Matt Sanders

As it turned out, after school, ace had been offered a Christmas shopping outing with the Bakers. She still had to buy something for her daddy, she informed Matt, and it would be much to hard to keep it a secret if he came with her.

She was so excited about going shopping with her new friend that he didn't miss having the heart to tell her she would be missing making cookies with her teacher. Having to make such a momentous choice would have torn her in two.

Matt knew he could phone and cancel and maybe even should phone and cancel, but as he moved up to the walkway to Aubree's house, he contemplated the fact that he hadn't.

And he knew he was saying yes to the Light.

Even though he knew better. Even though he knew, better than most, life could be hard, and cruel, and made no promises.

When Aubree opened her door, that's what he saw in her face. Light. And he moved toward it like a man who had been away for a long time, a soldier away at the wars, who had spotted the light pouring out a window of home.

And hour later her kitchen was covered in flour and red food coloring. he was pretty sure there were more sprinkles on the floor than on the cookies.

And despite the fact she was the world's best teacher, calm, patient, clear about each step and the order to do them in, those cookies were extra ugly. Sugar cookies, they were supposed to look like Christmas tree decorations. They didn't.

He held one of the finished cookies up for her. "What does this look like?"

She studied it. "An icicle?"

"Aubree, it looks like something obscene." He bit into it, loving her blush. "But it tastes not bad."

She put her hands on her hips, still very much Miss Dawson, pretending that kiss of a few nights ago wasn't hanging in the air between them like mistletoe, pretending her face wasn't on fire. "Has anyone ever told you you're incorrigible?"

"Of course," he said, he picked up a misshapen Santa and bit his head off. "That's part of being a Sanders."

"Really?" She surveyed the cookies, apparently realized they were not going anywhere near the welcome party, picked up one and bit into it. "Tell me about growing up a Sanders."

And oddly enough, he did. in Aubree's kitchen, surrounded by the scent of cookies baking and a feeling of home, Matt told her how it was to grow up poor in a small town.

"But," he said, making sure she knew he was not inviting pity, "we might have been poor, but our family was everything. We were fiercely loyal to each other. My dad couldn't give my mom much materially, but I don't think a man has ever loved a woman the way he loves her. He would fight off tigers for her. For any of us. There was an intense feeling of family.

"And we might have been poor, but we were never bored." He told her about working in the studio since he was just a little boy, starting on small chores, working his way up to recording.

He told her about making their own fun since they could never afford anything. In the summer fun was a secondhand bicycle and the swimming hole, or a horse and a pile of dirt.

"You really haven't lived your life until you've squished mud through your toes," he told her. "And in winter, fun was a skate on a frozen pond in the skates way too big because they were purchased to last a few seasons. it was tobogganing on a homemade sled, and snowball fights. it was an old deck of worn-out cards in the kitchen.

"Like at Michelle and Brian's the other night?" she said, and he heard the wistfulness.

"Yeah, growing up like that.." Each of his memories held Val and David. It was the first time in a long time he felt the richness of that friendship, instead of the loss. It was the first time he understood how much it had become a part of who he was today.

"Tell me about how you grew up," he invited Aubree.

And then Aubree told him about her family, and how fragmented it was, how some of her earliest memories were of tension, of feeling as if she was responsible for holding something together that could not be held.

"It was like trying to stop an avalanche that had already broken free," Aubree said. "My mom and dad eventually split when I was eleven. And it was a blessing, but it made me long for things I couldn't have."

"Such as?"

She smiled sadly. "I used to watch other families on the block, families on television, and long for that. To be together with other people who loved you in a special way. A way that both shut out the rest of the world, and made you able to go to into it a different way."

He was astonished how sad he felt for her. "I"m surprised you don't have it, if you longed for it," he said gruffly.

"I tried to set it up, to manipulate it into happening, to impose my sugarplums-and-faries vision of family on every single relationship I was in, but I just ended up more disillusioned. At some point, I decided the kids I taught would be my family.

It seemed to him that this was a lesson Aubree would teach him again and again. It wasn't all about him. Maybe that was part of the legacy his two best friend had left him with.

When you cared about people, putting what they needed sometimes came a head of what you needed.

He knew he wasn't a man who could be counted on to make anyone's life better forever. Certainly he could not be trusted with sugarplum-and-fairy fantasies about family.

But he could probably be trusted with making her feel better for one single day.

And that day was today.

"Eating all those cookies?" he said.

"Yes?"

"Has made me really hungry. Want to go for Chinese?"

Taking somebody for Chinese food was a sign of a serious relationship in a small town, but she probably didn't know that.

"Yes," she breathed as if something was settled between them. So, maybe she knew what going for Chinese in this town meant after all.

And really over the next few hectic days, it felt as if something was settled between them. Whatever it had been in Matt that could fight her, and his attraction to her, could fight no more.