Christmas in Absaroka County: Walt Longmire Christmas Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

my lungs along with my words.
    She looked up at me. “Is it Mom?”
    I glanced away and lifted up my hat, scratched the hair underneath, and then lodged it back on. “I don’t know . . . I guess.”
    She nodded and bumped her hip into mine, pulling in even closer against my arm, and, when I wasn’t quick enough placing it around her. She squirmed her way into the crook and draped the offending appendage over her shoulder. “I miss her, too.”
    “I know you do.”
    She continued to watch Dog. “You need to get with the Christmas program, Daddy.”
    “I know.”
    She sighed against my chest, and I could feel the words welling up in her. “Dad, I may not be coming home for the holidays as much anymore. I’ve kind of got my own life back East, and I’m thinking I’d rather use the time off from the firm in the summer.”
    I thought about my undersheriff Victoria Moretti’s younger brother, the Philadelphia patrolman who had asked my daughter for her hand and pretty much everything else. “Sure.”
    “If this is our last Christmas together, I was thinking that it would be nice if it was a good one.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Her head shifted past the thick collar of my sheepskin coat, where she could watch Dog. “That’s one long pee.”
    I watched as he gave out with the last few surges. “He saves it up for when you come home.”
    Dog, aware that we were talking about him, broke off the irrigation and came over to poke his jealous muzzle between us. Cady turned her face up and stood on tiptoe, grazing her glossed lips against my stubble.
    “I’m probably going to get some things for some of the other people on my list, too, so in a very short period of time you will be required to brighten your mood and come in and help me carry. All right?”
    Dog and I watched her twirl the black greatcoat, fling the tinsel-threaded cha-cha fun fur scarf over her shoulder, and march between the parked cars of the Best Buy parking lot as if it were the steppes of Russia.
    I looked down at Dog. “Show off.”
    Smiling and wagging, he looked up at me.
    “Yep. Laugh now. PetSmart is right next door, and I bet she’ll want to get you a pair of those reindeer antlers with the jingle bells.”
    After loading the beast back into the truck, I stood there for a minute, thinking that I really didn’t want to get in yet. The air was bracing, and maybe that’s what I needed, a little slap in the face. I stood there for a while watching the cars wheel in and out of the parking lot and hoping my mood would shift like the traffic.
    I remembered the first Christmas with Cady and how she’d refused to go to bed—the life of the party at eight months. My wife and I had had a Christmas picnic by candlelight on a Hudson’s Bay blanket we had thrown on the floor beside the crib. It was the best Christmas dinner I ever remember having.
    Glancing at my profile in the side window of my truck, the clinging flakes blocking my inspection just enough so that I could stand the view, I gave the hard eye to the left tackle of the almost-national-champion University of Southern California Trojans, to the First Division Marine investigator, and to the high sheriff of Absaroka County—informing him, in no uncertain terms, that it was time he straighten up and fly right.
    He didn’t seem overly impressed, so I took him for a walk.
    * * *
    It was crowded at the entrance of the electronics store, with the lights spilling from the whooshing pneumatic doors and the trumpeting of classical Christmas thundering against the heavy glass where stickers held a large red and white December calendar informing the world that only three days of shopping remained.
    I ambled through the empty handicapped spots around a green Wrangler toward the concrete pillars that kept the populace from parking inside the store. My eyes shifted past the calendar to a lean young man in a Navy dress uniform and an arm sling. He stood by a large cardboard box that had been covered with