A Winter Discovery Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  The Story Plant

  The Aronica-Miller Publishing Project, LLC

  P.O. Box 4331

  Stamford, CT 06907

  Copyright © 2011 by The Fiction Studio

  Cover design by Barbara Aronica-Buck

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-61188-027-4

  E-book ISBN-13: 978-1-61188-028-1

  Visit our website at www.thestoryplant.com and the author’s website at www.michaelbaronbooks.com

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except as provided by US Copyright Law.

  For information, address The Story Plant.

  First Story Plant Printing: November 2011

  Printed in The United States of America

  eBooks created by www.ebookconversion.com

  I wrote the majority of this story in the library after the power in my home went out for close to a week. I’d therefore like to dedicate A Winter Discovery to all libraries. Even for those of us who have embraced digital, libraries are invaluable community resources, and they deserve all the support we can offer them.

  Chapter One

  Hang on

  Reese had a feeling he wasn’t going to fall asleep so easily tonight, either. Dad sang him a couple of songs at bedtime, like he always did. Millie even stuck around after because she thought Reese looked “bouncy.” If she had seen him in bed last night, she would have realized this wasn’t a new thing. She sat with him and rubbed his back for a while, which felt really good, but when she got up and left, Reese didn’t feel any calmer.

  He couldn’t imagine how anyone stayed calm this time of year. Of course, not everyone had a birthday around now (too bad for them), but Reese knew that even if he hadn’t just turned six, he would still be super excited all the time. How else were you supposed to feel when there were cool lights and decorations all over the place? Mr. Fleegle had put a set of reindeer on his roof yesterday. Yeah, they were fake – at least that’s what Millie said when Reese told her about them – but they were still reindeer. Reindeer meant Santa Claus, and Santa Claus meant presents, and presents meant all kinds of new things to play with. Except if someone got him a sweater. You couldn’t really play with a sweater (at least not without getting Dad angry), but Reese figured he’d be okay with a sweater, too.

  Then, on top of everything else, they watched “Frosty the Snowman” on TV tonight. Frosty was no-doubt-about-it the coolest snow-dude ever and he got Reese even more revved up about Christmas. This was the time of year when snowmen came alive! That was almost better than getting presents. Well, at least it was better than some presents, like that sweater he was thinking about earlier.

  Reese tried to make himself go to sleep. He thought about really boring things. Like when the news is on the radio or when Grandpa is talking about golf. Tanya had once told him that when she had trouble sleeping she counted backward from a hundred. Reese thought about doing that, but since he was still having a little trouble counting frontward to a hundred, it didn’t really work out.

  Finally, he just sat up. He knew if he went into the living room that Dad or Millie or even both of them might sit with him for a while, maybe even until he fell asleep. But he didn’t want to do that. Since he was six, he was older now, and that meant he shouldn’t need his parents babying him. Maybe if he just played with something else, he could get his mind off Christmas, at least a little. Then he’d be able to fall asleep.

  As he threw his legs over the side of the bed, he saw the picture of his mom on his dresser. He felt that goopy feeling he always got when he looked at Mom. Dad and Millie and Tanya were always telling him stories about her, but it all just felt slippery inside of him. It was like she was real and she was pretend at the same time. Reese sorta had the same feeling when he looked at her as he got when Tanya was away at college. But how could he miss someone he didn’t really know? It was his mom, that’s how. How could he not miss her. He knew she was around for the very, very beginning of his life, but he didn’t remember any of that. He just wished he had something he could hang on to. Anything.

  He slid over to the picture and picked it up. In it, she was holding Reese close to her. All you could see of him was his tiny face because he was only a day old. Reese didn’t think the baby looked like him at all. Mom could’ve been holding any kid, really. Mom looked beautiful, though, and he liked knowing that she was holding him. There were only a couple other pictures of the two of them together because Mom died before Reese had gotten much older. Some kind of instant death thing where you’re okay one minute and gone the next. Dad tried to explain it to him a few times, but it just seemed weirder and scarier every time he did.

