Free One Last Weekend by Linda Lael Miller Page A

been since Frank was seven himself.
    â€œHow come you put that up here?” she asked, with good reason. Every Christmas of her short life, her great-aunt Eliza’s calendar had hung in the living room of the main house, fixed to the mantelpiece.
    It was a family tradition to open one box each day and admire the small treasure glued inside.
    Frank crossed the worn linoleum floor, intending to steer his quizzical daughter in the direction of the front door, but she didn’t budge. She was like Maggie that way, too—stubborn as a mule up to its belly in molasses.
    â€œI thought it might make Miss Hutton feel welcome,” he said.
    â€œThe lady who lived in our house when she was a kid?”
    Frank nodded. Addie, the daughter of a widowed judge, had been a lonely little girl. She’d made a point of being around every single morning, from the first of December to the twenty-fourth, for the opening of that day’s matchbox. This old kitchen had been a warm, joyous place in those days—Aunt Eliza, the Huttons’ housekeeper, had made sure of that. Putting up the Advent calendar was Frank’s way of offering Addie a pleasant memory. “You don’t mind, do you?”
    Lissie considered the question. “I guess not,” she said. “You think she’ll let me stop by before school, so I can look inside, too?”
    That Frank couldn’t promise. He hadn’t seen Addie in more than ten years, and he had no idea what kind of woman she’d turned into. She’d come back for Aunt Eliza’s funeral, and sent a card when Maggie died, but she’d left Pine Crossing, Colorado, behind when she went off to college, and as far as he knew, she’d never looked back.
    He ruffled Lissie’s curls, careful not to displace the halo.
    â€œDon’t know, Beans,” he said. The leather of his service belt creaked as he crouched to look into the child’s small, earnest face, balancing the coffee mug deftly as he did so. “It’s almost Christmas. The lady’s had a rough time over the last little while. Maybe this will bring back some happy memories.”
    Lissie beamed. “Okay,” she chimed. She was missing one of her front teeth, and her smile touched a bruised place in Frank, though it was a sweet ache. Not much scared him, but the depth and breadth of the love he bore this little girl cut a chasm in his very soul.
    Frank straightened. “School,” he said with mock sternness.
    Lissie fairly skipped out of the apartment and down the stairs to the side of the garage. “I know what’s in the first box anyway,” she sang. “A teeny, tiny teddy bear.”
    â€œYup,” Frank agreed, following at a more sedate pace, lifting his collar against the cold. Thirty years ago, on his first night in town, he and his aunt Eliza had selected that bear from a shoebox full of dime-store geegaws she’d collected, and he’d personally glued it in place. That was when he’d begun to think his life might turn out all right after all.
    * * *
    Addie Hutton slowed her secondhand Buick as she turned onto Fifth Street. Her most important possessions, a computer and printer, four boxes of books, a few photo albums, and a couple of suitcases full of clothes, were in the backseat—and her heart was in her throat.
    Her father’s house loomed just ahead, a two-story saltbox, white with green shutters. The ornate mailbox, once labeled “Hutton,” now read “Raynor,” but the big maple tree was still in the front yard, and the tire swing, now old and weatherworn, dangled from the sturdiest branch.
    She smiled, albeit a little sadly. Her father hadn’t wanted that swing—said it would be an eyesore, more suited to the other side of the tracks than to their neighborhood—but Eliza, the housekeeper and the only mother Addie had ever really known, since her own had died when she was three, had stood firm on