Free The Christmas Note by Donna VanLiere Page A

cook and she was terrible at crafts and spent way too much time thinking about what to wear or how she looked, but she has been a great mom. I can’t look at her and think any of the things that Melissa must think of her mother. I finish the cookie and look at her. “When I was a teenager my mom and dad divorced. We went from all of us under one roof to three of us and Dad across town in an apartment. He eventually met another woman and moved to Arizona and became part of her family. Her kids called him Dad because they were so young when he married Liz. I’d sit in tenth grade math class and think about those snotty-nosed kids calling my father Dad while I went home to a house without him in it.” Melissa is quiet, awkward is more like it. It seems she doesn’t know how to carry on a conversation so I carry on without her. “I blamed Mom for everything. She was married briefly before Dad, when she was young. I brought that up and told her she didn’t know how to be married. It just seemed to me that she could have done more to keep Dad in our lives. I hated her, I think. I wouldn’t talk to her for months. It was awful. I loved my dad. I loved them together. I thought they were good, that everything was fine. I didn’t know what was wrong about them. I still don’t know.”
    “Your mom never remarried?”
    Finally, she speaks! I wasn’t sure if she was even listening. I reach for another cookie. “She did. After divorcing Dad, she married a college professor named Len and he was a good man. They were great together, but…” I think about it. “But I missed her with Dad. I wanted my kids to know them as grandparents together, not apart. Dad’s marriage failed several years ago but he still lives in Arizona. He has grandchildren there. His life is there and Mom’s was with Len. Len was good to Mom and he was good for her. He kept her grounded. Maybe that was Dad’s problem. Maybe he let Mom get the best of him. I don’t know.”
    Melissa finishes and twists the napkin around her index finger. “What happened to Len?”
    “He died a few years ago, and then Mom and Gloria became best friends. She’s done more for Mom than anybody in this world,” I say, laughing.
    “Ramona never had anybody.” She says it with such gavel-rap finality.
    “No one?”
    She untwists the napkin and starts wrapping it around another finger. “She had lots of men—good-looking men, some of them married, and she’d use them for money and booze, something to eat, you know. They were after one thing but she didn’t care. She played that game for a long time. Sometimes a guy would wise up and leave her alone but she could always find another idiot and string him along. Even when her looks started to fade she could still find some desperate fool. She never had one of them who stayed. Not one staying man or one staying friend.”
    “Do you hate her?” I’m surprised I asked that but watch her.
    She drums her fingers on the table, the napkin looking like a poorly wrapped bandage around her middle finger. “I can’t hate her. I hate everything she did and everything she didn’t do. I hate everything she was, but I can’t hate her. It doesn’t make sense.”
    “Sure it does.”
    She slides her plate away from her and pushes her chair back. I can tell that Melissa thinks she’s uncovered too much.
    “Thanks for this.”
    I reach for the plate. “Hey!” I say, remembering. “Did you talk to your boss about finding your siblings?”
    She looks small and sunken now. “He and Jodi weren’t in on Friday when I wanted to talk to them.” She twists her mouth and rattles the bottom of the glass on the table. “And then I lost my nerve after that.”
    “Why?”
    She looks exhausted and defeated. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to call my aunt and ask her about a girl she told me about years ago … a girl she said looked so much like me she could be my sister.”
    “Have you called her?”
    “I did, but I hung