamie would have been involved in Ruby’s life if given the chance, but she couldn’t say. She didn’t know him. He seemed nice that one night in the bar—they laughed together over nothing and beer—but was he a good man? Could he be patient and firm, the way a willful child needed? Did he drink too much? Did he solve problems with his fists or with his words? She just had no idea.
One day Ruby would no longer be satisfied with scraps of trivia and would want to know what type of man her father had been. Odessa had no idea what to say. Worry kept her mind racing on restless nights.
Odessa stood at the window above the sink, watching Ruby stomp toward the tree line. The setting sun cast a soft glow over the snow-covered lawn and the greenery of the woods.
Lights burned at the property to the left, probably renters for the holiday season.
It had been twelve years since Mads lived next door and she was still checking out the window for him.
Damn it. Odessa rubbed her chest, soothing an old ache. That jerk could still hurt her and that infuriated her. He’d been gone longer than she knew him, had grown up, went to school, had a child—so why did it still hurt?
She should move to a new town, somewhere free of the past. A fearful little voice whispered that if she moved, he wouldn’t be able to find her, and how pathetic was that? She finally moved out of her parents’ house five years ago, all the while fighting the dread that Mads would never find her if she didn’t stay.
He might have been her best friend when they were kids, but he left without saying goodbye. He hadn’t tried to contact her, except for one odd email, in all that time. She needed to face reality.
He wasn’t coming back.
He didn’t care about her, not the way she cared about him. Odessa had loved Mads with everything her teenage heart could muster, and he just vanished. His family moved. No goodbye. No new mailing address. No phone number. It was like he vanished off the face of the earth.
And she absolutely hated the way he worked up her emotions after all this time.
God, she was pathetic.
Satisfied that Ruby would stay out of the woods, Odessa set the table and made herself a cup of coffee.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe she’d have less trouble sleeping if she didn’t have coffee at five in the afternoon, but also maybe some people should keep their noses out of her business.
She kicked off her shoes and changed out of her work clothes while the coffee brewed. Muller’s Pantry Essentials ran her off her feet all day, but she loved her store. It had originally been Muller’s Family Market, a quaint little shop in a tourist-friendly downtown, but her parents expanded to a larger building on the edge of town.
The move had been a financial disaster. Customers weren’t willing to pay the slightly higher costs when they could drive fifteen minutes to a big box store in the next town over and get a pound of genetically modified pesticide-covered strawberries for less.
They had to do something or the store, an institution her grandparents started, would fold.
Odessa updated the downtown property’s interior with a new floor and trendy paint, and turned it into a boutique market, featuring local-sourced foodstuffs. Tourists loved it. When asked, she knew the farmers and the fields that grew the produce. Hell, she probably knew the cows from the local dairy. No one complained about paying extra for berries harvested that day and no one grumbled about not finding watermelon in December.
For now, her father managed the larger store location, but that would probably close when the lease came up for renewal next year. He might retire or he might join her at the downtown store. They hadn’t talked about it.
She loved managing the Pantry. It had a lot of perks, like setting her own schedule and dropping Ruby off at school every morning, but it exhausted her.
The door slammed open. “Mom! You won’t believe what I found!”
Mads
