Christmas Bliss (3 page)

The dining room furniture was the predictable repro Empire, in predictable Grand Rapids mahogany. An array of dishes, crystal, and silver were spread across the table, which was covered with a heavy damask tablecloth. I snagged a pair of ornately decorated silverplated candlesticks with a masking-tape price tag of $5. In a sterling-loving town like Savannah, I probably couldn’t turn much of a profit on this pair, but I liked them, and that was enough.

Great-aunt Edith’s “good” china was nice enough, with delicate pink roses and swirling gold edging, but I rarely buy or sell what I think of as fussy “tea party” porcelain and crystal, only because it just doesn’t float my boat.

My eyes alighted on a large, yellowing cardboard box with familiar green graphics on the sides, and I felt the familiar thrill of discovery. The ruined Christmas tree at the curb had raised my hopes for this sale—maybe, just maybe, I’d find some vintage ornaments.

The vintage gods were with me. The box was an old Shiny-Brite ornament box, with twelve corrugated compartments for glass ornaments. But it was heaped with probably three dozen ornaments, all tossed casually into the fragile cardboard carton.

I marveled at their beautiful pastel colors and intricate designs as I carefully lifted each ornament for inspection. They were figural ornaments, grinning snowmen, Santa Clauses, angels, and reindeer. There were ovoid and teardrop-shaped mercury glass indents in my favorite shades of dusty pink, turquoise, seafoam, and faded gold, and an entire orchestra of miniature gold glass instruments.

The ornaments had obviously been long used and well loved. Some were missing the small metal cap that would have accommodated a hook to hang on the tree, a couple of the silver and gold ones had tarnished finish, and at least one reindeer was missing its antlers. But I didn’t care. It was an enchanting collection. The masking-tape tag read “Antique Ornaments. Very Rare. $40.”

One of the dining room chairs held a tall stack of neatly starched and ironed table linens. I rifled through the stack and set aside a dozen damask banquet-sized napkins, another dozen linen cocktail napkins with perky red and yellow embroidered roosters on the corners, and an adorable set of embroidered “day of the week” dish towels, each with a different vintage forties-era design.

Miss Edith’s niece obviously knew nothing about vintage linens. She’d marked the bundle of dinner napkins at $2 and the cocktail napkins at $1, probably because they were yellowed and rust-spotted with age. But I knew a good soaking in OxiClean and some determined spot-cleaning would leave the beautiful old fabric as snowy as the day they’d been sold. And then they’d be worth ten times the price that I’d pay for them. Not that I intended to sell them. I have such a soft spot for old linens that my best friend BeBe calls me a linen slut.

As for the kitchen towels, I’d sold a similar set on eBay two months earlier, for $40. The masking-tape price on this set was $1. Score!

I was loading the linens into my tote bag when I noticed, for the first time, that everything was monogrammed with a large, elaborate
S
.

I sighed happily. I’d never changed my name to Tal’s during that marriage, which was a source of endless disappointment to Tal’s mother and mine. And now that I was marrying Daniel Stipanek, in my middle-thirties, I intended to keep my maiden name. But I was tradition-loving enough to appreciate the idea of setting a table for a dinner party with linens emblazoned with my new husband’s initial.

The mahogany china cabinet taking up the far wall of the dining room was loaded with dozens and dozens of collectible Boehm porcelain birds, but I deliberately avoided them, as well as the stacks of Bradford Exchange plates and Precious Moments figurines, all of them coated in dust.

Instead, I opened one of the cabinet’s shallow drawers, more from idle curiosity than anything else. Nestled inside the top drawer’s felt-lined compartments was a large cache of flatware. The silver was blackened with decades of tarnish, decorated with a pattern of baroque curlicues and flourishes, and engraved with a large
S
on each piece. I picked up a fork and weighed it in my hand, turned it over and grinned. This was sterling silver. Heavy, gorgeous old sterling. I counted all the pieces. There were eleven place settings, complete down to old-fashioned pieces like demitasse spoons, fruit knives, and fish forks.

I opened the second drawer and found it equally crammed with matching serving pieces, like ice tongs, a carving set, and slotted spoons.

None of it was priced. I felt my heart thumping in my chest. Just as I was counting out all the serving pieces, I felt the cell phone I’d tucked in the pocket of my jacket buzz with an incoming text. Finally—Daniel must have finished up with the lunch crowd and snatched a moment of privacy.

I pulled out the phone and sighed. The text was from Cookie. Again.

WHERE ARE U? THE TULIPS ARE WILTING!

I dumped all the silver from the second drawer into the top drawer, hefted my tote onto my shoulder and sped back to the porch to the cashier statement.

Diamond Lil was still on her cell phone, chatting away. She put the phone down and looked at the drawer in my arms. “The dining room suite is two thousand dollars. It’s solid mahogany and the table has three leaves. It’s a great buy, but you’ll have to bring somebody to help you load. It’s ungodly heavy.”

“I’m actually only interested in this flatware,” I said. “How much?”

“Where’d you find this stuff? I’ve never seen it before, and I’ve been through this house with a fine-toothed comb.”

“It was in the china cabinet. Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve had a family emergency and I need to leave right now.” I set the drawer on her card table and gestured at my tote bag. “I’ve got a bunch of napkins and some candlesticks here, and that comes to fourteen dollars. What would you want for all the flatware? There are eleven place settings and nine or ten serving pieces.”

