Off The Market by 12 NA's of Christmas, Magan Vernon

Ghost of Christmas Past
     
    ETTA
     
    I believe it was Thomas Wolfe who said “you can’t go home again.” Obviously Mr. Wolfe’s dad didn’t have a massive heart attack while he was away at college, forcing him to  move back home to help out. Which is exactly why I’m stuck spending another Christmas Eve showing houses. Real Estate seemed like a safe career, that would keep me around to help my mom, but I didn’t expect the housing market to crumble so bad.
    The snow fell heavily around my Toyota, blanketing the entire neighborhood in a white sheet. As the snow crunched under my tires , I cursed myself for answering my co-worker’s desperate call.
    "Myra, it's Christmas Eve, who even wants to see a house on a holiday?" I asked. Not that I really had anything better to do on Christmas Eve. Mom was visiting her sister in Florida and without a family of my own, I was stuck staying at my sister’s. If I had to hear one more realtor joke from my brother-in-law , I would probably gouge his eyes out with one of the icicle lights from the Christmas tree.
    Myra never answered my question. She was too busy yelling at her kids after I heard the sound of shattering glass, so she blurted out the address almost too fast for me to write down, and was off the phone.
    "Figures I'd be going back to my old neighborhood on Christmas," I muttered, glancing down at the directions. When Pine Hill subdivision was built, it was the Mecca for all the suburban famil ies south of St. Louis; with its never ending sidewalks, cookie-cutter two-story homes, and plenty of yard space for all of the neighborhood kids to run around in.
    That was before the economic down turn. Now Pine Hill was just like every other subdivision in town: rows of foreclosed homes with overgrown bushes and paint chipping from the wood siding. The particular house that I was showing had been on the market for almost a year and was one that I was very famili ar with. It was the house of my high school boyfriend, Andrew Lawson.
    The very guy whose heart I broke when I moved to California for school and didn’t want a long distance relationship. I could have gotten back in contact with him when I moved back to Missouri, but it just didn’t seem right. I couldn’t go running back to him and expect everything to stay the same. So I cowardly did everything I could to avoid him. I never went back to all of the places that we used to hang out in high school and tried never to show houses in Pine Hill. That was before I found out his parents moved not too long ago. A lot had changed in the past two years.
    Driving down his old street was like going back in time. I could see my sixteen-year-old self, walking down the sidewalk on a hot Missouri day, my legs freshly tanned from spending all day at the lake, just hoping Andrew would stop his basketball game and take one look at me. When he finally did catch a glance he'd usually stop his game, sweep me in his arms, and give me a hard kiss on the mouth, right in front of all of his friends and the neighbors. For good luck, he always said.
    I sighed. That was ages ago. Other men rarely looked at me and certainly not the way Andrew used to. I broke it off with Andrew right after graduation. I was headed to college and he planned to stay and take over his father's business. He begged me to stay, pleaded that I could go to school somewhere closer. Of course I didn’t listen. Why didn’t I listen? Now I was living in my mother’s basement and working on Christmas Eve. I was really moving up in the world.
    I hadn't heard from Andrew since I moved back and didn't even know if he still lived in town, but it didn't matter. He wouldn't want anything to do with me anyway. It had been years since I'd seen him and the years had not been good to me. Gone was the dancer's body and long, glossy black hair. Now my hair was a shorter, highlighted do and a there were a few extra pounds that I could never get off of my hips. I could blame it on the