Free Mackinnon 03 - The Bonus Mom by Jennifer Greene

going to do presents this year?”
    Whit hated to answer. She hadn’t taken off her first-of-the-morning scowl yet. “I thought we all agreed that this year—just this year—we’d do presents in a different way. Just buy some things that we could do together. Like games. Or an ice cream maker. I’d pop for new bikes—”
    “What about cell phones?” Pepper piped in.
    “No new cell phones. You have a cell phone.”
    “But we don’t both have cell phones. And the one we have is boring. It doesn’t do anything.”
    “Except call home in an emergency,” Whit agreed.
    “Dad! That’s like what you have when you’re six years old. We’re way past that now.”
    “I know you both feel that way.” Sometimes Whit had the worrisome feeling of being the mouse cornered by two cats. “But a lot of the new technology that costs a ton...we can’t do all of it. So some of the fancy stuff, you have to be old enough to work, to earn some money yourselves, rather than count on me to pay for it.”
    Pepper opened her mouth to argue—this argument had been building for months now—but Lilly intervened, her voice careful and quiet.
    “Dad, I think your idea about an ice cream maker is way awesome. But still. I don’t want to wake up Christmas morning with no presents, no surprises at all. Pepper and I like different things these days. We need different things these days.”
    “If you really need something, just tell me. That doesn’t have to be about Christmas. I’m pretty sure we can always find a way to do something you really need.”
    Lilly’s lip started to tremble, which meant her emotions were threatening to get away from her, but she obviously had something she wanted to say. “Even before Mom died, we were talking about redoing our room. Or using the study, so we could both have our own rooms. Pepper still wants purple, but I don’t. I want blue. I could paint it myself.”
    Whit didn’t have tics. But sometimes he felt like he could easily develop a few when his daughters tossed him in quicksand and he had no rule book about how to get out. “I don’t have a problem with your having separate rooms. I didn’t know about that. But that has nothing to do with Christmas.”
    “But it would have. If Mom were here. Because it’d be about coordinating colors of bedspreads and rugs and stuff on the wall. Figuring it out, then doing it together. And shoes. And my school jacket...it’s just gorpy now.”
    “Gorpy,” Whit echoed carefully.
    “I’m not mad at you or anything,” Lilly said. “But you just don’t understand.”
    “I’m trying, honey—”
    Too late. Her face had scrunched up, tight and red, the way it did when she was trying hard—too hard—not to cry. She bolted from the chair and ran upstairs before he could try to talk her down.
    Pepper ducked her head, mainlined the cereal.
    All he could think was that he was way, way over his head. He’d chosen the holiday away so they wouldn’t be so constantly reminded of their mom. But nothing ever seemed simple with the twins. It wasn’t just their mom they’d lost. But a woman in their lives. A grownup female’s influence.
    He could buy fifty ice cream makers and he still couldn’t come through the way they needed sometimes. Bedspreads? How was he supposed to make getting a bedspread—a color coordinated bedspread—something he could do with his daughters?
    He could probably do it.
    Hell, he could probably volunteer for a root canal, if it was something good for his girls.
    But hell’s bells. Sometimes talking with them was like translating a language from New Guinea.
    He needed help.

Chapter Five
    Y ears ago, Rosemary had discovered that one of the best places to hide out was a darkroom—figuratively and literally. She wasn’t thinking about Whit when she turned out the lights. Or her ex. Or Christmas. Or anything else but her work.
    The photograph slowly clarifying in the tray was never going to make National Geographic quality,