Chapter 23

All too soon, it was time to go. Mai, Sandy, and Tam were there to see her off, but the actual tears came when it was time to say goodbye to Kim-ly. No one remembered seeing Kim-ly so emotional before. The Vietnamese tough chick looked positively heartbroken, and she even made Don and Lanh promise to take special care of Karole back in Greeley. As the sun came up on the Northwoods, Don, Lanh and Karole sadly headed west to their current home.

Finally, after what seemed like a month but was only a week, they loaded Lanh’s big SUV, mostly with Krissy’s gifts, and the kids were all hugged and kissed one last time and it was time for Lanh, Don, and 8-month pregnant Karole to head back to Colorado. Their Christmas visit to Minnesota had been short and sweet, and for the first time in her life Karole felt sorrow at leaving somewhere. Arlo cried his little eyes out. He wanted to go with Uncle Don, Aunt Lanh, and Aunt Karole, but when he found out that his mom couldn’t come with him, he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t decide. He looked longingly at Aunty Karole and back at Mom, heartbroken over the decision that life had forced on a two-year-old.

Karole’s heart was aching for the little guy. Just days ago, he was afraid of her because when he felt her baby move; he thought Karole ate a baby. But since his Uncle Don vouched for her, Arlo and Karole have been almost inseparable. Karole looked at Tam, Arlo’s mother, whose eyes were moist. Her heart was aching for her little boy’s quandary, too. “Ah’ll be back little guy, and Ah’ll have a little girl to come see you. We can teach her how to go fishin’ an stuff like that, ok?”

“An’ baseball too?” sniffed the heartbroken two-year-old.

“Of course! Where ah come from everyone plays baseball! It’s in ma blood!” said Karole as she tousled his black locks of hair. “And Aunty Kim-ly will have a baby boy, we can teach him too.”

Hope sprang up in Arlo’s broken heart. He looked up at Aunt Karole with big tear filled but hopeful eyes. “An me? You teach me?”

“Yeah lil’ fella, we’ll teach you baseball too,” said Aunt Karole, as she gave Arlo one last hug. “And maybe Reggie soon too,” came an unbidden thought, leaving her to wonder where that came from. “You need to stay here and tell stories to your daddy, ok?”

“K,” sniffed Arlo.

The trip back to Colorado was a mixed bag of emotions for Karole. The days leading up to Christmas were crazy. She watched this big happy family celebrate their favorite holiday, and they kept drawing Karole into their celebration of joy, but she wanted to “celebrate” by watching from the outside. Eventually, she felt the love that was radiating from her friends and, all in all, it was her best vacation to date. She learned new passions for pho and lefse. She learned how to go ice fishing out on the big pond out back, and she got to go on a winter hayride with all the kids before they went back to school.

If anything, her trip back to Colorado was filled with reluctance. Karole passionately loved her job, but she hated her house, it was supposed to be a cradle of love for her and Jayce and their daughter, but now she’s alone and cold and for the first time in her life she felt truly at home somewhere and it turned out to be in that big drafty old farmhouse in Minnesota. She was offered a whole Jack and Jill suite for her and Krissy to live in, and before she left, the plaster was patched, the fresh paint was up, and the painting was done by herself, Lanh, and Kim-ly.

As they crossed into North Dakota, the scenery was the most alien that Karole had ever seen. On the way up from Colorado, it was bright and sunny. In South Dakota, they even stopped at Mt. Rushmore for pictures. Now it was snowing. The landscape was stark, barren, and frigid. The land was billiard table flat here in the Red River Valley; the farms were huge and stretched on forever. Wheat stubble was left in the field, and it was catching the snow that blew across the barren open land. Fields were lined with narrow strips of trees and underbrush, which were called shelter belts which protect the fields from the harsh wind. Other than the occasional farmhouse and steel sheds, all that could have been seen were the strips of trees surrounding inky black stretches of fields that were highlighted by the glaring white of the snow that was being trapped by the remaining stubble. It was a cloudy gray day with the ugliest snow Karole had ever seen. The flakes were tiny, more like flake fragments, not pretty like in Minnesota. Here the snow looked more like fog than a snowfall.