The Red Gloves Collection by Karen Kingsbury Read Free Book Online Page A

home like last time?”
    Brian wanted to rip out the needles and tell her it’d all been a mistake. That she had a cold, nothing more. He gritted his teeth and willed himself to smile. “You won’t be in long, Gideon. A few days maybe.” He took her delicate fingers in his. “One of us will be here until you come home, okay?”
    “Okay.” Her voice was slow and tired. “But there’s one thing I wish I knew.”
    “What’s that, honey?” Brian could only imagine the questions that had to be running through her head. Why her? Why now? Why, when it had looked like everything was going to work out? Of course even those would be nothing to the one burning question that had shouted at him every moment since their meeting with the doctor: How were they going to find the money?
    Tish brushed her fingers lightly over Gideon’s hair. “What, sweetheart? Tell us.”
    “I wish I knew … ” Gideon stared out the window. “ … if Earl opened my gift.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    E arl must have passed a hundred trash cans since the Christmas dinner.
    Each time he told himself to take the kid’s bag and throw it out—toss it in with the rotting food and wet pieces of paper and empty beer bottles. Forget about it the same way he’d forgotten everything else.
    But each time he couldn’t do it.
    Stupid kid.
Why’d she have to give him a present, anyway? He was past that, past the need for caring or being cared for. He was supposed to be planning his death, not worrying about what to do with some Christmas gift.
    He wandered down the alley. It was Sunday, three days before Christmas. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied he might already have been dead by now. Instead—against every bit of his will—the gift had come to mean something to him. Maybe it was the child’s drawings, the crooked way she’d colored a Christmas tree on the bag or the wobbly letters of his name scrawled across the middle.
    Somehow it reminded him of the life he used to lead. And that was the most frustrating part of all. Earl didn’t want to remember the past. Without the red gloves, it was over. Dead. There was no hope, no history, no family to conjure up in the cold of the night.
    There was nothing.
    Until he took the girl’s gift.
    He felt in his jacket. It was still there, the scrunched-up package tucked into a deep pocket of his parka. He hadn’t opened it—didn’t plan to. Especially not three days before Christmas.
    He leaned against a damp brick wall and stared at a slew of trash cans across the alleyway. The rain had let up, but it was colder than before. Icy, even. Back when he’d had the red gloves he would have been asleep by now, savoring the hours until daybreak. But without them, time ran together. One meaningless hour after another.
    A breeze whistled between the buildings and made the cans rattle. Earl barely heard it, barely felt the cold against his grizzled face.
    December 22.
    No matter how distant he became, how changed he was from the man he’d once been, he would never forget this date. It was hard to believe five years had gone by.
    He narrowed his eyelids and there in the shadows of the alleyway he could see them. The people he’d once loved. His mother and father, his sister and brother and their children. But most of all his girls: Anne and Molly. The women who had been everything to him.
    Memories played out before him, the way they had constantly played out since he’d received the child’s present. A dozen Christmas Eves during which Anne had wanted only one thing: for Earl to join them at the annual church service.
    “Come on, honey. Please?” She’d smile that guileless smile of hers and weave her fingers between his. “Your family won’t go with us. Please?”
    But Earl wouldn’t hear of it. “I won’t be a hypocrite, Anne. You know how I feel about church. I wasn’t raised that way.”
    “Think about Molly.” She’d wait, holding her breath, probably praying he’d change his mind. “She’s going to