Page 33 of Have a Bear-y Little Christmas
“It really is beautiful, isn’t it?” Jeannie asked.
“Hmm?” I murmured, tearing my eyes away from the kids.
She gestured around us. “Just all of it. You can actually see the stars despite light pollution. Then there are the lights. Even the businesses that don’t have displays have special-colored bulbs in their windows. And there’s the wreaths. The houses. And this morning just enough snow fell so everything is all crisp and white. I don’t think we could have asked for a better setup.”
“Would it be terribly gauche of me to say I hadn’t really thought about that?” I admitted.
“No, but why don’t you think about itnow?”
There wasn’t a single ounce of reproach in her voice, so I did just that, starting by looking up at the deep inkwell of the night sky, depthless black upon depthless black with dots of silver-spun celestial light. Then, the tall buildings that surrounded Main Street, looming like sentries against the endless expanse of outer space, some lit up with what had to be thousands of pointsof illumination in meticulously organized displays, and some with just the bulbs Jeannie had mentioned.
Red ribbons and evergreen garlands were wound around the lamp posts, with strings of white lights stretching out between them.
And finally, there were the faces all around us—the other people on tour, the people hurrying home, the owners of street carts. The world could often be such a dark, bitter place, but for the moment, I could see the shimmer of holiday felicity in the air.
“It is beautiful,” I said, even though beautiful seemed a woefully lacking descriptor.
“It is, isn’t it?” she asked, and I could have sworn I heard her voice hitch. “I have to confess, about this time last year I was cursing these same people who were enjoying themselves. I’m not proud of it, but now I don’t understand how I could have ever seen this as anything other than something truly amazing.”
“I take it Max was pretty sick then?”
“Very much so. He wasn’t at his worst, but he was close to it.” She blinked, then blushed vibrantly. “I’m sorry. That was probably a downer thing to say. I’ve been in my head a lot lately.”
“I don’t think I can judge anybody. I did, after all, blurt out that my wife had died literally a few minutes after you and I met.”
She laughed lightly. “You do kind of take the cake for that.”
“And what a record to have under my name.” I gave her a small smile. “But if you do want to share, I don’t mind. I understand that holidays are a big time for introspection. Especially if you’ve lost something... or thought you were going to lose something.”
She tilted her head back to look up at me, and there was something so incredibly vulnerable in her expression, but it feltalmost sacred in a way. Like I was being trusted with something intensely important that most people weren’t.
“You are a very insightful man, Mr....” She trailed off, her eyes going wide. “I just realized that I don’t even know your last name, so I can’t even be flippant.”
“Heaven forbid we stop you from being that,” I teased. “And for the record, it’s LeBeau.”
“LeBeau? How very French!”
“Well, I am Creole, after all.”
“Is that where the accent comes from? Because you do sound a little bit like you’re from here, but you’ve got more of a twang to you.”
“Yeah, I’ve lived in this area my whole life, but my and my wife’s family are also all Creole, so we were raised with the dialect.” I wasn’t ashamed of my slight accent, not at all. I was proud of my family’s history—not just that we were shifters, but also that we came from all over the world to create the rich culture that we shared.
“Oh, so you have a big family?”
“Sure do. We’re spread all around the region in about a four-hour-drive radius. So, it’s not like we’re each other’s backyard neighbors, but it’s not bad.” As much as I didn’t mind sharing about my rather large clan, I’d had enough of talking about me. Especially since Jeannie had been about to share something very special.
Perhaps I was just getting swept up in the rush of the holidays, but I had a feeling there was something so particularly special about the woman. Maybe it was the way she looked at her son with utter adoration, maybe it was how she treated my daughters with respect, maybe it was how much fun I had talking to her. Or maybe it was all three of those and a bunch of other reasons combined. I liked to think of myself as a pretty good judge of character, and at the moment, my judgment wastelling me that getting to know Jeannie would only be a good thing.
“But enough about that, I believe you mentioned that this time last year you weren’t exactly in the holiday spirit?”
“Trying to get me to monologue, huh?” she asked, and for a moment I thought that was her subtle way of shutting the conversation down, but she sighed and kept going. “The type of cancer that Max had is one of the best ones you can get if you have to get cancer as a kid.” She made a scoffing sound. “Which is a really weird thing to say, but it’s true. It has a crazy high five-year survivability, and most kids respond within one round of chemo.”
“Something about the way you said that tells me that Max didn’t.”
“Nope. He was diagnosed about three years ago and started treatment within a month. At first, it seemed like he was doing okay and the cancer cells were being eradicated, but… I don’t know what happened, but all his numbers tanked, and the cancer started to spread.”
I listened with rapt attention as she spoke, horrified but also filled with admiration. It helped that I knew the story had a happy ending, since one of the first things I’d learned was that Max was in remission. Not just in remission, but smiling happily with my daughters while they sang “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” loudly and off-key.
