He shook his head. “I need to stay here and help my sister.”
Rachel didn’t look like she needed help, but if she had been Jack, she would’ve stayed behind, too. She got off the trailer and grabbed hold of the hand Aiden wasn’t using to hold Bailey’s leash and walked with everyone else up to the porch of their neighbor’s house.
She took one glance back at the trailers as Hope knocked on the door and saw Jack straightening Rachel’s blanket andmaking sure it was tucked in around her so the cold couldn’t get in. It was so sweet that he was so protective of her.
After a rousing rendition of"Silent Night," where the dogs joined in and did their best to sing, too, they headed back to the trailer. This time, Jack didn’t sit close enough that their legs touched. He didn’t reach out with a pinky to brush her leg, and he didn’t take her hand in his. She felt the loss keenly. That hope Aiden had given her felt a little less potent.
As they turned down another road, Rachel said, “Hey, my friend Amy lives in that house up there on the left. She has brought me so many meals while I’ve been going through chemo.”
Noelle’s mom, who was riding in the closer trailer, called out to her dad, “Stop at that blue house on the left.”
Before Jack got any other ideas, Noelle said, “I’ll stay with Rachel this time—it’s your turn to go up and sing.”
He shook his head. “I don’t—”
But Rachel interrupted with, “Will you tell Amy I said hi?”
Noelle was close enough to see the muscle in his jaw working, but then he gave a nod and called out to where Aiden was now sitting with Noelle’s nephews. “Come on, buddy. Let’s go sing.”
Aiden and Bailey both leaped off the trailer and ran around to take Jack’s hand before walking up to the home. Noelle watched them, impressed that Jack was willing to go, even though he had such bad associations with Christmas, he didn’t sing, and he probably didn’t know Christmas songs very well.
“What’s Jack like at work?”
Noelle scooted closer to Rachel so they could talk more easily. “Very professional and closed off. He doesn’t get personal, ever.”
Rachel laughed. “I wondered if that was what he was like since he always seems so concerned about professionalism.Well, that and the fact that he always goes to work dressed in a suit. But outside of work, he’s sweet. Thoughtful. Fun.”
She had seen a lot of that over the last couple of weeks. It was a side of him she was growing to love. “What was he like as a kid?”
Rachel looked up like she was thinking about where to start. Then she said, “When our parents died, he hit a bit of a rebellious stage. Which I totally understood—it was such a hard time. I was eighteen, and suddenly I was his guardian, and I had no idea how to be the mom of a fifteen-year-old. I had mothered him a lot all of his life, but this was different.
“And it wasn’t that he was rebelling against me—it was more that he was mad at the world because so many things had been stacked against us. He just stayed out past curfew, got some questionable friends, started dressing differently, things like that. I knew it was likely just part of the grief process and how he dealt with it. But I was so worried for him and didn’t know how best to help.
“After a few months, there was a night when he’d left with friends and hadn’t been in the best headspace. Before, he’d missed curfew by an hour or two. That night, it was four hours past, and I worried myself sick every single second of those four hours. By the time he got home, I was a complete wreck.
“He came home and saw exactly what that night had done to me. I swear, he stopped being rebellious right then.” She snapped her fingers. “Like flipping a switch. He somehow figured things out and pulled himself out of it. I think he realized that he was piling even more stress on me when things had already been hard enough for both of us.
“But he’d always been a sweet, thoughtful kid. When we were little, our dad would drink a lot and get verbally abusive. Just mean. Sometimes physically mean. We learned to just stay away whenever he was drinking. Our mom dealt with it by closingherself off and shutting down, so Jack and I had to rely on each other a lot. Since I was the big sister, I acted like the mom when our mom wasn’t.
“When we were small and putting ourselves to bed, healwaysthanked me for taking care of him. I’ve never known anyone to be as grateful as he is. One night, after he thanked me, he said, ‘But there’s no one taking care of you.’ There wasn’t. And I really felt it, you know? I nearly started bawling right then and there just to have it acknowledged.
“So from that night on, he always toldmea bedtime story, so I’d be taken care of, too. He made up his own before he was old enough to read and did a mix of reading stories to me and making up stories as he got older. I swear that was what made me survive our childhood. I’m lucky to have him as a brother.”
Noelle’s eyes were misting at hearing how his childhood was and how sweet he was through it. She looked over at where he stood at Amy’s porch, holding Bailey’s leash in one hand and holding Aiden, who was perched on his shoulder, with the other hand.
“He’s going to make a really good dad someday.”
Rachel nodded. “The best.”
Noelle tried not to imagine him being a dad to their own kids. She knew how dangerous that kind of thinking was.
Yet, a part of her still imagined it anyway. And it must’ve been showing on her face because when Jack and everyone else came back to the trailers, he was giving her a curious look like he was trying to interpret her expression.
And this time when he sat down, he pulled the blanket around them snugly, so she cozied right into him.
When they made it through all the lights in town and back to her parents’ house, everyone started saying their goodbyes. Jack had planned to take both Rachel and Aiden home, but Aidensaid, “Can Ipleaseride back with Noelle? She has windows that you roll down by turning a handle instead of pushing a button!”
Okay, her little Kia Rio was not that old—it just happened to have manual windows. Hearing Aiden talk about it made it sound like it was several decades old.
