Snowfalls, Fires and Family - 3. Chapter 3

“Aunt Tabby, can you check on her while I start unloading the stuff?” he asked. Tabby nodded and opened the door, sliding out of the truck cab to walk up to Anna as she walked down the path to her jeep. The two women greeted each other with smiles and hugs before Tabby moved to help her with the last of her luggage, a smallish roller bag that most likely held toiletries, and a backpack that looked stuffed.

Opening the back of the truck cab, he grabbed several of the bags and followed the women into the house, Anna putting her suitcases out of the way in the living room. “Hey there, Anna,” he called out as he passed, heading for the kitchen to drop off the load.

Anna smiled as she followed him when he left the house to get the next round of bags. “Wow did you guys go hog wild on the groceries,” she teased, shaking her head. Tristian snorted and handed her several bags with a smile.

“Here, carry these into the kitchen yeah?” he asked, tweaking her nose before turning back to grab the last of the bags in the cab. Wrinkling her still cold numb nose, she huffed, turned around carefully on the icy sidewalk and headed back in.

“Please tell me that we’re salting the driveway and walkway today,” she said to Tabby as she dropped off the load in her arms.

Tabby snickered as she separated out the bags into ‘cold stuff’ and ‘shelf stuff’. “Yes. We had to buy a couple of new bags of the stuff. There wasn’t any here.”

“Mom would have kept it up in the attic,” she admitted, biting at her bottom lip. “After Richard ditched out on us, she moved it up there instead of keeping it in the cellar. She hated the cellar.”

“The salt? Yeah, we know,” Tristian said, walking in and putting the bags down. “Aunt Tabby here checked on it before I got here yesterday. She was prepping to buy some then…well she went into the hospital with a cough and never came out again,” he hummed, shaking his head. “Come on. There’s more bags. Do you know when the rest of the siblings will be here?” he asked.

Anna hummed and pulled out her phone, checking the time. “I have to head out in about twenty to go pick up Markus from the airport,” she said. “I told him that since I was in town that we’d share my jeep, so he could save a few hundred on renting a truck. Poor guy just changed jobs after all so he’s kind of dealing with that bullshit.”

“That sounds good. Karla and Brian are due in tomorrow. Brian’s fiancé is heading to her parents for Christmas. He’s heading out that way a couple days after Christmas though,” he warned.

Anna hummed, not saying a thing, and headed back out to the truck, leaving Tristian and Tabby to share a knowing look at her reaction. She wasn’t particularly fond of Karla, their eldest sibling having taken after their father, her step-father, in a lot of her attitude when it came to her siblings. At least before they had been spread out amongst family.

Shaking his head, Tristian followed her and grabbed the bags of salt, carrying them in and laying them in what used to be the formal living room. He would salt the ground while Anna was picking up Brian. He then went for the turkey’s and ham’s while Anna grabbed the lighter bags, favoring one shoulder with how much she carried.

Tabby told Tristian that she had some damage to the muscles in her senior year of high school.

Between the two of them, they got all of the bags in, Anna choosing to take her old room that had been redone with soft yellow paint and dark gold trim, a queen-sized platform bed, and matching red wood furniture. It was looking as if Karla and Brian would be able to have their own rooms since Tristian was sleeping in the master bedroom.

“So, you got any idea on what you’re doing with this place?” Anna asked as she made fresh coffee for the all of them.

Tristian grunted, shaking his head as he put the turkeys onto large towels that were used for such things in the secondary refrigerator. “Not an idea.” He put the hams in with the turkeys and closed the door, knowing that he would submerge the turkey’s the next day to defrost over a couple of days. “I have a few options but I’m not sure what I want to do with it.”

Anna pursed her lips thoughtfully.. “Karla is selling off the cottage. Since she’s selling it off, she can’t get the part of the estate that was put aside for the upkeep of it,” she said, finding the cleaned mugs and adding one for herself.

“I read the same will you guys did,” Tristian stated. Their mother had been very clear in how things would be divided up and had the house, cottage and everything sellable praised once a year. She kept everything up to date and was careful with her money, working hard even though she had no real need to. She had a lot of money from her parents who had passed many years ago and from her past jobs.

