Page 41 of Single Dad's Christmas Cookie
“Give me your coat,” I said, holding my hand out, expecting her to take her coat off and hand it to me. Instead, she held her arm out and pulled her hand inside. I looked at the sleeve withoutthe hand before I realized she needed me to pull on the cuff. As I pulled on the coat sleeve, she retracted her arm and twisted until I was left holding the coat.
She ate her French fries, delicately, one at a time, carefully chewing and pausing between bites to take the sip of her drink. She ate so slowly and methodically. I was convinced that she would still have food left over by the time Nova returned.
I sat and ate my cheeseburger and fries with her. I had easily twice as much food, but it still took Amelia longer to eat.
I pulled out my phone and checked to see if maybe I had missed a message from Nova. There were no messages or texts. Nothing.
“What do you normally do in the afternoons?” I asked Amelia.
She shrugged.
“What do you and Nova do after lunch?” I asked again.
“We color or watch a movie.”
“How about I put a movie on? I’m sure Nova will be back in no time. Will you be okay if I do that and go into my office to do some work?”
Amelia shrugged. “Can I come in color in your office?”
I needed to be able to focus, and I knew my daughter could be a bit of a chatterbox, but I also wasn’t going to leave her on her own. I was certain that Nova would be back any minute.
“Sure, why not? Grab your things. Come on.”
I didn’t expect Amelia to be in my office for more than ten minutes. So after an hour had passed and Nova had still not returned, I started to be concerned. The snow was falling thickerand harder, and she had expressed a real concern about being able to drive in it. That was not a good combination.
I sent her a quick text and followed up with a call. The call didn’t go through. It went straight to voicemail. Maybe she was driving? She shouldn’t be answering the phone anyway, if that was the case.
But I didn’t like it. It was going to get dark soon. Being the shortest day of the year combined with the storm was not a good combination, especially for a nervous driver in a little car.
Her car might have been a good choice for driving in the city of Atlanta, where Nova was from, but it was not a good choice for the wintry roads up here. If she wasn’t back in a half an hour, we were going to go out and look for her. I managed to wait for another ten minutes before I was barking for Amelia to get her coat on.
“Where are we going?”
“I think we need to go find Nova. I’m afraid she might have gotten lost and forgotten how to get to the house from the grocery store.” As I started to explain it to Amelia, I realized that I didn’t need to make her nervous and scared for Nova. But I had an increased tightening in my shoulders and an uncomfortable flutter of nerves in my gut.
“Do you know which grocery store she goes to?” I asked Amelia as I fastened her into her car seat in the back. As if I expected a six-year-old to pay attention to where the cook shopped.
Of course, she wouldn’t know. How many grocery stores were there in town?
If I was going to go in search of Nova, I needed a plan. Taking my daughter out in a snowstorm was questionable at best, but Nova was out there, and I needed to find her.
I drove to the first store I could think of. I didn’t see Nova’s car on the road or in the parking lot.
“I don’t see her,” Amelia said mournfully.
“Don’t worry. We’ll find her.” But I felt a building anxiety at her absence.
I drove to the next grocery store I could think of, and from there I made my way back to the house. I did this back and forth driving as the road conditions got worse from home to store, to store to home.
She needed to be somewhere.
I hit the GPS to give me yet another route. It recalculated and directed me down a road I wouldn’t have thought about taking.
A thick layer of snow covered everything. But then through the snow, I saw flashing lights off the side of the road. I hit the brakes and turned my hazards on.
“Stay here,” I commanded Amelia as I pulled over and jumped out of the car.
The snow on the ground was not smooth and even. It was lumpy and churned up like there had been a fight. From the position of the car halfway in the ditch, it looked like Nova had lost.
