Do Not Open 'Til Christmas by Sierra Donovan (17)

Hemingway thought the cardboard box on the living room floor was just great when it was his idea to jump inside.

He wasn’t so keen on it when Chloe closed the flaps over him and sealed the box shut with packing tape.

He yowled, the box rattled, and an urgent paw shot out through one of the many crude, quarter-sized air holes Chloe and her roommates had cut into the box last night. They didn’t have a cat carrier, so they’d repurposed the box from a package Tiffany had gotten from her grandmother last week. It wouldn’t have to hold him long, if Hemingway’s family was on time for their rendezvous in the Pine ’n’ Dine parking lot this morning.

“Ready?” Kate asked. She stood by the door in her pink uniform, car keys in hand.

“Yep.” Already in her coat, Chloe scooped up the box, trying to hold on to both the top and bottom for security’s sake. The box pitched back and forth as Hemingway moved inside his new confines.

Tiffany looped Chloe’s car keys over Chloe’s little finger and peered through an air hole. “’Bye, sweetie. We’ll miss you.”

A paw darted out again, and Tiffany jumped back.

In the car, Hemingway’s raspy voice took on a whole new vocabulary. At first his meows were long and drawn out, almost like moans. Chloe expected that. Most cats hated cars. But as she followed Kate to the diner, his vocals soared into what sounded like multi-syllable words, like the notes of a tenor auditioning for the Metropolitan Opera.

“It’s okay, buddy.” Chloe rested a hand on the box as the car reached a stoplight. “Maybe we should have called you Pavarotti.”

A long brown and white paw came through an air hole and flailed around as if groping for a hand to hold. Chloe choked back something between a laugh and a sob. Her emotions were too close to the surface, and the time waiting for the stoplight gave them a chance to set in.

A cat is not a metaphor, she told herself.

After seeing Bret last night, giving up Hemingway felt that much harder. He wasn’t her cat, never had been. Letting him go was the only thing to do. It would be nice to see Hemingway reunited with his people, she reminded herself. But he’d found his way into her heart in a short time, and . . . she was turning the cat into some kind of an analogy again.

Somewhere along the line, she’d forgotten her own very good reasons for not getting involved with Bret. He’d obliged her by supplying new ones. She needed to get a clue and move on with her life.

When the car moved forward again, Chloe kept her hand on top of the box, afraid he might ram his way out like some kind of hyperactive jack-in-the-box. And to think Kate and Tiffany had gotten him home the first time with no box at all.

Chloe pulled into the employee lot behind the Pine ’n’ Dine for the first time in nearly two months. This was a sad errand, but she hadn’t wanted to just send Hemingway out the door this morning. He’d become her friend, and she wanted to give him a proper good-bye.

A long, ululating meow from the box let her know just how much Hemingway appreciated her efforts.

It wasn’t even full daylight when, at a little before seven, a minivan pulled into the lot. It felt like a ransom drop, or a drug deal.

A woman and a little girl—not a boy—got out of the minivan, met by Kate. It hadn’t warmed up since last night; she had to be literally freezing in her Pine ’n’ Dine uniform, since her coat didn’t cover her legs. By contrast, the little girl was barely visible under her hooded coat, snow boots, and what looked like ski pants. Mom had bundled her up well.

Chloe got out as the three of them approached the passenger side of her car, where the box waited. The mother, a pretty blond woman with a slightly frazzled expression, had an actual wire mesh cat carrier in hand. Transferring the cat could be tricky. Maybe they should just hand over the box. Except . . .

Chloe said, “Maybe you’d better take a look and make sure it’s the right cat?”

The girl’s gray eyes got bigger. The thought apparently hadn’t occurred to her. Chloe felt ashamed of her fleeting hope that they might have the wrong animal.

Hemingway rasped out a meow, a little less theatrically now that the car wasn’t moving, and the box shook.

“It’s him!” the girl exclaimed.

“Sophie,” her mother cautioned. “Let’s just be sure.”

Carefully, holding down the box flaps, Chloe used a key to slice through the packing tape. The flaps came up, and she seized Hemingway before he could make a break for it. His claws instantly planted themselves in the front of her coat as he dug in, trying to climb over her shoulder. Chloe crouched to the little girl’s level, and Sophie came forward to pet the cat.

