One More Christmas
This
story, the final post for 2016, for the #SundayBookBlog for teen readers will
break your heart. It brings into focus what many families endure through the
holidays.
Today,
we focus on One More Christmas.
Fifteen-year-old Dawn just has one holiday wish—that her mom will survive until
after Christmas, so her younger brothers and sisters don’t have to remember
this as a time of sadness and loss.
One more Christmas is all Dawn wants. Is that too much
to ask?
With a little more than a week before the holiday,
fifteen-year old Dawn and her dad share a heart-wrenching secret about her mom.
She’s dying of leukemia, but no one suspected a thing; they all just thought she
was tired. All Dawn has to lean on is a prayer—that her mom won’t die before or
on this special day, so her five younger siblings don’t have to remember that
during the holidays in the future. Will she receive her wish?
Robby Ryan got off the bus ahead of me. Not that I was
that far behind him. We had the whole walk home, about a quarter mile on paved
sidewalks, and no reason to hurry. He stopped and glanced at me, a sly smile on
his face.
“Come on, Dawn. Quit being a slowpoke.”
We’d had a sort-of-friends relationship all our lives.
He lived across the street and a few houses up from me in our little hometown
of Monrovia, California. Robby was an older man, all of seventeen. I was
fifteen for a couple more months, and that was the worst age to be in 1974. My
parents were so old fashioned, saying I couldn’t even think about having a real
boyfriend until I was sixteen—in February.
“I’m not a slowpoke,” I said to him, grinning. “Why are
you rushing anyway? It’s not like we have anything to do except boring old
chores.”
Comments