Carol for Another Christmas Read Free

would lose his job and then none of them would have enough to eat and she’d never get the operation her uncle Jamie said would make her The Bionic Kid.
    So she was quiet for that reason, but she was also usually pretty quiet, for though she looked fine from the waist up, she had what Grandpa called a “few little problems.” Her good parts were her curly red hair, which everyone always said was so pretty, and her sort of weak but very inquisitive brown eyes that couldn’t see very far but loved to read anything she could find from library books to shampoo bottle labels. Her arms were strong from working extra hard to help her legs, which had come rotated inward at the hip, knee, and ankle when she was born. And her fingers could draw and cut out her own paper-dolls, make origami paper boxes, pandas, cranes, robots, dragons, and anything else she could find the scrap paper for. If her legs had been the only problem, she could have been left home, but she also had a faulty heart valve, so her heart didn’t pump enough oxygen to her lungs for her to be able to catch her breath if she moved too fast. Because of her heart, Grandpa had to bring her to work now. Kids couldn’t go to Mama’s work at all, and Mama’s younger brother and sister, Uncle Jamie and Aunt Brianna, were only thirteen and twelve themselves; too little to take care of her if she had a heart attack. When she was little, Grandma had been there to help them, but then Grandma went away. Maybe, Tina suspected, the same place her own daddy had gone, but she didn’t know. Grown-ups didn’t talk about that stuff when she could hear.
    Anyway, she wasn’t any trouble to her grandpa because she was good at keeping still most of the time, unless she fell or bumped against something accidentally.
    But she was especially quiet tonight because as of midnight, when they came to work, it was Christmas Eve morning and she was waiting and wondering what was going to happen next.
    She wasn’t waiting for or wondering about her Christmas present. She wanted a kitty but she knew the apartments didn’t allow cats or dogs or ponies—only rats, mice, and cockroaches. There might be a little something, a candy bar maybe, in the sock she’d left hanging from the windowsill with those of her aunt and uncle. That was if Mama had scored a big tip from one of the customers and the mice didn’t get to the candy bars first.
    No, she was excited because she was waiting for her invisible friend to come back and help her put the final touches on the project she’d been helping him with. Christmas Eve was the time the two of them had been working toward since Halloween night, when he’d first appeared to her. Tonight, she and Grandpa would be staying home instead of working their midnight to eight A.M. shift because at midnight tonight, when Grandpa was usually getting out the vacuum and the dust rags, it would be the start of Christmas. If her friend was right and she had done everything correctly, something awesome was going to happen. It was all pretty mysterious and complicated, and she wished she could be there to see it happen, but her friend had said she’d know when it did, whether she was there or not.
    Back in October, when Mama got her night job and Tina started coming to work with Grandpa, she’d thought it’d be pretty boring. Her being here had to be a secret, so Grandpa had made her a little nest under a desk with a sleeping bag and a throw pillow. It was one of those double desks, with half you keep a computer on and half you keep books and stuff on. She was supposed to sleep under the books part. There were still lots of books on the desk with titles that didn’t make any sense. Grandpa had to move around the building doing the cleaning, but Tina was supposed to stay in her little nest and not make a peep so she wouldn’t be found and Grandpa wouldn’t get caught. She didn’t know