Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Screamed.
Maybe shrieked.
He’s always been a bit high-strung.
Anyway, when I turned, looking toward the edge of the roof over the antlers of Santa’s favorite reindeer, I saw my son gesturing wildly. Well, just his arms, and I could only see the top half of him because I wasn’t letting him up on the roof.
“What?” I snapped at him, because I was a bit winded from being scared to death that I was going off the roof and the reindeer could not, in fact, fly.
“What?” he repeated like I was nuts. “You’re gonna die. Just come over here, please, and get down.”
“But––”
More honking, and when I looked down, I saw the love of my life standing in the driveway glaring up at me.
I waved.
“Get the hell off the roof right goddamn now!”
“I told you,” Kola called over to me, looking damn smug.
“I told you,” I mimicked him.
“That wasn’t very grown-up.”
I rolled my eyes and then moved closer to the edge, half dragging, half carrying Rudolph, who, while not being life-size, was not small by any stretch of the imagination. “Sam, I––”
“Don’t lean over,” he barked up at me. “You’re gonna lose your balance and die!”
That seemed unlikely.
“I will not die,” I yelled back.
“You’ve taken ten years off my life just being up there. What the hell are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” Ridiculous man.
“I have no idea, because you’re not supposed to be up there!”
Technically, he was right. I had tasked him with the decorating and given him the deadline the day after Thanksgiving. He promised to take care of it before the ninth of December, which was when the Winter Wonderland Tour of Lights started in our neighborhood. But when I got home from picking up the kids and there was no Sam and nothing was done, I panicked, and Kola and Hannah and I had emptied the shed and started carrying the reindeer up the ladder. Since I didn’t want my kids on the roof—it wasn’t safe—I was the one carefully clustering Santa’s posse around the chimney. The sleigh and the big man himself was another matter. I hadn’t figured out how to get that up there yet.
“Sam––”
“We have to put up the decorations, Dad,” my daughter, Hannah, explained to her father from the window below me. She was in what was newly her room that had previously been Kola’s—they switched because she liked the big window that looked out at the street and he did not—and was about to crawl up onto the roof. “The people on the decoration committee start first thing in the morning checking to see that your house is ready to be included on the tour.”
“Yes, I––”
“And Pa was worried that if you got home too late, then we wouldn’t have Santa up in time for them to check first thing tomorrow.”
“I told him I would do it,” Kola told Sam, “but he said it’s too dangerous for me to be on the roof.”
“It is,” Sam thundered up at him, agreeing with me before adding, “It’s too dangerous for all of you!”
“Yeah, but––”
“No!” he yelled at Kola. “And you better not crawl out on that!” he warned Hannah.
“But, Dad, I was going to put the ladder on the roof so I could do the lights.”
“Over my dead body,” he said, I thought, a bit too dramatically.
“I’ve got this,” I told all of them as my foot slipped and I almost did the splits on the roof. “Did you see that?” I asked Sam, who was rapidly turning gray. “Pretty limber for forty, am I right? I think I––”
My left foot hit a slick spot—there was ice up there—and I bobbled Rudolph and upset my balance, and Kola screamed before he scrambled up onto the roof, but I couldn’t hold on to the reindeer that it had taken Kola and I, together, to get up there and… I lost him.
Over the side tumbled Rudolph, and my son joined me, hands clutching my parka, as it fell and landed on its feet—like it had been staked in the snow.
“Holy crap,” Kola said, eyes wide, staring at the reindeer covered in lights that would soon be lit up once we, again, carried it up to the roof. “How’d you do that?”
“I have no earthly idea,” I breathed.
Sam was bent over, hands on his knees, and I looked at Hannah, who tilted her head up to look at me.
“You guys better get down right now before he explodes,” she whispered loudly. “Seriously, he’s gonna kill you both.”
Thinking that she knew her father pretty well at this stage of her life, I tipped my head toward the top of the ladder and followed Kola, in a crawl, over to it. Why it was scarier getting on the ladder to descend than any other part, was always surprising. You would think it would be the going up, but it was actually the opposite.