Free A Winter Discovery by Michael Baron Page B

in the study/guest room had done it for Gerry, though Maureen’s enthusiasm would have sold him anyway. And he had to admit that the length of the driveway had rarely been an issue in all the years he’d lived here.
    He’d seriously considered moving after he and Ally had married. It didn’t seem fair to ask her to make a home in the place he’d lived for so long with his late wife. Ally wouldn’t hear of it, though, noting that the house had tremendous meaning to Tanya and was the only home Reese had known. She’d accepted, she said, that Maureen’s spirit was going to be with them forever, and that this would be true whether they changed addresses or not.
    As Gerry began shoveling again, he thought about how graciously Ally had entered all of their lives. She’d been remarkably delicate with him, and she and Reese had bonded seemingly instantaneously . Her most impressive work had been with Tanya. On the eve of Gerry and Ally’s wedding, Tanya began to show signs of strain, clearly having more trouble with the idea of her father remarrying than she was willing to acknowledge or discuss. On the way to the rehearsal dinner, she snappishly said to Ally, “Am I supposed to call you ‘Mom’ now?” Gerry cringed, but Ally seemed unfazed, telling Tanya that she could call her anything she wanted, including a profanity if that made her feel better. Tanya didn’t respond immediately, but a few minutes later, she spoke again.
    “It doesn’t seem right to call you ‘Ally’ anymore,” she said, all the cynicism gone from her voice. “I just can’t call you ‘Mom.’”
    Ally smiled softly at the girl who was about to be her stepdaughter. “I get it, Tanya. Really.” She paused for a moment and then said, “How about calling me ‘Millie?’“
    Tanya chuckled, a clear sign that the tension was easing. “Millie?”
    “Yeah, Millie. We’re going to be a fam- millie now. I guess you could call me ‘Fam,’ but I’d really prefer that you didn’t.”
    Tanya tried the name out a couple of times and it stuck. By the time Reese was speaking in complete sentences, he was calling Ally ‘Millie’ as well.
    The thought that Tanya would be traveling home from college soon made the snow feel suddenly heavier. Gerry hadn’t gone on line this morning to see what the weather was like in Milwaukee. When Tanya had decided to go to Marquette, he’d convinced himself that she wasn’t terribly far away because it was only a two-hour flight. However, it was a fifteen-hour drive, and, if conditions were bad enough that planes couldn’t get off the ground, driving wasn’t likely to be much of an option, either. Maybe it was a good thing that Tanya wasn’t returning for another six days. With any luck, the weather would warm up again before then.
    Gerry tried to get into something of a shoveling rhythm, but the reality was that he really had no aptitude for this sort of thing. There were people who reveled in physical labor. Gerry was not one of those people. Maybe he’d see if one of the guys plowing the streets would finish the job for him.
    An exclamation came from the front door, sounding something like a warrior cry if the warrior had sucked on helium first. Reese, barely visible inside a parka, snow pants, and a hat with thick ear flaps, came barreling out of the house, catapulting himself into the snow, and executing a full barrel roll before the drifts stopped him. He attempted a snow angel, but the snow was so deep that he was doing little more than creating mini-avalanches.
    He popped up and beamed at Gerry. “It snowed last night!”
    Gerry grinned. “Is that what this is?”
    Reese took huge handfuls of snow and threw them up in the air to shower himself. While only his face was uncovered, it was already ruddy from his dive, and now this self-imposed storm. Reese didn’t seem perturbed by this in any way.
    Reese glanced around himself quickly, as though he couldn’t comprehend the bounty that surrounded