Christmas On The Ranch. Arlene James

to gobble her toes, which made the baby smile, her eyebrows dancing.

      “She’ll be laughing before long,” Fawn predicted.

      “Remember when I used to do that with you?” Jackie asked Dixon. “You used to howl with laughter.”

      “I remember you called me your mistake,” Dixon blurted, quite without meaning to.

      Jackie’s face registered shock, and she twisted around in her chair. “I did no such thing.”

      “You did,” he insisted quietly. “Well, as good as.”

      “I don’t know what you heard,” Jackie insisted, “but I never would have said that.”

      He told her then exactly what he remembered, and she shook her head sadly. “Son, son. You weren’t the mistake. Yes, I got pregnant and married too young, and it was much more difficult than I thought it was going to be, just as my parents predicted, but that wasn’t the mistake. My real mistake was divorcing your father.”

      “But...you hated Dad as much as Grandma did!”

      “No. No, no.” Jackie shook her head, smiling sadly. “I was heartbroken when Greg came home married to Lucinda. Frankly, Dix, until Harry, I never thought I’d love again.”

      “I...I don’t understand any of this.”

      She sighed. “Pride and pain make us do foolish things, Dix. I have no pride left, and Harry took care of the pain. He was a good Christian man. He forgave all my mistakes, loved me in spite of them and made me happy, even though I didn’t have you with me.” She looked at Bella, smiling. “We never expected to have a child of our own. He thought he couldn’t. Imagine our joy last Christmas when the doctors told us we were expecting.”

      “I confess I’m surprised,” Dixon said, looking at his now drowsy-eyed baby sister. “I wouldn’t have thought you even wanted more children.”

      Jackie looked up, obviously surprised. “Why would you think that?”

      “It’s not like you were around a lot,” Dixon pointed out. He didn’t say that some folks would have called her neglectful. His grandmother had.

      “I needed to work to help pay the bills, Dixon, and that meant either driving long distances on a daily basis or moving you away from your grandparents, which was exactly what your father wanted me to do. That was our main problem, actually. Eventually he gave me an ultimatum. And I made the wrong choice. He left, and I stayed here with you, which meant that I had to work even more, and that just made your grandmother even more critical. Eventually she was raising you, and I was...inconvenient.”

      Dixon hadn’t realized that she’d felt that way, but he could see now how she might have. His grandmother had been a strong-willed woman of firm opinions. He didn’t doubt that she’d loved him, but her love had been a rather possessive sort.

      “How is Greg?” Jackie asked lightly, too lightly, interrupting Dixon’s thoughts.

      “Fine,” Dixon answered in the same vein.

      “Still married?”

      “Yep.”

      “That’s good.”

      Something about the way she said that set off alarm bells in Dixon’s mind, which made him say, “Lucinda and the boys are fine, too.”

      Jackie smiled knowingly. “Your brothers must be all grown up.”

      “Sixteen and fourteen.”

      “That’s quite a group of siblings,” Jackie mused. “Twenty-eight, sixteen, fourteen, and four months.”

      “Almost twenty-nine,” Dixon corrected. “I’ll be twenty-nine this month.”

      Jackie beamed. “Yes. My two Christmas gifts. I found out about your sister on the nineteenth, the day before your twenty-eighth birthday.” She laughed. “I thought they were going to tell me I had cancer. They told me I was pregnant!”

      “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, sincerely puzzled.

      She sighed. “I guess I was afraid you’d say what everyone else did, that having her was foolish. Harry and I were going to bring her together to meet you as soon as she was born and able to travel, but then...” She bowed her head. “God had other plans.” She looked up once more and said, “You do think I was foolish to have her, don’t you?”

      “I didn’t say that.”

      “Greg would probably agree with you.”

      “I didn’t say that,” Dixon repeated more firmly.

      “Your grandparents would certainly agree.” She chuckled sourly. “That would probably be the first time Greg and your grandparents agreed on anything.”

      “No one has said you were foolish to have Bella,” Dixon told her.

      “Well, I don’t care,” she went on as if he hadn’t even spoken, her fingertips brushing over Bella’s tiny foot. Dixon realized that the baby had dropped off to sleep while they were talking. “She’s worth it. You’re both worth it.”

      Feeling eerily as if his mother had somehow slipped away, Dixon murmured that he was going up to the attic for some things they might need. Tossing aside a dish towel, Fawn asked if she could help. He wanted to wave her away, but he doubted he could move down the necessary items alone.

      Nodding, he led the way to the game room and pulled down the hinged attic ladder. It was the one feature from the garage that he had elected to leave in place. After climbing the ladder, he switched on the attic light and went straight to the farthest corner. Fawn scrambled up after him. The white crib, with its yellow and green trim, stood collapsed against the wall, with the metal spring platform behind it and the mattress, wrapped in plastic, in front.

      “What do you think?”

      “That’s good,” Fawn said. “Bella can’t sleep in her carrier for long.”

      They moved all three pieces to the hole in the floor then let each one down.

      He got some rags while Fawn located an appropriate cleaner, and together they wiped down everything. As they worked, he considered what to do next. Obviously, he couldn’t put his ill mother and baby sister out in the cold, but he worried that he didn’t know the whole story yet, and he feared that Jackie might resent his father and vice versa.

      Over the years, every time anything about his mother had come up, his dad had always quickly changed the subject. Not once had he expressed an opinion or a thought about her, though the man had to feel something for her. They were once married, after all, and had a child together. Dixon assumed that Greg’s feelings for Jackie were mixed at best and most likely negative, given that few divorced couples thought highly of each other. Jackie, on the other hand, might well resent Greg and Lucinda’s successful marriage and family, which could lead to some truly appalling episodes.

      The best course at present seemed simply to say nothing to his father about his mother’s presence. After Christmas—if Jackie stayed around that long, because Dixon had his doubts on that score—he would decide what to tell his father. They saw each other almost every day at work so it wasn’t like Greg dropped by the ranch very often. Dixon reasoned that he’d surely know more about the situation by Christmas and know better what was what. He accepted that she was ill, even seriously ill, but she couldn’t be actively dying. Could she?

      Meanwhile, there was a baby in the house, and someone had to make sure that she had everything she needed. That included the best possible care. If it just so happened that care came in the best-looking package he’d ever seen, who was he to complain?

      “If Jackie’s as ill as you say, should Bella be in Jackie’s room?” Dixon asked.

      “Jackie’s her mother,” Fawn replied simply, “and we have a baby monitor, so whenever Bella wakes, I hear her.”

      That