I'll Be Home for Christmas
From Christmas of the Red Chiefs
Chapter One
The bus door opened with a pneumatic whoosh, alongside the Mega-Pumper gas station, and expelled my twelve-year-old stepdaughter Marlie and me on the exhale. Marlie juggled her backpack and fashionably tiny purse while I schlepped a weekender and my tote bag.
We were the last two passengers, arriving in a place where neither of us wanted to be -- my hometown of Bent Tree Creek, California -- and as we stood there on the asphalt, our ears stinging from a snow-laced breeze and our most recent scathing argument, my heart attempted a swan dive and belly flopped instead.
"It so seriously sucks that we don't even have a car," Marlie said. Toes curled over the edge of the precipice between childhood and raging adolescence, she'd recently morphed from a sweet and very girly girl into the reigning mistress of hormonal contempt.
I raised the collar of my too-thin coat against the bitter cold and stifled a sigh. These days Marlie did enough sighing f ... read full excerpt from I'll Be Home for Christmas ebook
