That was probably Emma, making sure that the article stayed right there. She was the archaeologist in the family and was always trying to figure out what their ancestors were like.
He didn't reach back to the very end of the drawer, but he knew the unopened letter from the music conservatory in New York City was back there.
He didn't know whether he had been accepted or not, because at that point in time, his parents had passed away, and he knew that there was no way he was going.
Still, he'd never brought himself to throw the letter away. After all, at that point he’d already turned down the offer from Juilliard.
Pulling the cash box out, he shut the drawer with his hip and put it in the cash register as his phone buzzed several times.
Once he had everything organized and was ready for customers, he picked up his phone.
There were a bunch of messages on the family group text chat, and he opened it up. It started out with his younger sister Mia answering the question that he'd posed last night—who is coming to Christmas dinner, and what should he plan.
Can't make it home for Christmas, sorry!
She didn't offer any reasons why, but he figured that the fact that she just started her new job in California probably had a lot to do with it.
His brother Jake said,New job demands crazy hours. Maybe next year?
He was going to text back that he was glad that Jake finally got his dream job, flying commercial airliners for a major US airline. He had been working his way up to that for years, and now had a route that took him from the United States to Europe to Australia, and every once in a while, he stopped off in Asia. He was definitely a globetrotter, although he'd been in the Air Force for years and had been stationed all over as well. It wasn't exactly new that Jake wasn't going to make it home. He'd probably only been home two or three times since he graduated from high school almost fifteen years ago.
From Emma:You know I'm not coming. I’m trekking down through Mexico and I’ll be out of service for a while. Then I'll be thinking about you from the Caribbean.
Noah let the phone fall gently to the counter as he stared unseeing out the window.
He was pretty sure Cami wasn't going to come, since she was busy doing her residency in Houston, and from what he understood, the newer doctors got the worst hours. She probably wasn't going toget a single day off in the entire month of December and half of January.
And then of course, Cody wouldn't be home either, for whatever reason.
I'm definitely jealous of the Caribbean. Enjoy yourself!He hit send.
Maybe you'll be in Australia over Christmas, and wouldn't that be fun to have Christmas in the summer?
He hit send again.
Let me know how the new job is going.He sent that one off and then allowed his phone to fall back down to the counter again.
No one would be home. He'd spent the last twenty years raising his siblings, and not a single one of them would be home for Christmas this year.
Was this how parents felt after their children had all flown the nest? This was the empty nest that so many adults dealt with, only he'd never been married. He'd been so busy raising his siblings that he hadn't even dated.
Not much anyway. The few times he'd tried, he'd scared his potential girlfriend away by talking too much about his siblings and what they were doing. That was his life though. That and the music store.
Well, he had one other thing he did, but no one other than his siblings knew about it. And even they didn't understand the extent that it mattered to him.
Typically, he didn't have a whole lot of business first thing in the morning, so he grabbed the window cleaner and arag and walked over, squirting some on the big showroom window that allowed passersby on the street to look in and see the arrangement that he'd made with musical instruments and Christmas decorations.
He wasn't much of an artist, but he thought it looked pretty good.
He squirted some and began to wipe it off. Back when his siblings were home, each one of them had chores that they had to do in the morning, and for a lot of years, he hadn't washed the windows at all because it had been someone else’s job.
But since Mia, his younger sister, had gone off to college, he'd been pretty much doing everything himself. He’d gotten used to only seeing his siblings sporadically, and the work of the music store sat on his shoulders alone.
How long was he going to be able to stay open?
He stopped wiping, and his eyes caught on the Victorian house on the corner. Vivian Dempsey was a lovely lady, and she had decorated her house beautifully, but that's not what caught his eye. There was a beautiful woman with long, dark hair washing the outside of Vivian's big picture window. The one with the Christmas town twinkling from inside.
The woman’s hair shimmered in the morning sun, and as he watched, she finished wiping, stood back, and then turned around slowly and seemed to look right at the music store.
