Deck the Halls. Arlene James

couldn’t help wondering how his nose had been broken, then she scolded herself for even thinking about him. Vince Cutler was nothing to her, and she intended to keep it that way. Secondhand experience had taught Jolie that romantic entanglements were more trouble than they were worth.

      Her mom had been big on romance, and all that had gotten her was three kids by three different men, none of whom they could even remember. Still, every time some yahoo had crooked his finger at Velma Wheeler she’d followed him off on whatever wild escapade he’d proposed, often leaving her children to fend for themselves until she returned.

      Sometimes they were out of food and living in the dark with the utilities shut off when she’d finally remember that she had a family. One day she simply hadn’t returned at all, and eventually Child Welfare had stepped in to cart Jolie and her siblings off to foster care.

      For years Jolie had harbored the secret fantasy that her mother would come back a changed woman, determined to reunite their scattered family, all the while knowing that Velma would have had to learn to care for them a great deal more in her absence than she ever had while present. Then one day Jolie had been told that her mother had died in a drunk-driving accident and been buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere in Nevada. A simple typographical error had resulted in the misspelling of her name and an incorrect filing of records. Her mother had been gone four years by that time.

      With Velma as their lesson, Jolie and her sister Connie had sworn that they would not go from man to man. Then Connie had somehow settled on that jerk Kennard and doggedly refused to give up on him. Jolie understood that Connie had feared being a serial loser just like their mom, but only after Kennard had gone to prison for the rest of his life, taking a pregnant Connie along with him, did she turn away from him. Of course, Connie had claimed that she hadn’t even known that an armed robbery was being committed that day, let alone a murder, despite the fact that she had been sitting in front of the bank in a running car.

      Jolie had been inclined to believe Connie at the time. Now she just didn’t know.

      Maybe if Connie had made a better choice than Kennard…but then, Jolie reminded herself, she wouldn’t have had Russell. It was worth any hardship to have a little boy like that. Wasn’t it?

      Jolie shook her head. Thinking that way could get a girl in trouble. Better just to go it alone.

      Jolie had learned that lesson the hard way after the authorities had split up her and her siblings when sending them into foster care. At first she and Connie had been placed together, but that hadn’t lasted for very long.

      Oh, they’d maintained contact. The department was good about that sort of thing. But the years had taken their toll. Jolie had been nine, Marcus only a year older and Connie just seven when their mom had disappeared.

      Two decades later, Jolie was again alone.

      With Russell to fill her days and nights and heart, it had seemed that she had family again, but only for a little while. Now all she had was a pile of other people’s clothing to iron and a single room with a private bath to call her own—so long as she could pay the rent.

      That thought sent her back to the job at hand, and for a time she lost herself in the careful placement and smoothing of one garment after another. Funny how you could take pride in something so small and insignificant as smoothing wrinkled cloth, but a girl had to get her satisfaction where she could.

      “Come on, baby, just a little farther.”

      Jolie patted the cracked black dash encouragingly, but the little car sputtered and wheezed with alarming defiance. Then it gave a final paroxysm of shudders and simply stopped, right in the middle of rush-hour traffic.

      “Blast!”

      Someone behind her did just that with a car horn.

      “All right, already!” she yelled, strong-arming the steering wheel as far to the right as she could. The car came to a rolling halt against the curb.

      Tires screeched behind her. Another horn honked, and then an engine gunned. A pickup truck flew by with just inches to spare. Jolie flinched, put the transmission in Neutral and cranked the starter, begging for a break. The engine turned over, coughed and died again. The second time, the engine barely rumbled, and on the third it didn’t do that much. By the fifth or sixth try, the starter clicked to let her know that it was getting the message but that the engine was ignoring its entreaties entirely. Jolie gave up, knowing that the next step was to get out and raise the hood.

      She didn’t dare try to exit the car on the driver’s side. Instead, she turned on her hazard lights, put the standard transmission in first gear, set the parking brake and released her safety belt to climb across the narrow center console and the passenger seat to the other door. Stepping out on the grassy verge between the curb and the sidewalk, she tossed her ponytail off one shoulder and kicked the front wheel of the car in a fit of pique. Pain exploded in her big toe.

      Biting her tongue, she limped around to the front end of the car to lift the hood and make her situation even more visible to the traffic passing on the busy street. After that, all she could do was plop down on the stiff brown grass to wait for someone to come along and offer to help as there was no place around from which to make a telephone call. Looked like she might be trying out those coupons from Cutler Automotive sooner rather than later. Provided someone with a telephone stopped.

      More than half an hour had passed and her toe had stopped aching before a Fort Worth traffic cop pulled up behind her aged coupe, lights flashing. Traffic moved into the inside lane to accommodate him as he opened his door and got out. He strolled over to Jolie, a beefy African-American with one hand on his holster and the other on his night stick.

      “Ma’am,” he said pleasantly, “you can’t leave your car here like this.”

      “Sir,” Jolie replied with saccharine sweetness, “I can’t get the thing to move.”

      He rubbed his chin and asked, “Anyone you can call?”

      “Could if I had a phone.”

      He removed a cell phone from his belt and showed it to her. Heaving herself to her feet, she walked over to the car to take her wallet from the center console. Pulling out the coupon from Cutler Automotive, she handed it to him. Nodding, he punched in the number and passed her the phone.

      The number rang just twice before a voice answered.

      “Cutler Automotive. This is Vince. How can I help you?”

      Vince. She swallowed and shifted her weight. “This is Jolie Wheeler.”

      “Well, hello, Jolie Wheeler. Have you got mail for me?”

      “Nope. I’ve got a coupon for a free tow.”

      “A free tow?”

      “That’s what it says. Any problem with that?”

      “No, ma’am. Where are you?”

      She told him, and he said he’d be right there before hanging up. She handed the phone back to the officer and thanked him. He nodded and turned to watch the passing traffic, trying to make small talk. They’d covered how the car had been acting and where she was going and where she’d been and the state of disrepair of the Fort Worth streets by the time the white wrecker, lights flashing, swung to the curb in front of her crippled car.

      Vince bailed out with hardly a pause, and Jolie’s heart did a strange little kick inside her chest. Then he walked straight to the grinning cop, ignoring her completely.

      “Jacob,” he said, shaking the other man’s hand.

      The policeman smiled broadly and clapped Vince on the shoulder. “How you doing, my man?”

      “Staying busy. How’re you?”

      “Likewise, only with very little sleep.”

      “New baby keeping you up nights?” Vince asked, flashing his dimples.

      It was at this point that Jolie