In Love with a Single Farmer-Daddy novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Christmas

The double doors swung shut behind her.

Nobody in the gym moved.

Posy stood at the microphone with her arm still red where Bonnie's fingers had been.

She was looking at the doors.

Her bottom lip had started to shake.

I knelt down on the stage beside her so we were the same height, and I pulled the microphone stand down with us.

"Posy," I said. "Look at me, not the door."

She looked at me.

"Who taught you that song?"

Her voice came out in a thread. "Mama."

"Where was Mama when she sang it with you?"

"In the car."

"So Mama was singing too," I said.

The microphone carried it to the back wall.

"Then if singing killed people, it would have been her own song that did it. And it didn't. The ice did."

I stood up and looked out at three hundred people.

"You all just heard what Bonnie screams," I said.

"Half of you were filming. The county attorney will want every second of it, so send it to him tonight."

Nobody coughed.

Nobody shifted in their chair.

Then, in the back row, my grandmother stood up.

Mavis Garber, seventy-six, in her church blouse, alone.

She didn't say anything.

She just stood.

The patty-melt mother stood up next.

Then the pastor.

Then the whole row of co-op men scraped their chairs back.

Then the gym was full of people standing up for a six-year-old in red boots.

Posy looked out at all of them.

Then she looked up at the music teacher.

"Can I do it again?" she whispered. "From the start?"

He sat down at the piano.

Posy sang "Silent Night" from the first line to the last, and on the second verse three hundred people sang it with her.

Christmas morning it snowed.

Roscoe fed at four-thirty, same as every day, and came back in with a sack under his arm.

Posy was already at the bottom of the stairs in her nightgown and red boots.

She'd been sitting there in the dark since five, she told us later, and she hadn't woken anybody because she wanted to be polite.

"She's talking now," Roscoe said to me over her head. "There's no stopping it."

"Daddy, did Santa come, did he eat the pie, did the cats get presents?"

"Bug, I've been up two hours, I don't know anything."

The tree was a cedar from the windbreak, crooked, with paper owls on it that Posy had cut out.

She got a sled, and drawing pencils, and a halter for the old sorrel with her name stamped on the leather.

The sack under Roscoe's arm had a half-grown gray kitten in it, the one from the loft, wearing a red ribbon.

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