Dear Santa

“None of my business? Wouldn’t have made any difference? You seemed to be happy enough the way things were? Take your pick. And the difference was, you took your butt-wipe status in stride. She didn’t.” Her tone softened. “To tell you the truth, mostly I just felt sorry for Justine. She was one insecure chick. And I truly hope she finds whatever it was she was looking for on the other side, since she clearly didn’t here. But I always admired you for sticking by her. The world needs more people like you, baby. And I know you must be hurting right now. So, listen, you want to pull out of the Chin party tomorrow, you go right ahead—”

“No! No, that’s why I came back.” One of the reasons, anyway, the other one being she could only deal with so much masculine brooding intensity at one time. That she’d actually agreed to put herself in the path of that brooding intensity for three or four entire days…

“You sure?” Venus said. “Because everything’s under control from my end, and we’ve got Cissy, Armando and Silas lined up, they could practically handle things without either one of us—”

“I’m sure, Vene. Anyway, it’ll do me good to focus on something else. But I did agree to go back for a few days, after the party. For Haley’s sake.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot about the baby. Poor little thing. But at least she still has her daddy.”

“Yeah, you’d think, wouldn’t you?” Mia briefly explained the situation, which got another huge sigh from the older woman.

“Why is it you have to get a license to drive a car or serve booze or sell a house, but any idiot with a functioning joystick can have kids? Explain that one to me.”

Mia smiled. “I wish I could. Not that I know what I’m doing, either, but I promised to at least give it a shot. So anyway, I’ll meet you at the Chins’ at noon…?”

After she’d squared everything away with Venus, she called her parents, breathing a sigh of relief when the machine picked up. Over at one of her brothers’ houses, no doubt. Once again, she gave a quick rundown of events, that she’d be going back up to Connecticut the day after tomorrow, that, no, she didn’t have a number for Kevin, she hadn’t heard from him for months, when he’d called from Albuquerque.

Immediate obligations dispatched, Mia hauled herself off the sofa to forage in her Lilliputian-size kitchen, thinking perhaps she’d been a bit too hasty turning down Grant’s offer. Now, glowering into the vast wasteland that was her refrigerator, she almost rued that steely resolve—read: stubbornness—that had seen her through high school, college, those first harrowing years as a Hinkley-Cohen butt-wipe.

As she was flipping through the smeared, dog-eared takeout menus tacked up by her phone, her doorbell rang. A quick glance through her peephole revealed the distorted visage of Mrs. Epstein, the self-appointed leader of the tenants’ group hoping—slim though those hopes might be—to stonewall the landlord’s bid to take the building co-op.

Under normal circumstances, Mia liked Mrs. Epstein well enough, her tendencies toward gossipmongering notwithstanding. Tonight, however, she was not in the mood. But alas, the moment she turned to tiptoe away, she heard, “It’s no good pretending you’re not home, sweetheart, I heard the floorboards creak.”

Damn prewar joists.

On a sigh, Mia threw the trio of dead bolts and swung open the door, hanging on to the two-inch-thick (a half-inch of which was paint) slab for support. She smiled. Then frowned. Under a maroon bob, every wrinkle the old woman possessed screamed “bad news.”

“We lost, bubelah. The slimeball can’t kick us out until our leases are up, but there’s no renewing them. We either have to buy or leave. The lawyer said we could contest it, drag it out a little longer, but the legal fund’s all used up already. And the longer we wait, he says, the more it’s gonna cost to buy in.”

It was just as well Mia hadn’t eaten yet, because God knows her stomach’s contents would have made a reappearance. All over poor Mrs. Epstein. She muttered a not-nice word, which got a nod and a “You said it, sweetheart” from the old woman before she shuffled off to spread the joyous news.

Mia shut the heavy door, sliding down onto the floor with her head in her hands.

No way could she afford to buy her apartment. She’d used up nearly her entire savings as seed money for her business; only in the last few months had she been able to start repaying herself, but it would be a good year or two before she’d brought her reserves back up to what they once were. So forget the odd twenty or so grand necessary for a down payment. She didn’t even have the thinnest of cushions to keep her from starving if for some reason she couldn’t work. And mortgage companies didn’t exactly welcome the self-employed—especially when the self-employed were, for all intents and purposes, dirt poor—with open arms.

And the best part of all this? Her lease was up in two weeks.

Two weeks.

She was one seriously screwed chick.

Chapter Three

“For heaven’s sake, Grant—it’s freezing out here!”

Even though they were in the sun—and it was in the mid-fifties, to boot—Grant’s mother clutched the suede-trimmed collar of her plaid wool blazer, shivering up a storm as they stood at the edge of the circular drive fronting the house. “Of course Haley misses her mother,” Elizabeth “Bitsy” Braeburn said, her voice far chillier than the temperature. Sunlight glinted coldly off her severely pulled-back blond hair. “That doesn’t give her license to rule the roost. And if you don’t exercise some control over the child now, God help us all when she gets to be a teenager.”

“She’s not even four, Mother,” Grant said in a low voice, his hands balled in the pockets of his leather bomber jacket, thinking, You should only know how much control I’m exercising right now. “She doesn’t even understand yet that Justine’s dead.”

“Then tell her again.”

