A Christmas to Remember (12 page)

He found her lack of pretension refreshing.

And despite his first impressions, he now knew she loved her baby. He’d watched her wrap him up in that faded receiving blanket and kiss his downy head before leaving him in the living room. The tender look in her eyes had lanced through him.

He pulled himself away from thoughts that were likely to turn maudlin. Instead he made himself useful, pulling another juice glass from the cabinet. “Can I interest you in some inexpensive Merlot?”

She had found a saucepan and was putting some water on to boil. She looked like she actually knew what she was doing.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said with a little tilt to her mouth.

Wow. The smile transformed her. She had dimples, and the corners of her eyes turned up. She was more than pretty when she smiled.

He handed her the juice glass. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

They touched glasses and sipped their wine. “Not bad for the BI-LO in Last Chance,” he said. He took a seat at the kitchen table, a beautiful oak antique that the auctioneer said would fetch a very nice sum. He wished he had a place for it in his Atlanta apartment. In fact, the idea of selling the house, which had been in the family for more than a hundred years, still made him queasy.

“So, you’re a wine connoisseur?” she asked.

He let go of a nervous laugh. “Not really. I never touched a drop until I was in my twenties. My wife liked wine, and I got in the habit.”

She turned to look over her shoulder. “She
liked
wine. Past tense?”

“We’re divorced.”

“Ah.” She moved to the refrigerator and took out some milk. The room grew silent except for the sound of sleet hitting the windows on the windward side of the house.

He’d come up here to be alone—to push all the holiday noise aside—and now, suddenly, the quiet seemed unbearable. He knew Maryanne didn’t want to talk about herself. And God knew he didn’t want to unburden himself to a stranger. But they couldn’t sit here in silence, could they?

“So,” he said, “how old is Joshua?”

“Almost four months. He’s just about learned how to roll over. I’m going to have to watch him in that drawer. That’s why I swaddled him so tight.”

“He’s got a healthy set of lungs.”

She poured the box of potato flakes into the boiling water, followed by some milk. “You know, it’s strange. He doesn’t cry much. I mean, he cries when he’s hungry and when he needs a diaper change. But he doesn’t fuss without a reason. So his crying jag tonight was kind of unusual.” She placed the saucepan of instant potatoes on the stove top and turned around to face Daniel.

She folded her arms across her chest, the gesture defensive. “I know you think he was crying because he was cold. But he wasn’t. I had him all wrapped up in my down jacket. I was kind of cold, but he was toasty warm. I didn’t set out with the intention of spending the night in a barn, you know. I mean, what mother would do that?”

He gave her a smile in the hope that she would relax and maybe trust him a little bit. He wanted her trust. He’d only met her, but he was coming to admire her grit and determination.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you before. I was just surprised, is all. And when you think about it, Jesus spent his first night in a barn.”

She blinked at him and then turned around. “Please don’t tell me you’re one of those churchy people.”

“Churchy?”

“You know, a holy…” Her voice trailed off, and she picked up the sack of frozen butter beans and began poking holes in it with a fork.

“A holy what?” he asked.

She didn’t say a word, but there was a savagery in her movements as she put the frozen veggies in the microwave and punched in the cooking time. The microwave whirred into action, momentarily drowning out the sound of the rain and sleet hitting the windows.

She turned around. “A holy roller.” She said the words with utter contempt.

“I’m not a holy roller, Maryanne. I was raised as an Episcopalian, and we kind of frown on holy-rolling, to tell you the truth. We’re pretty tame as a congregation. Although I will admit that the Ladies’ Auxiliary is a bunch of busybodies. The knitters among them go into overdrive whenever a new baby is born. And when someone passes they all show up with casseroles. They do a lot of praying for the sick. And they are unrelenting matchmakers.”

He knew all of this firsthand. The ladies had shown up in droves each time death had darkened his door. They’d prayed for Daddy this last year, and they’d visited him on a regular basis at the nursing home. And ever since Daniel’s divorce, the ladies had been pushing one single woman after another in his direction, including Jenny Carpenter, who was actually a Methodist.

