“No, there’s another one in there,” he said, pointing to the short side of the living room. Emelie got up and peeked into the bedroom, and it looked exactly like the four rooms on top, the living room and the kitchen. A thorough and completely surprising Christmas theme. There were Christmas curtains with Santas, tapestries with lyrics from Christmas carols above the bed and a red, fluffy carpet on the floor. What the heck was she going to do with all of this stuff? And what was she going do about the grumpy young hottie living in her garden?
Chapter 4
Two hours later, Emelie was back in her car on the ferry heading back towards the mainland. She wasn’t wearing tights anymore; she had pulled them off and thrown them away. She really wasn’t much of a tights girl, but she had wanted to make a proper first impression. She wasn’t so sure on who exactly. When she was working as a housekeeping manager at the city hotel in Växjö, tights were mandatory, and she hated it. They were itchy and way too warm. No, it was nice to get rid of them.
She was thinking about the house on Sardinön. Her big house. Andreas wasn’t sure about exactly how big the house was, but it was probably written down somewhere. She did know it was large enough to house a family bigger than hers. If you managed to remove all of the Christmas stuff, of course. She sighed and rolled down the window. A fresh, salty breeze found its way into the car, cooling her down. She lifted her fringe and put her head out of the window to get more of the fresh air. While she had been in the house just walking around, feeling astonished by the sheer amount of Christmas decorations, Linn and Sara had texted her several times.
“What is it like?”
“Is it big?”
“Is it a shack that needs to be sold ASAP?”
“How’s the hottie?”
“Hello??”
She hadn’t had the energy to answer. How was she going to explain the total and utter Christmas chaos that reigned in Astrid’s house?Herhouse, she corrected herself and stroked her hand over her face. She had taken lots of pictures and now her phone was full of Santas, sleighs, Lucia brides and elves, so that they could see for themselves when she returned. The ferry was almost back at the shore and, right before she started the car, she sent a text message to her friend and her eldest daughter:
“On my way home, will tell you everything once I get there. Hugs.”
She started the car and prayed to some car god that her brown heap of metal Peugeot would manage to take her all the way home.
The following day, she told Linn, Liv and Linnea about her trip. The younger girls thought that it was amazing to have a Christmas house and thought that they should keep everything exactly the way it was and move in as soon as possible. Emelie figured that in their mind, there was a Santa standing in the lawn outside the house, ready to fulfil their every wish of ponies and new ice skates. Sara and Linn were both as surprised as she had been and still was, and no one really had a good solution to what she should do with the place.
“If you want to sell it, you will need to clear out all Christmas stuff. That’s some job,” Sara said as she was scrolling through Emelie’s pictures on the phone.
“But if you keep it, you will also need to clean up,” Linn said, peeking over Sara’s shoulder. Emelie dropped down at the kitchen table, her head in her hands.
“I knooow, it’s just so insane!”
Then they had discussed different scenarios regarding the Christmas decorations. Could they be tossed? Sold? Were they worth anything? And did she want to live there? Maybe just during summer? What did it actually cost to have a house like that? When Emelie went to bed that night, her thoughts were spinning even faster than before, and she had no idea what to do. She pushed the thoughts away and tried to focus on work tomorrow and what to expect there.
The next morning, Emelie packed her wallet and sneakers into her backpack and looked at Linn, who was still sitting at the kitchen table with a half-finished sandwich in front of her.
“Come on, we need to leave. It’s your first day at the summer job. You don’t want to be late, do you?”
“Bloody hell, this is bonkers”, Linn said, emphasising the last word.
She was looking through all the pictures in Emelie’s phone for the fourth time.
“I mean, where did the old lady find all this stuff? It’s nuts” she said, turning the phone around in order to get a better look.
“I don’t know, and it didn’t seem like Andreas did either”, Emelie said.
Linn sighed and slowly started moving towards the hallway. The prospect of working as a cleaner at the City Hotel wasn’t exactly exciting, but still, it was a job.
“Was he fit?”
Emelie had one hand on the door handle and the younger girls were already in the car, waiting.
“What? Who?”
Linn rolled her eyes.
“Christ…Andreas of course!”
“Heck, I don’t know. He looked like a normal bloke. Or you know, like a 30-something kind of bloke that grew up on a west coast island, you know, moped with a loading platform, dungarees, no cap though,” she said, looking at her daughter who was slowly tying her sneakers.
