Jamie Sobrato - Baby Under The Mistletoe

“What made you join?”

She laughed. “Foolishness, mostly. I clicked on one of those ads by accident, and next thing I knew, I was looking at your profile.”

“It wasn’t foolishness-it was fate.”

“That sounds far more romantic than my version of it.”

He sipped his coffee. They’d already done a lot of the getting-to-know-you conversation via e-mail and phone, which, Julia realized now, was probably a mistake. It left them with less to talk about face-to-face.

“I was thinking, maybe you’d like to take a walk after this?” Frank said finally.

“Where to?”

“I do a little sculpting. I have a studio down the street. I don’t normally bring people to it, so it’s a mess, but something tells me you might enjoy it. Also, my wily daughter will be there, so you can meet the person responsible for our having met.”

“Sure, that sounds lovely. Why don’t we go now. These are portable,” she said, nodding at the paper cups.

“Great. Let’s go.”

They left the coffee shop, then headed north along a side street. The day was sunnier here than it had been in Promise, and Julia breathed in the fresh, crisp air, enjoying looking at the funky shops they passed along the way.

Frank’s gait was casual and not too hurried. He made a point of keeping the conversation rolling along, telling her anecdotes about the town of Guerneville, and Julia was grateful since she still felt too nervous to think straight.

A few minutes later, they were standing in front of a brown-shingled building with large windows and a sharply pitched roof. The first floor of the building was a business called the Green Gallery.

“This is my place. My daughter runs the gallery, and I work upstairs in the loft.”

“Oh.” Julia blinked at the news, as she quickly reformed her mental picture of Frank as retired engineer and all-around outdoorsman to…sculptor and art-gallery owner? He had a few surprises up his sleeve. She hoped his artwork wasn’t awful, so she could find something nice to say about it without lying.

“Come on in and meet Chloe.”

Julia followed him into the light, clean space of the gallery. Polished bamboo floors gleamed, and the white walls bounced light around so much that overhead lights were barely necessary.

“Hey, Pop,” said a slender, pretty, dark-haired woman who looked to be in her late twenties.

She glanced curiously from Frank to Julia, smiling warmly.

“Chloe, this is my friend Julia Morgan. She lives over at Promise Lake. I thought I’d show her around the gallery and studio.”

“Great. I just finished putting up the new stuff.”

“Chloe was an art history major in college. Poor girl can’t get a real job so she has to work for me.”

Chloe rolled her eyes at this. “Don’t believe a word he says.”

“Actually, I’m lucky to have her,” he confessed. “She had a choice between working at a prestigious gallery in San Francisco, or staying here in backwater Guerneville to help out her old pa.”

“It wasn’t such a hard choice. Dad lets me do whatever I want with this place, so I get to display the work of environmentally conscious artists. Most of the works here are made entirely with recycled materials.”

“That’s wonderful,” Julia said as her gaze landed on a dazzling installation of brightly colored smashed aluminum cans.

At first the piece looked to be made out of something else entirely, and Julia wouldn’t have guessed about the cans until she heard the words recycled materials.

“And she tells me what I’m doing wrong with my works in progress,” Frank added in a teasing tone. “She’s a brutal critic.”

“Dad’s ridiculously modest,” Chloe said. “He’ll never tell you that he’s one of the pioneers of green art.”

“Oh?”

“He started working with recycled materials in the early seventies, when green was still just a color.”

“He never mentioned…” Julia said.

“He’s pretty good.” Chloe smiled. “You’ll see.”

“Remember, she’s trying to get me a date. C’mon,” Frank said, nodding toward a door in the back of the room. “I’ll show you my studio.”

Julia followed him up a flight of stairs. The second floor was a wide-open space filled with soft light from the wall of windows on one side of the room. The other walls were wood, giving the place a warm glow. A large table was littered with various tools and pieces of odd materials. In the center of the room stood a metal sculpture-a meticulously crafted globe that, upon closer inspection, Julia could see was a representation of the earth.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit too masculine. Nature and earth should feel more feminine, don’t you think?”

Julia gave the matter some thought. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Perhaps you can help me figure out how to fix it.”