“I have. Repeatedly. As has Etta. The concept means nothing to her.” He tore his gaze away from his daughter—all bundled up in sweaters and fleece-lined everything, sitting cross-legged in the leaf-cluttered grass with Henry in her lap as she kept an eagle eye on the ten-foot-tall entry gate—to look at his mother. Who, for reasons not yet clear, had shown up uninvited a half hour before, impeccably coiffed and tastefully accessorized, as always. “And according to the psychologist, there’s not a damn thing I, or anyone, can do to force things.” He looked back. “When she’s ready to accept Justine’s death, she will.”

The vigil had begun yesterday morning, when Haley announced she was going outside to “wait for Mommy.” Both Etta and Grant had patiently repeated the whole heaven thing, only to be met with an unsettling “Have you ever seen heaven?” When he had to admit that, no, he hadn’t, a tiny chin went up in the air, followed by “Then how do you know it’s real?”

A particularly thorny question to ask someone who didn’t, in fact, “know” anything of the sort. But what was the alternative? At the moment, letting Haley believe her mother was somewhere else seemed a far better option than trying to explain that Justine no longer was.

But who knew the “somewhere else” would prove to be the sticking point, that in Haley’s bright but still developing mind, being somewhere else meant that, at some point, a person could return. Clearly convinced—and rightly so—that her mother would never simply leave her, she simply couldn’t comprehend that Justine wasn’t coming back.

Hence the vigil. And since Grant couldn’t see letting a three-year-old sit outside by herself for hours on end, here he, and his trusty BlackBerry, were. Never mind that, when he asked Haley if she’d like company, her only response was a “suit yourself” shrug.

At least this morning there really was someone to wait for: Mia. Who should be arriving any minute. Hell. His mother hadn’t exactly taken to Justine; he could only imagine what she thought of Mia, with whom she’d only dealt with in the context of the wedding, five years before.

“For God’s sake,” Grant said as his mother’s shivering increased. “Go inside and get warm. I’m sure Etta’s got the coffeepot on—”

“Who on earth is that at the gate?” Bitsy said, shielding her eyes from the sun.

Speaking of the devil. Or—loath as Grant was to admit it—more likely a godsend, he thought as he caught sight of Mia’s old minivan, growling impatiently as it waited for Etta to buzz the gate open.

“That can’t be right,” his mother said as the gates slowly groaned apart. “Grant, you simply must speak to Etta—she can’t go letting in every Tom, Dick and Harry who wanders down the drive by mistake!”

“It’s not a mistake.” Grant said quietly, ignoring his mother’s flummoxed expression as Haley scrambled to her feet, showing her first signs of enthusiasm in two days. “Stay on the grass!” Grant yelled when the little girl started running toward the drive, almost amazed when she actually stopped. As the van passed, Haley spun around, her small legs pumping as she raced it up to the house. A minute later, Mia and his daughter were a tangle of arms and kisses, and his mother—being possessed of a one-hundred-gigabyte memory—said, “Why is she here?”

“Did you bring Mommy?” Haley asked, trying to peer around Mia to see inside the van.

After the briefest of glances in Grant’s direction, Mia crouched in front of the child, shaking her head. “No, sweetie,” she said softly. “Remember? Mommy’s not alive anymore.” She gently tugged a curl. “So you can’t see her. Nobody can.”

Haley regarded Mia for a moment or two before her thumb went into her mouth, her other arm strangling the poor stuffed toy around its neck. Then she settled into Mia’s arms again, her curls flattened against Mia’s bulky sweater, and Grant’s throat tightened.

“That’s why she’s here,” he pushed out. When, however, he noticed Mia’s struggle to stand with Haley clinging to her, he strode over to relieve her of the child, in a move both unpremeditated and instinctive.

Now on her feet, and clearly oblivious to the bits of leaves and dirt on the knees of her jeans, Mia’s eyes darted from Haley—who, while not exactly relaxed in his arms, wasn’t squirming to get down, either—to Grant. A small smile toyed with her mouth before she turned to Grant’s mother, who’d joined them. The smile stretched a little further.

“Mrs. Braeburn,” she said smoothly, extending her hand. “It’s been a long time. How are you?”

A moment passed before his mother apparently decided it wouldn’t kill her to remove her hand from her pocket to shake Mia’s. “All right, I suppose. Considering the circumstances.” She withdrew her hand, readjusting a large tourmaline-and-diamond ring that had shifted sideways over her protruding knuckle.

If his mother’s imperiousness bothered Mia, she didn’t let on. But then it occurred to Grant that, in her line of work, she must deal with women like his mother every day.

“Yes, of course.” Sadness flickered across her face, but the smile never wavered. “You look fantastic, though. I love your jacket!”

Eyes that had seen their share of tweakings over the past few years widened almost imperceptibly—point to Mia, for catching the old girl off guard.

“Um…thank you, dear.” Bitsy’s gaze remained on Mia for a long moment. “Thank you,” she repeated, then turned to Grant. “Now can we go inside before I freeze my assets off?”

“I’m here to tell you,” Etta said, hanging the vintage, black silk dupioni dress Mia planned to wear for the funeral in a white-washed armoire that, in any other house, would have dwarfed the room, “I have never seen that woman at a loss for words. I don’t know if that makes you an angel or a witch, but whatever you are, keep it up! You need me for anything else, hon?”

“I didn’t need you at all,” Mia gently pointed out, shoving shut the drawer to a small Bombay chest by the bed. “Please, please don’t wait on me, Etta—it makes me hugely uncomfortable.”