But today was the first time Miriam Randall had ever given him any kind of advice, and Miriam was reputed to have special abilities when it came to helping single people identify their soul mates.

Of course, it was hard to see how her little sermon about the wise men could be interpreted as marital advice. Maybe she was just trying to tell him to quit being a sourpuss.

“I don’t much like churchy people,” Maryanne said. “They always have ulterior motives. And I don’t need people like that telling me what to do or where to go or how to be.” The microwave chimed. She turned around, opened the door, and rotated the bag of veggies.

“Okay,” Daniel said. “I get it. But the truth is, you aren’t the first mother who ever took shelter in a barn. Better to do that than to walk on in the rain and discover that a blackened and crumbling chimney is all that’s left of the Carpenter place. Of course there’s a barn there, too. But it’s almost falling down. I don’t think it would keep the rain out.”

She leaned on the counter, her back to him. “I remember that barn,” she said in a little voice.

“You do?”

“I was six. My grandfather told me some BS story about the animals talking on Christmas Eve. I decided to check it out.”

He chuckled.

She turned. “You think it’s funny?”

He shook his head. “No, I think it’s par for the course. Every farm kid in Allenberg County has gotten up in the wee hours of Christmas day to visit the animals. The thing is, though, if you just walk into the barn all brazen and sure of yourself the animals are going to clam up. You have to sneak up on them. And that’s practically impossible to do. They can smell you coming before you even get there.”

She stood there blinking at him. The expression on her face was kind of cute. Clearly she was a woman who had stopped believing in miracles. And right then it occurred to Daniel that maybe he’d stopped believing in them, too.

* * *

Objectively the ham and instant potatoes weren’t much of a Christmas Eve dinner, but to Maryanne they might have been manna from heaven. It had been several days since she’d had a good, hot meal. A nursing mother couldn’t survive on Cliff Bars for very long before deep hunger set in. And, of course, she’d done a stupid thing spending her grocery money on gas to get here.

What would happen if Cousin Jenny wasn’t the same kind person she remembered? Obviously her memories were suspect.

Although Daniel Jessup was clearly a kind person, even if he did prove to be a master at prying out Maryanne’s secrets. By the time they were sipping after-dinner coffee, he’d learned that she’d come all the way from Montgomery. That her mother had been married to Ezra and Maggie Carpenter’s only son, John. That John had died in a barroom fight when Maryanne was no bigger than Joshua. And that she’d met her grandparents only once, twenty years ago. At Christmas time.

“I may have heard Momma and Daddy mention your father once or twice,” Daniel said. “And I might even have heard that Ezra and Maggie had a long, lost grandchild. I reckon that was you. I guess John Carpenter had a chip on his shoulder even as a young man.”

She put down her coffee cup. “My father was a drunk. And Mom never let me forget it.” She looked toward the dark window over the sink. The storm was blowing the rain against the house. She shivered. She was grateful to be inside.

And so angry at herself for falling for Gary Duggan, Joshua’s father. He was probably a carbon copy of her own, no-account father. What a fool she’d been for following in her mother’s footsteps. If she ever saw Gary Duggan again, she’d spit in his eye.

But then he hadn’t been the first person to abandon her.

She looked back at Daniel. He didn’t have that come-hither look in his eyes that had so attracted Maryanne to Gary. But he was very handsome. And he was like some walking and talking dream. In her secret fantasy life, she and the imaginary Joe had grown up together, doing all kinds of things, like fishing, and climbing trees, and going to the eighth grade dance together. She imagined whispering secrets to him. She imagined him as a true friend—the kind who would never leave her.

“Why are you here?” she asked, and immediately regretted her words.

“It’s my house,” he said. Of course he hadn’t understood the true meaning of her question. And now she had to backtrack or he’d think she was crazy.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she said. “I’m just trying to figure out why you’re here all alone without any decorations and nothing but boxes everywhere.”

He studied the remnants of the pie he’d just consumed. “Daddy died about two months ago, and I’m putting the farm on the market. I don’t live here anymore. I live in Atlanta.”

“Well, that explains the Georgia license plate and the BMW. What are you, a stock broker or something?”

