Anger at first, then sadness, then an uncertain peace. I’d been divorced for more than a year this was the first Christmas the boy and his dad were not together.
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“A day or two?” A shriek, the sound of a little kid who didn’t nap on the plane and had reached the end of his tether.
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“I’m sure we’ll have everything back to you in a day or two.” “And my phones at home and work are right here,” I said, underlining the numbers. “We’ve got the descriptions and the tag numbers from your ticket.” “We’ll find them,” said the guy behind the counter, whose green nameplate said NED and whose windburn and crushed hat-hair told me he’d had a good ski day. “Did somebody take our Christmas presents, Mommy?” As I completed the paperwork, the boy tugged at my parka. Now, at the end of a day that began in Boston at dawn and was interrupted when we made the Denver transfer from United to Aspen Airways, the boy and I stood at the counter at Sardy Field reporting the missing suitcases while the line of other weary travelers grew restive behind us. She loaned it to us for the flight back to Aspen after our Christmas holiday vacation in NH-the boy, then five years old, the only grandchild, had reaped such a Claus haul that the haul needed a suitcase of its own. My blue one, the boy’s smaller brown one, the red leather one that belonged to my mother.
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The three suitcases got lost somewhere between Boston and Denver. “Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods.”