“You’re joking.”
“I’m not joking. You’ve got something, Jess. We’re going to work on that something together.” He reached out to hug her and then remembered that probably wasn’t cool and pulled back. “Sorry. Forgot we were outside the school. No hugging allowed.”
“I don’t care what any of them say. They’re jealous because you’re my dad.” The way she said it confirmed his suspicion she was having trouble at school.
He struggled to access calm. “Do people give you a hard time over it?”
She opened her mouth to dismiss it and then changed her mind. “Sometimes. Kids are stupid, that’s all. They’d all love to ski with you every day.”
An ugly suspicion formed in his mind. “Jess, you came home in a mess yesterday—”
“I slipped on the ice. I have to go. Bye, Dad.” She grabbed her bag, but he stopped her.
“Wait. I just talked to you. You should talk to me.”
“I do.”
But it was obvious to him she was holding something back. “Do you want to invite someone back this weekend? Sleepover? Because you can.”
“No, thanks. I’m going to be skiing the whole time, and we still need to buy a tree. There’s loads to do for Christmas. Talk about it later, Dad.” She was out of the car before he could stop her, walking fast through the gates of the school, head down, not talking to anyone.
Tyler swore under his breath and fought the temptation to march in after her and demand to know what was going on. Because something was going on, he was sure of it.
He sat back in his seat, gripping the steering wheel tightly.
Was that why Brenna had been encouraging him to talk to her?
Did she know something she wasn’t telling him?
Making a mental note to ask her, he drove back to Snow Crystal. A morning spent with a group of skiers with more money than skill did nothing to improve his mood, and by the time he collected Jess from school, his temper was wearing thin. It was snowing steadily, and there were no signs of it stopping. He wondered if Brenna and Josh might decide to postpone their date or even cancel altogether.
Jess walked out of school the way she’d walked into it, head down, avoiding eye contact, striding toward the bus. She would have walked straight past his car if he hadn’t opened the window and called to her.
“Dad!” Startled, she glanced around her. “What are you doing here?”
“I had to go to the store for something,” he lied, “so I thought I might as well pick you up.”
He saw a group of mothers looking in his direction and realized he’d been blind to how having him as a father might have affected Jess. Did all these people spend their time looking him up on the internet? Were they reading the lies or, worse, feeding those lies to Jess?
She slid into the seat next to him and raked her hair away from her face.
“So how was today?” He’d read that parents weren’t supposed to subject kids to a barrage of questions, and he wondered how that was supposed to work. He wanted to pin her to the seat until she’d told him what was bothering her.
“Fine.”
Tyler ground his teeth. “For the record, fine isn’t an answer.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve been thinking about Christmas. If Brenna’s going to be living with us, we should buy her a present. A big one. It needs to be a proper Christmas. She can’t be the only one without a pile of presents under the tree and a stocking at the end of her bed.”
Tyle
r, who didn’t want to think about stockings or beds in relation to Brenna and was still trying to work out how to get something other than fine out of his daughter, nodded. “Sure. Whatever. No, wait a minute.” He realized he hadn’t done anything about Christmas gifts. “Who says there is going to be a pile of presents for you? Have you sent a letter to Santa?”
Jess slouched in her seat. “I stopped believing in Santa when I was six, Dad. And no one writes letters anymore.”
“So?” Stuck behind a snowplow, he drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Send an email to the North Pole. Message him. Get him on Skype. Do whatever you teens do to communicate these days. The guy needs clues.”
Jess laughed. “Skype with Santa. That sounds like something Kayla would dream up.”