He looked up, met her gaze, and shook his head. “No, I’m a lawyer.”

And just like that her bubble burst. She hated lawyers more than do-gooders. She had to ignore the flannel shirt and the jeans and remember the tasseled loafers and cashmere coat. He might have grown up right next door to Grandpa’s farm, but he was not Joe. Joe was not a real person, even if he sometimes seemed as real as Cousin Jennifer.

Just then, Joshua started to fuss. Thank goodness. She could escape Daniel’s blue-eyed stare for a few minutes. She pushed up from the table and hurried into the living room.

The baby had managed to unwrap his blanket and was on his way to rolling right out of the bureau drawer. She greeted this development with mixed emotions. He needed a crib to keep him safe. And she didn’t have the money for a crib.

She didn’t even have a place to
put
a crib.

She picked Joshua up, and he gave her a big, wide, toothless grin that made her heart fill up. She loved him so much. And each day she got the feeling that he loved her back. She sat down on the couch, draped the blanket over her shoulder, and nursed him.

There were times, like right this minute, when she wondered if allowing Joshua to love her was the right thing. She couldn’t give him anything. Even on Christmas.

She had no gift for him. And now she didn’t even have a home or know where her next meal was coming from.

Even in foster care, she’d gotten something every Christmas. Of course it was never something she’d wanted. In fact, there had been only one year when she’d gotten the gift of her dreams—that year at Grandpa’s farm. There had been a baby doll under the tree for her.

She had cherished that baby for about three hours until Mom came back.

Mom was not supposed to come back on Christmas day. She was supposed to come back after she married Derek, her boyfriend. Mom had told Maryanne that she would be staying with Grandma and Grandpa for a while.

A while had turned out to be two days. Mom had come back all tearful and announced that she and Derek were taking Maryanne back to Houston, where Derek was from. Grandma had been unhappy about this news, and there had been a screaming fight. And then Mom had dragged Maryanne out of the house before she could even get her baby doll and take it with her.

Maryanne had howled all the way from Last Chance to the Georgia border over her lost doll. And at the first gas station, Derek had spanked her for it. Hard. And Mom had told her that she had to obey Derek from now on because, if she didn’t obey him, she might have to go live with her grandma and grandpa, forever. And even though Maryanne had kind of liked her grandparents, the idea of not ever seeing Mom again was very scary.

So she promised to obey Derek, even though he was kind of mean. But having to obey him didn’t last all that long. The night they reached Montgomery, Derek wanted to go out partying. Mom didn’t really want to go, but she had to obey Derek, too. So Maryanne got dropped off with a friend of Derek’s for the night, a really scary lady who smoked a lot of cigarettes.

That night, Mom and Derek got themselves into a fatal car wreck. Many years later, Maryanne had discovered that alcohol was involved. It sure looked like Mom had a weakness for drunks and jerks.

Of course, Derek’s friend took Maryanne right to social services, and at the age of six, she’d entered foster care. For years she had assumed that Grandma and Grandpa hadn’t wanted her.

Then, about two years ago, she’d finally screwed up the courage to look into her own files—only to discover that no one in Montgomery had ever tried to contact her grandparents. Probably because Maryanne didn’t know their names or even the place where they lived, except to say South Carolina.

So maybe Grandpa and Grandma would have given her a home if someone had given them a chance. And if that had happened, then she would have grown up next door to Daniel Jessup.

That thought set her heart to racing, just as Daniel walked into the room. And there was this look on his face. Like he kind of understood where she was coming from. Or like maybe he felt the same strange connection or something.

But that connection couldn’t be real, could it? It was just her desperation and her loneliness.

She couldn’t just sit there staring at Daniel, so she looked down at Joshua, who had fallen asleep. Feeling suddenly embarrassed and awkward, she buttoned up her blouse and pulled down her sweater.

* * *

Daniel stood on the threshold between the dining and living rooms, unable to move. The light from the table lamp haloed Maryanne’s hair, making her look almost like a Madonna. The tender look on her face as she gazed down at the baby opened up Daniel’s heart in a palpable way.