  What would it have been like to spend Christmas with your mother? Millie was great and all – really, really great – but it had to be super special to have a mom at Christmas. Too bad he was never gonna get the chance. In the movies, people got big-time Christmas wishes all the time. Maybe he’d wish for that. Just a tiny little something with his mother. If he wished hard enough it could come true.

  Touching Mom’s face once, Reese put the picture back on his dresser and then turned toward the window in his room.

  It was snowing!

  Excitedly, he got up to look outside. It was snowing very hard. Ginormous flakes. Could be great packing snow, which meant that Dad and Millie were going to be in for a serious snowball fight tomorrow.

  Now he was never gonna get to sleep. Christmas coming and snow? There was just way too much to get freaked about.

  Reese looked over at the streetlight to watch the snow as it was coming down like crazy. As he did, a single flake floated in this direction and landed on his window. It was weird, because all the rest of the snow seemed to be blowing the other way. He looked at the flake closely, trying to see the different lines coming from it. Millie told him that the lines were called “crystals” and that every single one was different from every other one. He figured she was exaggerating about that.

  After he’d looked over the snowflake for a while, Reese put his finger up to the window, knowing that the heat in his finger would warm up the window and melt the snowflake like it had when he’d done that kind of thing before. He kept his finger there for a while, but when he pulled it back, the flake was still there, not looking melty at all.

  What was that about? Maybe this was mutant snow, a kind that never melted. How cool would that be? They could have snow all year ’round. When they went to the beach in the summer, they could come out of the water and then jump around in the snowdrifts. That would be the best thing ever.

  He touched his finger to the window again. When he pulled it away, the snowflake was still there. This was very interesting.

  He continued to check out the flake for a while. As he did, another picture of his mother popped into his head. She looked a lot like she did in the picture that was next to the hall closet. That one of her on the ski slope where she had a gigantic smile on her face. Thinking about that picture while still staring at the snowflake, Reese got that goopy feeling all over again.

  He put his finger to the flake one more time – it still didn’t melt – and then crawled back into bed. Once he lay down, he looked at the picture of his mom and then over to the snowflake again. Suddenly, he was getting very sleepy.

  He scrunched down into his covers, still thinking about Christmas and snow, but really thinking about his mother more th
an anything else.

  He yawned and snuggled his pillow, feeling very tucked in.

  Chapter Two

  A Frosty

  Realtors should mention this when they show you a house with a long driveway, Gerry thought as he looked up to check his progress. They’re nice to have, except when you need to shovel a foot of snow off of them. He’d been out for forty-five minutes already, and he’d cleared less than a quarter of the driveway. Last year, he’d invested in a snow blower, but the thing didn’t work when the snow was this deep. Another thing not mentioned by the salesperson. “Yes, sir, this is an excellent piece of equipment. It’ll work whenever you need it – except when you need it the most.”

  Gerry realized that he would have bought the snow blower anyway. There weren’t that many snowstorms like this on Long Island, and he couldn’t remember the last time it had snowed this much in December. He also realized that he would have bought the house even if the realtor had thought to tell him about the amount of work it took to clear the driveway after a blizzard. Maureen had fallen in love with the house within thirty seconds, marveling at the flow, the sun room, and the wainscoting in the living room. The size of the kitchen and the built-in bookcases 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 him. Then his eyes locked onto Gerry’s. “We gotta make a Frosty!”

  Gerry stuck his shovel in the pile in front of him. “You want to make a snowman?”

  “Not a snowman, Dad. A Frosty!”

  Was this some kind of terminology all the cool kids were using in kindergarten? “A frosty?”

  “You know, one that comes alive.”

  “Umm….”

  “A big one. Way bigger than me. Like he was in the show.”

