December 1992

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“Hold up, hold up.” Maverick crouched before the fireplace and pushed the button, and fake flames rose up into the fake logs with a gentle cough. He stood up and surveyed their work. “There. Now it’s perfect.”

Jenny crossed her arms. “It’s not bad, I guess.”

“What do you mean?” He uncrossed her arms and pulled her close. “It’s perfect. The tree, the stockings, the fire. Like a Christmas card. And next year, it’ll be even better, because there’ll be another stocking next to yours.” He rubbed her belly. It was still flat, she’d only been pregnant for a few weeks, but he’d become fascinated with her belly and could hardly wait for her to get big.

They hadn’t planned for this baby, and he hadn’t been thinking about being a dad yet, but now that she was coming—she was a she, he could feel it—Maverick was all but marking the days off on the calendar.

Jenny, on the other hand, had spent the past couple of weeks, since she’d taken the test, in a daze. It scared him, and he hated that feeling above all others. He kept trying to find ways to get her excited. Sure, she was scared, a lot of changes were going to happen to her body, and the biology of the whole thing freaked him out a little bit, so he could hardly imagine what it felt like to actually grow a human being inside your own body, but if he could get her focused on all the good stuff, she wouldn’t be so scared. Jenny was like this about all the big things—she needed to be distracted from her worries and focused on the goal.

Meanwhile, Maverick was having the best fucking Christmas of his life: in love with a beautiful woman, baby on the way, Christmas tree, fireplace, stockings hung with care. He was making a family of his own, just like Lester had said, all those years ago, when he’d aged out of the system and gone out into an unforgiving world alone.

“Jenny.” He pulled her to the sofa and sat her down. “What’s wrong, babe?”

Staring at their cheap fake fireplace and its bright orange flame, she sighed. “I don’t know...I guess...I’m scared. What if I suck as a mom? What if I turn out to be like my dad? What if...I don’t know. Just what if. I don’t feel like I’m ready for this, Mav.” She was going to cry. Dammit.

Maverick didn’t think he’d fully relax until she was too far along to do anything about the pregnancy. He didn’t really think she’d do anything like that, certainly not without telling him first, but still...maybe once all the options were truly gone, she’d stop finding dumb reasons not to be glad about this. “Who cares if we’re ready?” She laughed soggily and tried to pull away, but he held her hands in his firm grasp. “No, I mean it. Who cares? Who’s ever ready for this? To hear Joanna talk about it, their girls were planned, and she still had no clue what she was in for.”

“That’s not helping.”

“It’s Fate, babe. It’s right because it happened. All my life I’ve wanted exactly this: a family just like this. At Iggy’s, we had those little cheap felt stockings, you know the ones they sell at the drugstore? They’re like five inches long?” She indicated that she knew what he was talking about. “We had those, and we’d write our names in Elmer’s and dump gold glitter on them, and then we’d use thumbtacks and stick them on this paper fireplace that the staff taped to the wall. We had a tree in the dining room, but the presents under it were empty, like the stockings. Just for show. We got presents, the church would come by and drop off shit the parishioners donated, and we each got something from the staff, but it wasn’t any kind of Christmas you saw on television. Even the Cratchits had more Christmas than we did.”

“Cratchits?”

“Yeah—from A Christmas Carol.”

“Oh, right. Duh.” She smiled a little, and Maverick had some hope.

“We didn’t have much Christmas because we weren’t a family. We were just a bunch of boys who didn’t have anybody. No donation dump of cheap toys and six-packs of socks makes up for that.”

Before she could start feeling sorry for him, Maverick changed direction. “When I went to bed on Christmas night, this is what I thought about. When I was grown up, I was going to have a family, and I was going to have a real tree with real presents under it and a real fireplace, and real stockings full of gifts. This is the first time I ever had it. Even at Mo and D’s, I’ve been just borrowing theirs. This is ours. Yours and mine. And next year, when the baby comes...”

He kissed her hands and got up.

“Mav?”

“Hold on a sec.” Crossing the room to the front door, he went to his kutte, hanging on the rickety coat rack, and rummaged in an interior pocket. “I was gonna wrap this, but the box is pretty enough. I got the baby something.”

She smiled. “The baby that’s the size of a pumpkin seed? That baby?”

“The one and only.” He resumed his seat and handed her the sparkly silver box.

With a curious twist of her brow, she lifted the lid, and then she gasped. “Mav, what?”

He took it from her and lifted out the dainty sterling chain. A small, heart-shaped pendant dangled from it. “You see what it says?”

She lifted the pendant on her fingertips. “Mav, what if it’s a boy?”

“She’s a girl. Trust me.”

“But what if it’s not? I don’t know if the baby knows what it is yet. Are you going to be disappointed?”

“To have a son? Fuck no.” He grinned. “I won’t give him this, of course. Might confuse him. I’ll give him something else and love him just as much. But she’s a girl, Jen. I know it. A little girl, and I’m gonna treasure her and carry her around on a puffy pillow so she never gets hurt, and I’m gonna love you and take care of you both so good. Next year, we’ll have another stocking on the fireplace, and there will be a fuck ton of presents under the tree, and she will be perfect and sweet and not spoiled at all even though she’ll have everything she could ever want. All my life, I’ve been working for this one thing. I’m not gonna screw it up. I promise. I swear to you—we are going to have a perfect life and a perfect family, and there is nothing you will ever need to worry about. I will take care of you forever.”

He took the pendant from her and set it back in its box, with the heart front-side up. Sterling silver, engraved in elegant script, with tiny diamond chips dotting the ‘i’s.

Daddy’s Little Girl