Aunt Santa

Chapter 6

They stopped by the store on their way back to the house. Sara tried to ignore the lick of panic as she took in the empty shelves of bread, milk, and eggs. She grabbed a few heavy bottles of water and put them in the cart along with a box of batteries.

"Can we get more cereal, too?" BB asked as her aunt tossed a dozen candles into the cart and then another armful for good measure.

Sam looked at the full cart and then at her. "Are we going to be okay without power?"

"Oh, yeah." Sara cleared her throat, trying to look casual as she grabbed a few more bags of potato chips. "We'll have plenty of heat from the wood stove and the stove works on gas so we can still cook. And it's freezing outside so we can just put the food out on the deck if we need to. And we have lots of flashlights at the house, too. It'll be fun! Like camping!"

Aware that her voice had reached a dangerous pitch, she glanced down at BB. "Why don't we get some more sprinkles and fun stuff for the cookies? We can still bake them tomorrow."

"It'll be the only thing we can do tomorrow," Sam muttered. He turned away from her to text someone on his phone and she wondered if he was ordering a car to return him to New Jersey.

The snow didn't start falling until later that night, hours after they'd put up the tree and strung it with lights. Sara retrieved the boxes of ornaments and managed to find a few camping lanterns in the garage as well. While BB and Sam decorated the tree and unwrapped more decorations, Sara quietly replaced batteries in their flashlights and set one in each of the rooms.

The scheduled dinner for that night was spaghetti and meatballs. She made enough for a small army even though BB wanted just a bowl of plain spaghetti with butter and some "sprinkle cheese."

It was going to be fine, she told herself as they settled on the wide couch to watch a movie. Snow was just starting to drift down outside, which she could see through the glow of twinkle lights outside the house, but it wasn't nearly as thick and severe as the farmer had warned. Maybe he'd been exaggerating, she thought.

Surely, a little snow couldn't be that bad.

Growing up, Sara had seen her fair share of snowstorms and they'd never been much cause for alarm, other than the severe storms that kept her home from school.

She was probably the only kid in her class who dreaded hearing the words "snow days." School was her escape, a relief from being at home.

When she made it to college and then started working in the city, she'd met a few people from the Midwest who had real horror stories about snow storms. She once went out with a guy who had grown up in North Dakota. He told her it wasn't unusual to see the snow stacked up so high against the house that it blocked the doors and windows. Sara found herself pulling at the neck of her sweater and quickly changed the subject.

They weren't quite at that point at Christmas House, but when Sara woke up and peered out the window, it felt pretty close.

The first thing she noticed was how the tree branches sagged under the weight of the snow. Icicles had formed overnight so that it appeared like whole branches had been dipped in thick white powder, ice all around the edges to keep the branch anchored to the earth. The wind had been hard at work too, crafting enormous drifts of snow into sculpted dunes, some that must've been at least two feet in height.

The bedroom windows looked like they'd all been sprayed with fake frost. Sara climbed out of bed slowly, trying not to wake BB who was buried under a mountain of blankets, the pink puff at the top of her ski hat the only thing that was visible.