One Frosty Night. Janice Kay Johnson
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up on the rafters. That’s where the skis are.”
“Ooh, do I still have cross-country equipment?” Olivia hadn’t even thought to look last year. It had been a mild winter, for one thing, at least when she’d returned to Crescent Creek. And with Dad looking so much worse than she’d expected, and her having to take over the store, frolicking in the snow had been the last thing on her mind. “I don’t know if I still have ski boots.”
“Attic,” her mother said. “I’m sure some of your winter clothes are still there.”
“Oh, lord. I didn’t even think of the attic.” Their eyes met, and they were both thinking the same thing. Packing.
Not today.
Her mother ended up shooing them out after wrapping most of the remainder of the coffee cake for Ben and Carson to take home.
This time Olivia dug out a hat for herself and found dry gloves to replace the ones wet from packing snowballs earlier. Ben followed her into the garage and used a step stool to pull an old-fashioned Radio Flyer sled down. Carson looked thrilled; apparently all he and his dad had was a plastic disc.
“Man, you can steer those.”
“Kinda, sorta,” she said, remembering some spectacular crashes. And a few runs down the hill with her squeezed between Ben’s long legs and his arms encircling her, too.
Ben waggled his hand as he went to the back of the Cherokee. “Keys?”
Carson dug them out of his pocket with obvious reluctance. “I can drive, right?”
“I don’t think so. Risking my life, that’s one thing.” A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. “Olivia’s, now, that’s something else.”
“Hey!” his son protested. “It’s not that hard!”
“This actually might be a good chance for him to practice, if you feel brave,” Ben said. “I didn’t let him on the way here because I wasn’t sure if the main roads were plowed. There isn’t much traffic right now, though.”
“I’m good with it,” she said.
Grinning his triumph, Carson circled to the driver’s side. Ben rode up front with him—so he could grab the wheel if he had to, she teased—and Olivia settled in the backseat.
Carson actually did pretty well during the short drive into town. Once he overcorrected during a skid, but he came out of it and nodded when Ben said something quietly.
She had known where they lived, but was just as glad Ben didn’t suggest going in when they stopped at his house. He jumped out, going into the garage through a side door and returning with the bright blue plastic disc. Waiting, she studied the two-story house, modest like most in Crescent Creek, but one of the oldest in town. It was a simple farmhouse style with a porch that ran the full width of the front. The backyard was fenced. When she asked, Carson said he’d wanted to get a dog, but he was allergic so Dad had said no.
“It’s dumb. I mean, I can be around them now,” he was complaining, when Ben got back in.
“Around who?” he asked, fastening his seat belt.
“Dogs.”
“Ah. The animals that sent you into full-blown asthma attacks when you were little. Attacks that meant you had to be hospitalized.”
“I’ve outgrown the asthma,” Carson said sulkily.
“Maybe partly because we don’t have any pets,” his father said mildly.
Carson looked ostentatiously in all his mirrors before backing out onto the as yet unplowed street, then starting sedately forward. Olivia relaxed. If he crashed here in town, no one would die, not with a twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit.
They had to park a couple of blocks from the hill leading up to the high school, new since she and Ben had gone there. Once they’d parked and started stomping through the snow, Carson carrying the plastic disc under his arm and Ben pulling the sled by its rope, they could hear the whoosh of sleds coming down the hill. Excited voices rose.
Ben gazed upward. “You been to the new high school?”
“Not to go in,” Olivia said. “I drove up one day just to see it.” She’d actually been thinking about attending the Friday night home game, until her friend Polly had called to invite her to dinner. Maybe another night.
Ben and Carson called hello to people they knew, introducing Olivia to a few. She was astonished at how many of the adults she recognized—some who’d been recent customers at the store, but more who’d been her schoolmates and now had children.
“Why don’t you try the sled?” she suggested to Carson, who demurred just long enough to be polite before sitting down on it, scooting forward with his heels, then gliding forward. He was really moving by the time he reached the bottom, letting out one delighted whoop.
She insisted Ben go next, accepting the accusation of cowardice and watching as he shot down the hill, spun out of control and crashed into a snowbank.
While she waited for him and Carson, she warmed her hands over a fire someone had started in a burn barrel hauled to the street for that purpose, and she joined the general conversation.
“Olivia!” a familiar voice called, and she turned to see one of the women she’d had dinner with Friday night. Autumn had been a good friend in high school. Unlike the others in their crowd, she’d gotten married right out of high school and now had three kids, the oldest almost a teenager. In fact, two of her kids were currently preparing to launch themselves down the hill on a sled.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” Autumn exclaimed. “I thought you’d still be snowed in.”
“Um...Ben Hovik and his son came and shoveled our driveway. He just went down the hill.”
“I saw him.” Her eyes narrowed. “Friday night, you stayed totally mum about Hovik Stage Two.”
“There’s no stage two,” Olivia said. “We’re just having fun today.”
“Uh-huh. Back in high school, you’d been out with Ben like half a dozen times before you told any of us— Ooh! Sabrina’s here, too.”
Thank goodness for distractions.
Both turned to include another of Olivia’s friends, this one a basketball teammate who had become a nurse and returned to Crescent Creek. Although Autumn and Olivia hadn’t stayed in close touch, Friday night had been all about updating each other. It turned out Sabrina had married a former logger turned builder who’d been several years ahead of them in school and therefore not on their dating radar back then. Her husband, Aaron, was a regular at Bowen’s, so Olivia greeted him with pleasure, too, when he appeared pulling a plastic disc, their two-year-old son riding his shoulders, half strangling his dad and giggling.
She had a surreal moment, looking around and realizing how many of the people at this casual gathering she knew and even considered to be friends. In all the years since leaving Crescent Creek, she’d been a city dweller who had become accustomed to being surrounded by strangers. She had forgotten what it was like to be part of a whole instead of always standing apart.
A lovely, warm feeling filled her, except as she turned to watch Ben and Carson cresting the hill, she heard Autumn whispering to someone.
“With Ben Hovik, of all people...”
She never had been able to trust Autumn with a secret, Olivia remembered. If she’d confided in her the way she had in Ben the other day, everyone in Autumn’s wide circle of acquaintances would know the Bowen marriage had been faltering even before Charles’s death, and that Olivia and her mother weren’t getting along.
So, you had to take the bad with the good, she reflected. Laughing at the sight of Ben still looking like the Abominable Snowman, she decided that, right this minute, the good was