  Reese had fixated on the holiday special they’d watched on television last night. Fortunately, Gerry had thought to TiVo it, because Reese wanted to see it again as soon as it was over. He was still wired about it when he went to bed.

  “I gotta get the stuff,” Reese said, looking back toward the house. “Where’s your corncob pipe?”

  “Oh, man, it’s in the shop.”

  “Okay, we’ll have to figure that one out.” Reese started ticking things off on his mittened hand. “We need buttons, coal, a big hat. You have one of those, right?”

  “A Yankee cap?”

  Reese glanced up at the sky. “Daaaaaaaaaad! He isn’t gonna come to life if we do it wrong.”

  “Tell you what – let’s start building the snowman –”

  “– Frosty.”

  “Right, Frosty. Let’s start building it and we’ll figure out the details later.”

  Gerry stepped around the wall of snow he’d been creating with his shoveling, and knelt down near his son to start gathering the base of the snowman. He took one look back at the driveway. He still had most of it to clear, and they had several errands to run today. It could wait, though. If he was lucky, one of the snow plows might come by before Frosty came to life.

  Chapter Three

  In stock

  The mall was far more crowded than Gerry had expected it to be. Didn’t other people have trouble shoveling out of their driveways? Didn’t they realize they could buy everything they were shopping for online, and that they could probably spend less doing so? Over the past five years, Gerry had become fully committed to internet shopping, having launched an online specialty goods retailer that now did business in more than forty countries. Yet here he was, with seemingly the entirety of Suffolk County, buying presents for seemingly every person they’d ever met.

  “Everything we needed really was just a mouse click away,” he said to Ally as they navigated through the crowds at Aeropostale to get shirts for two of her cousins.

  “It’s not the same. Christmas shopping isn’t supposed to be mannered.”

  As Gerry reached for a polo, another shopper snatched it away as though it were the last lifeboat on the Titanic. “I think I might have been okay with mannered.”

  Ally kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is fun. This is part of the whole getting-into-the-season thing. Besides, Reese wouldn’t have had nearly as much of a good time watching you buy everything on your computer.”

  Gerry glanced over at his son who was, at this moment, engaged in an an
imated conversation with a cutout of Santa Claus. Earlier, he’d climbed on top of a huge Christmas tree ornament, sung along with a group of electronic elves, and exchanged high-fives with a guy in a reindeer suit. Going to the store at this time of year was like one extended Christmas morning for him.

  “Yeah, I just wish he’d use his imagination a little more. I was really glad to see that he didn’t get too upset when the Frosty we built didn’t start moving around.”

  “Resilient kid. I thought I timed the hot chocolate announcement particularly well there.”

  “That was a master stroke. How did you know he thought we were building a living snowman?”

  “Are you kidding? I think the people on the next block knew. Reese is not exactly quiet in his enthusiasms.”

  The boy was now making swooping motions with his hands to the cardboard Santa. Gerry assumed they were discussing flight patterns. “No, he’s not. So, do you think he’s going to tell Santa what he wants for Christmas?”

  Ally tipped her head in that direction. “If he does, then we should definitely eavesdrop. We’re running out of time.”

  Over the past month, both Gerry and Ally had bought a variety of stocking stuffers for Reese – everything from packs of baseball cards to DVDs to action figures. A decision on his big present had eluded them, though. It wasn’t that they couldn’t figure out what Reese might like; it was that they needed to winnow down the choices from the great range of things that excited him. Did they address his growing love for sports (Gerry lobbied for a multi-game ticket plan to Yankee Stadium, but Ally suggested that the gift would be more appropriate for the other little boy in the household)? Did they try to encourage his interest in music? Of late, he’d been showing increasing fascination with crafts. Was it time to explore that further? Was he too young for a video game system? Even if he wasn’t, did they really want him to have one at this age? A remote controlled car? An e-reader? A silver tea set? Nearly anything could be a good choice, while at the same time nothing seemed to be the perfect choice.