The Noel Letters (The Noel Collection #4) - Richard Paul Evans Page 0,3

patrol parka stepped up and pulled it off, setting it on the ground next to her.

“Thank you,” Wendy said. “That was kind of you.”

“My pleasure,” he said, his smile visible beneath his facial bush. I’m sure Wendy got a lot of that.

Wendy seemed oblivious to it. Or maybe she was just jaded. “You said two bags?”

“This is it,” I said.

Wendy pulled the handle up on the suitcase. “All right. Let’s go.”

We took the elevator up to the skybridge then exited to the short-term parking garage. The night air was sharp and cold, freezing my breath in front of me in white puffs.

“My car’s over there,” Wendy said, pointing to an older white Subaru wagon. When we reached it, she lifted the hatch and we put my bags in, which filled the entire back of the wagon.

She unlocked the doors and we simultaneously climbed in. There was cat hair on my seat and footwell. Actually, it was everywhere. Wendy had two Siamese cats: Jennifur and Clawdia. My father had referenced them from time to time. He was allergic to cats. So was I. My eyes watered.

As I put on my seat belt I glanced over at Wendy. Her eyes were closed tight but tears still managed to escape her eyelids and roll down her cheeks.

“Are you okay?”

She didn’t answer, but again wiped her eyes. Then she breathed out, leaned forward, and started the car. Christmas music came on. Perry Como, something I was familiar with, as our family listened to it when I was young.

“They’re playing Christmas music early here,” I said. “In New York the stations don’t play Christmas music until after Halloween.”

“It’s a CD. It makes me happy,” she said, then added, “I need a little happy right now.” She reached down and turned off the music then turned up the heat. The warm air blew loudly from the dash vents. “Let me know if it gets too hot.”

“Thank you.”

We drove out of the parking garage then south toward the eastbound I-80 freeway. The Salt Lake airport is only six miles west of the city in what is likely the most desolate part of the valley, the land surrounding the Great Salt Lake.

The only thing that’s great about the lake, other than its name, is its size. Lakes are usually beautiful places that draw people. The Great Salt Lake did the opposite. Think of it as a North American version of Israel’s Dead Sea and you’ll understand its lack of appeal.

My parents first took me to the lake as a child. I remembered thinking how pretty it was, its salt crystals sparkling in the sun. My delight vanished the moment I got in and discovered how uncomfortable the saline-rich water felt on my skin. Parts of the Great Salt Lake are ten times saltier than the ocean, which means little can live in it, outside of nasty microbes and the brine shrimp that feed off them. One of the by-products of the salt is hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs. Not exactly Lake Tahoe.

Neither of us said much on the ride to my father’s house. I just silently looked out the window at the transformed scenery. The city had changed as much as I had since I left. In one of his letters my father had told me that Downtown had doubled in size, which was impressive, but still left it a dwarfed, meager percentile of the Manhattan skyline.

We took Interstate 80 to 215 South, then the ramp east to the Highland Drive exit.

As we pulled into my old neighborhood, the only thing I recognized was the 7-Eleven my father used to take me to every Sunday to buy me a Slurpee and a box of Lemonhead candy. What had been a Taco Bell on the corner was now a dental office—a peculiar and disappointing conversion.

In my eighteen-year absence the trees and bushes had grown, and the aged houses seemed to have shrunk. The street was beautifully tree lined. The area had gentrified as the older residents passed on and younger homeowners moved in, remodeling or outright demolishing the older homes.

The area of the city I’d grown up in was called Sugar House, or Sugarhouse as the locals wrote it. It was named for a sugar beet test factory that had resided there more than a century prior. Sugarhouse was one of Salt Lake’s oldest neighborhoods and the tiny home where I’d spent my childhood had been built before World War II on what had once been the