She laughed. “I’m a retired elementary school teacher. Most of my art expertise involves pasting macaroni to construction paper.”

“You’re being modest.”

She turned her attention to a finished sculpture in the corner, a piece that looked a bit like a bird in flight. It was both stark and stunning.

“That’s my raven,” Frank said. “What do you think?”

“Very striking. What’s it made of?”

“Old bicycle tires, meticulously cut into tiny pieces.”

And as she got closer, she could see it was true. The tread patterns had the effect of looking like the texture of feathers.

“I used to sculpt with traditional materials, but one day I looked around and thought, ‘Why am I putting more garbage out there in the world, when there’s already so much discarded stuff the planet’s nearly drowning in it?’”

Julia looked at him, impressed that a man of their generation could be so aware of his own environmental impact. Every other man she’d known over fifty was too busy driving his giant SUV to the golf course or jetting off on vacation, to worry about such things.

Heck, she hardly worried about such things, comfortable as she was in her safe middle-class life. Here was a man who devoted his art to making important political statements. Was she political enough for him, or would he ultimately decide she was bourgeois and dull?

This was ridiculous. She was too old to be so worried about impressing a man.

She looked at Frank and realized he’d been watching her brood. “I know this isn’t the cheeriest stuff. What do you say we get out of here and take a stroll downtown?”

“Oh, thank you, but I should probably be getting home soon.”

The wind had been taken out of her sails. She suddenly had the feeling something was very wrong, and she was wasting her time here with this Frank person. Feeling self-conscious again, she took a sip of tea to have something to do with her mouth.

“I know how you feel, Julia-like we’re too old for this online-dating stuff. Maybe too old for dating at all, right?”

She smiled, feeling her cheeks redden that he’d managed to read her mind so easily.

“Maybe we are,” he continued. “But what if we aren’t? What if we miss out on something wonderful by thinking like that?”

She looked at him again, at the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, and she remembered why she’d wanted to meet him in the first place-because he seemed like a good man. Because he seemed like someone she might be able to care about.

He still did. He had a daughter who clearly liked him, and he had what looked so far like a vibrant, interesting life.

“What do you say we meet for dinner later this week?” she blurted before she could lose her nerve.

“I’d like that.”

“I’ll call you to make plans?”

“I’ll look forward to it,” he said.

Whatever else was wrong-with West, or her ex-husband or her own ability to seize the day-she couldn’t let it ruin this one little grasp she’d made at trying to find happiness a second time around.

WEST DROVE to his father’s house in a half rage, half stupor. The news that he was going to be a father was only partly sinking in.

It scared the hell out of him. If he’d just learned he’d have to have a leg amputated, he’d at least have begun immediately to see all the ways that news would impact him, but this…

Becoming a father, so unexpectedly, and with a woman he had no significant relationship with, seemed like someone had detonated a nuclear bomb in the middle of his life. Existence as he knew it had been blown to smithereens, and he was a stunned survivor, wandering around unable yet to make sense of the aftermath. What did it mean for his career-where, until now, he’d only had himself to consider when accepting assignments and promotions? Would he have to limit the postings he was eligible for? Would he even be able to continue in the military? If not, what the hell would he do? This was the only job he knew, the only one he’d ever wanted.

As he pulled into the driveway of his family home, he forcibly put aside the dilemma for a while. He had a whole other set of devastating circumstances to face, although at least he came here expecting bad news.

He got out of the SUV and strode up the sidewalk, his dread growing with each step. As he reached the door, he could hear his father yelling inside. General Morgan-or the General, as he was usually referred to-was prone to yelling, but the bellowing he was engaged in now had a different timber, almost manical quality, that West had only started to recognize last summer during his most recent visit home.

West had never imagined his own father succumbing to any weakness, let alone weakness of the mind. The tone of his father’s voice sounded crazy. No, that wasn’t the right word. Senile was better. The most accurate description, according to the doctors, was Alzheimer’s disease.

And it wasn’t early onset, either. No, the General was advanced into the dementia that was making him more and more incompetent, less and less able to function as a normal person.