Which meant that her estate was sizeable thus the various rules that had come with inheriting anything. Tristian had gotten the house, and if he decided to keep the house, would get access to the account that was built for the upkeep of the taxes on the house to add as he needed to. Karla had gotten the vacation cottage that their mother’s first husband had left her after his death.

She had sold the vacation house she had received in the settlement with her second husband after he had wiped out their joint accounts. Luckily, she had always been smart, despite not getting out of the marriage with him sooner, and had most of her personal and inherited money protected from him so they hadn’t been hurt very much.

She had kept the house though, having bought it with her first husband, and had apparently over the years turned it into something more. Leaving it to Tristian though had been a surprise to all, not that his siblings wanted it. They didn’t want to deal with the laws that went with owning a house on land.

He had been six when they had been taken away, but his siblings had all been seven, nine, ten and eleven, and had more memories of the house than he had. Especially since Tabby had often taken him out of the house whenever she could while his siblings had been in school.

Shaking his head, he took the cup of coffee, his sister giving him a knowing look before she shrugged. “Yeah, alright. I can see why you’re having to think about what you want to do,” she said, leaning against the counter. “So, what? We have the Christmas celebration to fulfill the will’s requests and you decide if you want to keep the house or sell it off before two years are up?” she asked.

Tristian looked at her and she pointed to the note. “Yeah, pretty much. I have a few options. I really don’t want to live here again if I can help it. I have a good life in Seattle. I’m happy there. Here…not so much. I would be looked at for my tastes in humans. For my career choice as a nurse instead of a doctor. For all that it’s pretty and lovely and they all smile, this town is pretty for the tourists. Not so much for anyone who doesn’t conform to what they want.”

Anna snorted at him and nodded, checking her phone again. “Alright, I’m off to pick up Markus from his plane. I’m going to guess that he’s on time since he hasn’t sent me a text or e-mail about being late,” she drawled, rinsing out her cup. “Want me to pick up some Chinese on the way back in?” she asked. Tristian checked the time and nodded.

“Yeah. Here, there’s like nearly a hundred on here,” he said, handing over a pre-paid credit card. “Pin is two-two-four-nine,” he said, Anna taking it.

“Be back in a couple of hours, hopefully,” she said, checking outside. She smiled as she was handed a travel mug of coffee and a bottle of water from Tabby before she grabed her jacket from the back of the chair where she had laid it and left, the door slamming shut after her.

“I swear that she never broke the habit of letting the door slam,” he snorted. Tabby chuckled and made herself a fresh cup of the coffee, adding a bit of sugar to it before going back to work putting groceries away.

They were checking on the wood situation inside and carrying a few loads of into the house to put in the enclosed living room in the log holders when Anna and Markus finally arrived. Whereas Tristian and Anna took after their mother with red hair, Markus and Karla had their father’s black hair. Only Brian had Richard’s sandy blond hair, while the siblings shared green eyes in various shades.

Markus put the giant bag of food in his arms down onto the table, looked at Tabby and Tristian, adjusted the hold on his suitcase and frowned. “I’m going to go claim my room and take a shower,” he said before turning around and leaving the dining room. Tristian sighed as Anna watched Markus leave.

“Think he still blames me for answering a teacher truthfully about our situation?” he asked as he walked into the living room to put the last load down in the wood holder. Tabby sighed and did the same with her own load, Anna following them. She eyed the totes and buckets that sat in one corner of the room and shrugged her shoulders at them.

“It’s not he blames you, Tristian, it’s that he blames himself for not having the guts to do it,” Tabby replied. “Marlin and Silvia sent him to therapy about a year after he was put in their care to deal with his issues. They knew he kept in the barest contact with you out of guilt and they wanted him to get help that they couldn’t give him.”

Tristian sighed and shook his head. “Yeah but he could have told me. Hell, we could have talked while buzzed on bloody Mary’s the last time that we were together,” he complained before deciding to let it for the moment. If his brother wanted to be an idiot about it, he wasn’t going to push him. Let him come to him in his own time.