The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [60]
“Come tomorrow,” Linc said, touched. “I’ll get a tree. We’ll put Daisy on the couch to supervise and you all can decorate.”
“Great,” Andrew shouted. “Christmas cookies. Eggnog. There are still three of us here. We’re not going home until Friday. Thank you. Oh, boy.”
“Great,” Linc said, not sure it was. “I’ll get the tree.”
But he didn’t have to. Daisy had ordered a tree and evergreen swags and several bunches of mistletoe from a farmer who called to say he’d be delivering them that afternoon.
“Daisy already ordered a tree?”
“Yep, she ordered all this stuff a couple of weeks ago. Said you were all gonna get the flu or something, and you wouldn’t be around to do it yourselves. How are you?”
“We’ve all had the flu,” Linc said through his amazement. “We’re better now.”
The grocery delivered Daisy’s Christmas dinner order just as Linc hung up the phone with the farmer. A frozen turkey. Lots of bread for stuffing. Red and green sugar for Christmas cookies. Candy canes for the tree. Cranberry sauce.
What had happened to scatterbrained Daisy Flattery? Who was this woman who knew she was going to be sick and planned ahead for it? Not Daisy Flattery, who let the ravens feed her.
Daisy Blaise, he thought. My wife. My wife, the adult.
His throat closed with emotion, and he leaned against the stair post until he got his composure back. Then he heard her moving upstairs and went up to see if she was all right. She was throwing up her hamburger and Coke in the bathroom.
“I told you so,” he said to his wife, the adult. “Now will you have some soup?”
The next day Andrew baked Christmas cookies while Linc and Olivia and Tracy struggled to get the tree straight. Daisy directed them from the couch, and they all finally decided that the tree was just crooked and there was nothing to be done about it.
“I like it better crooked.” Daisy smiled at the tree and cuddled Liz happily. “It has more personality.”
“Just what this house needed,” Linc said. “More personality.”
For tree trims, Daisy had woven little baskets of red and white gingham and filled them with bleached white baby’s breath. She’d made stuffed doves of white velvet, and little stuffed pears of yellow velvet, stuffed gingerbread men and women of brown velvet trimmed in white rickrack and tiny round buttons. But as far as Linc was concerned, the best of the ornaments were quintessential Daisy, little hand-painted salt dough figures of all of them: Andrew in a chef’s hat carrying his bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough, Lacey with a paintbrush wearing a dress covered in ivy, Olivia holding a women’s history book and wearing an ERA T-shirt, Tracy sitting cross-legged tickling Jupiter, Evan looking gloomy as he looked at his apple, Julia holding her sides laughing, Bill holding canvases, Chickie beaming and clutching pink roses, Art with a stethoscope and small animals peeping out of all his pockets. Daisy had even done Booker and Crawford looking scholarly and Caroline carrying a microwave stuffed with books. They all looked rounder and cuter than in real life, like elves instead of realistic portraits, but Daisy had caught their personalities and the students were charmed.
“Take them home with you when you go,” Daisy told them. “Merry Christmas from us.”
Linc’s figure had his typewriter under one arm and Jupiter under the other and he was wearing his letter jacket. He kept turning it in his fingers, fascinated by the detail. “How’d you know what the jacket looked like?”
“I found it in your stuff. I tried it on too. It’s really warm.”
Later, when they were all stuffing themselves with warm Christmas cookies and milk, he went upstairs and got the jacket. When he came down, he put it around Daisy’s shoulders as she sat at the table.
“Stay warm,” he said, and went into the kitchen so he wouldn’t have to talk about it. When he came back out, she’d put her arms through the sleeves and was cuddled up in the jacket’s yellow and black bulk, her