“Careful, honey,” her mother said. “When kitties get scared sometimes they bite or scratch. Or try to run away.”

“Easy, buddy.” Chloe pried the cat’s claws out of the shoulder of her coat and lowered him so they could see his face. His hugely dilated pupils had replaced the irises almost completely.

“It’s Garfield.” Sophie’s voice was tremulous as she launched into a hug that included both Chloe and the cat. A lump swelled in Chloe’s throat.

“Garfield?” Chloe’s voice faltered. “Like the cartoon cat?”

“He was more of an orange color when he was a kitten,” the mother explained. “Thank you for taking care of him. Sophie’s been beside herself for days.”

For over a week, Chloe thought guiltily, as Kate politely refused the mother’s attempts to offer a reward. Meanwhile, Sophie’s shining eyes remained fixed on her pet.

Sophie wanted to hold Garfield, but they convinced her that wasn’t a good idea. With some difficulty, the little girl’s mother helped Chloe stuff him into the cat carrier. Inside his new wire mesh prison, the cat resumed his raspy song.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Chloe said thickly to No-Longer-Hemingway. “You’re going home.”

She knew the cat was where he belonged, and Sophie’s smile soothed her heart. But it still gave her a sharp pang to see him go.

After the cat’s owners drove away, Kate gave her a hug, which told Chloe she must be in really bad shape.

“Look at it this way,” Kate said over her shoulder. “He was shallow, disloyal. There are lots of other cats in the sea.”

Chloe laughed and sniffled. “I hope not. That’d be pretty bad for the cats.”

“Okay, how’s this: there’s a cat out there for you somewhere and you’ll know it when the right one comes along.”

“Good enough.” Chloe blinked hard, sniffed once more, and pulled back.

She was pretty sure these analogies were happenstance, that Kate didn’t know Chloe had a lot more on her mind and heart than just a cat. Then again . . .

“Thanks,” Chloe said. “Now you need to get to work and so do I.”

* * *

When she got to the office, the black Mustang wasn’t in the parking lot yet. Chloe took another box out of the trunk of her car and, in short order, took down the Christmas decorations on her desk. Yes, it was depressing. More than a little. And maybe she shouldn’t give up her decorations on someone else’s account. But everything she’d done after Bret kissed her the first time had only made things worse. Well, she was finished with making things worse.

She started the coffee. Heaven knew she needed it.

When Bret came in a few minutes later, she made sure she was hard at work at her computer. He hung his coat and walked by, pausing briefly at the sight of her stripped-down desk.

Chloe made the mistake of looking up. As Bret’s glance flicked from her desk to her face, his eyes barely showed recognition. It scraped her insides raw. She kept her hands on the keys and returned her eyes to the screen. And Bret went to his office.

She knew there was more underneath that stony gaze. A lot more. She’d felt it when he kissed her. But he was good at hiding it, and it still hurt.

* * *

Half an hour later, Bret stared at the piece that had just landed in his in-box. It was easily the most sentimental thing Chloe had ever written.

And on it went, about the lost cat Chloe and her roommates had returned to a little girl and her mother. It talked about loving and letting go and what a pet could mean to a child. Unabashed schmaltz, and somehow it worked. It worked on Bret, at any rate.

Only Chloe would name a cat Hemingway.

Emphatically, it wasn’t news. It was a first-person column, not the kind of thing they usually ran in the Gazette, and Bret found it impossible to read it with any kind of objectivity. The piece was a slice of emotion laced with quirky humor, especially the part about the loud drive in the car to deliver the cat. And the payoff with the little girl’s reaction . . .

Okay, it got him. But it wasn’t news.

Chloe had obviously dashed off the piece this morning, and Bret had never seen her produce anything so quickly. It was clearly written from the heart; he doubted she was capable of writing any other way. But what to do with it?

Bret looked through his closed glass door at Chloe’s desk, bereft of its little tree. He’d done that. Which shouldn’t factor into his decision.

What would McCrea do? He might give her some fatherly advice about keeping emotion out of journalism.

Or he might run it.

It was Christmastime, after all. A time when sentiment could be pretty forgivable.

Bret set it aside until that afternoon, when it was time to work out the layout of tomorrow’s edition. At last he decided to run it in the editorial section, giving it a nice side column on page three.

He wished he had something more to give her.