“I do mean it. Tell me where I failed you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think you can possibly understand. Try to picture your six-year-old daughter whose daddy is coming to pick her up. She’s in her favorite outfit and even has a purse, and of course that stuffed rabbit that went everywhere with her.” Kaylee paused for a moment and took a deep breath before continuing. “I sat on the chair in the foyer for what seemed like hours. You didn’t come.” She shook her head sadly.
“You took me to your new house when I was about ten and there were so many people there, I sat on the sofa until it was time to go. Your wife wanted me to call her Mom; your mother-in-law wanted me to call her Mimi. I’d never met them before and they had a big fight in the kitchen before we left. Then there was the father-daughter dance when I was in junior high. You weren’t available for that. I spent most of my childhood either waiting for you or being stood up by you.”
He frowned. “I remember going to your house to see you on a regular basis,” he said. “I walked you down the aisle at your wedding.”
“Most of the time if you came over I would go watch a movie in my room and you and my mom would talk in the kitchen. As for the wedding, thank you for that. And thank you for not bringing your third wife.”
“You must feel you never really had a father...”
“No, what I felt was that I had a father and my father left us. I’m sorry if you were unhappy, but I learned at an early age that I couldn’t make you happy. And Howie, I’m having a little trouble being happy right now myself. So if you’re counting on me to make you happy now...?” She shook her head. “My mother asked me to be kind to you because despite all evidence to the contrary, you love me.”
“I do. And I think there’s hope for us. Maybe down the road a bit. I’m going to keep trying.”
“Maybe. But I can’t help you with your grief over losing my mother because my own grief is just so heavy.”
“If there’s any way I can help you, will you tell me?”
“Of course. Thank you for asking. But I need to be alone to finish my book now.”
The Monday before Thanksgiving, Mel called Kaylee to remind her about putting together the charity baskets. At that precise moment Kaylee felt like she should stay home and write like the wind to get her book finished. She was close and it was finally going quickly. But she liked Mel and didn’t want to let her down.
When she got to the bar, she saw an assembly the likes of which she had never seen before. The tables were all lined up against the walls, forming a big circle around the room. In the center of the room were boxes and boxes of groceries. Huge boxes of groceries. The place was full of men and women, mostly women, many of them she knew or recognized. Jilly and her sister Kelly, Vanessa Haggerty, Paige Middleton. She saw the pastor’s wife, Ellie Kincaid, and Nora Cavanaugh, the wife of a local orchard owner. There were also a few townsfolk she’d met, Connie from the store and a couple of the Riordan men. And Mel was standing at the center of the room, barking orders.
“We have lists of what goes in each box. Some of our families have six kids, some are widows or solitary men, and we’ve stocked their boxes accordingly. We have turkeys and hams, cooked and frozen, and the rest is nonperishable. Take a list, fill a box, and check it off my master list. And Vanessa and Paige have made plates of cookies and bars and those are a sweet treat for us! Let’s do it.”
Mel saw Kaylee and came over and gave her a hug. “I’m hoping you’ll come with me to do a little delivering, some today and some tomorrow,” she said.
“How many boxes will you fill?”
“Oh, I think fifty. At least as many as we can.”
“Is the poor population so high around here?”
“No, it’s not too bad. But we do have working families who feel the strain and we want to help them as well. The very poor get assistance from the county, but it’s never quite enough.”
Mel handed her a list and she got to work. She wrote the name of the recipient on the side of the box and began to gather the groceries. She learned that Jack and Colin Riordan had gone to one of the big box stores on the coast and filled up their truck beds with supplies. And the gift boxes weren’t limited to food—they also had soap, toothpaste, feminine hygiene products, diapers, baby wipes, bleach and shampoo.
While she was loading the boxes with essentials, Kaylee became profoundly aware that all her life, even in the leanest of times, she had always had what she needed. Her mother, a single mom, had managed not only to feed and house Kaylee, but there were also lots of those special things. A new outfit for a party, a day at Disneyland every now and then, a prom dress, a wedding. They’d never received a box of food over the holidays because they were in need.
And she made a silent pledge to remember that Howard had contributed to her well-being and education, which had been costly. She might have a grudge because he left, but he had been there with the checkbook when it counted.
Of course, the women were all talking and laughing. She got Vanessa’s recipe for lemon bars and fudge; Ellie started them singing Christmas carols and oddly enough, Kaylee survived a little Christmas spirit. The men were joking around, making the women laugh or scold them. And the