“God. Aunt Edith had stuff stashed everywhere. And I guess you can tell her taste wasn’t really all that great. She was a schoolteacher for thirty-five years, so I guess she bought what she could afford on what they paid teachers at Blessed Sacrament.”

“She taught at Blessed Sacrament? That’s where I went to school.”

Lil’s eyes flickered over my underwhelming attire—the tattered jeans and the vintage Kool and The Gang concert T-shirt worn with unlaced red Chuck Ts. “Hmm. My sisters and I went to Savannah Country Day.”

“What was your aunt’s name?”

“Edith Shanahan. I think she mostly taught sixth grade.”

“Mrs. Shanahan taught me sixth grade!” I cried. “She was your aunt? She was so wonderful! She took our class on field trips to the Telfair Museum and camping on Cumberland Island, and she wrote and produced our class musical. We all adored your aunt.”

“Yeah, she was kinda cool, I guess,” Lil said. She looked down at the silver, picked up a spoon, then put it back down again. “It’s nice silver,” she said, suddenly warming up to her late aunt’s questionable taste.

“It really is,” I said, holding my breath. I didn’t want to offer a price, because if I offered too little I might offend her. Too much and I’d tip her off that the silver was actually worth something.

She picked up a pocket calculator and began punching in numbers. “Let’s see. Five pieces in a place setting, times eleven, that’s fifty-five. And you said there are like, what? Twelve serving pieces?”

“Something like that.”

“We’ll round it up to seventy pieces, shall we?”

“Okay.”

“Hmm. Well, it has been kind of slow, and I’ve never seen this pattern before. Edith probably got it with her S&H Green Stamps or something.” Her nose wrinkled at the thought. “I couldn’t possibly take less than one-fifty. And I’ll have to ask you for cash.”

“Of course,” I said sweetly, fishing three fifties and a twenty from my junking cash stash and placing it on the card table.

“Almost forgot,” I said, handing her two more twenties. “I’ve got the vintage Christmas ornaments too. Forty dollars, right?”

“Right.”

Her cell phone rang and she picked it up and began chatting, at the same time sliding the bills into a metal cash box—without offering me the six dollars in change I should have had coming.

She also didn’t offer to help me get the silver out of the drawer, so I grabbed an empty cardboard box beside the card table and dumped all the silver inside. Lil shot me an annoyed look for all the racket I made, but I put the empty silver drawer back on the table and high-tailed it out of there. I was humming “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” under my breath as I trotted toward the truck.

Under normal circumstances, I might have felt a strong pang of repressed Catholic guilt over scoring such a huge bargain on the sterling flatware. But not today. Diamond Lil might not have thought much of her late aunt Edith—or her middle-class taste—but I was thrilled to have bought something with a connection to my beloved teacher.

Chapter 3

I heard the music just as I was rounding Troup Square. Tubas! Half a dozen of them, blooping and bleating something that bore only the faintest resemblance to … “Silver Bells”?

Sure enough, there, clustered on the sidewalk in front of Babalu were a squadron of tuba players, adorned in smart matching navy wool band uniforms, their elephantine brass instruments raised heavenward. Dozens of people stood around watching, some of them singing along.

Jethro’s ears pricked up and he leaned across my lap to scout out the cause of the cacophony.

“Those boys!” I said, smiling fondly.

I hadn’t always viewed “the boys”—aka Manny and Cookie, my across-the-square neighbors—with affection.

Manny Alvarez was a retired landscape designer from Delray Beach, Florida, and Cooksey “Cookie” Parker had been a Broadway chorus boy in his youth, before working in retail in New York. When they’d first opened their upscale gift and interiors shop a year or so ago, I’d viewed them as interlopers, out to steal my best merchandise lines and snake away my valued customers.

Babalu was just across the square from Maisie’s Daisy, the antique shop that I operate out of the carriage shop behind my townhouse. I’d started my junking career as a picker—somebody who sources antique and vintage items at estate sales, junk shops, and yes, even a few Dumpsters—and it had taken me years to get up the gumption—and the funds—to open my own shop.

The boys’ over-the-top shop displays grated on my nerves. And let’s face it, I was more than a little jealous of their success, and they were more than a little eager to show a small-town Southern girl how it was done in the big city. Our relationship became even more strained after I won first prize in the downtown historic district’s holiday decorating contest with my Blue Christmas display window, beating out Babalu’s Winter Wonderland tableau.

Eventually, however, we’d become fast friends—and in-laws, sort of, after Jethro fathered a litter of puppies with their dog Ruthie. This year, what with the wedding planning, I’d let my Christmas decorating slide a little, which meant that Manny and Cookie had easily won first place.

The brick storefront of Babalu had been magically transformed into a gingerbread palace, with faux icing swirls and swoops outlining all their building’s architectural details. Giant faux candy canes, red and green gum balls, and chocolate drops bordered the shop window, and two enormous potted Fraser fir trees on either side of the front door were festooned with every kind of candy imaginable.

The tuba players finished their rendition of “Silver Bells” and launched into an oompified version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
,”
and as we walked inside the shop, a costumed gingerbread boy handed me a cellophane-wrapped cookie—a miniature version of the shop. When Jethro looked up expectantly, the gingerbread boy reached in a basket on the counter and tossed him a dog treat, which Jethro caught in midair.

Although Babalu was thronged with customers, Cookie swooped in and enveloped me in a bear hug as soon as we stepped foot (and paw) in the shop.

He was dressed in camel-colored wool slacks, a fisherman knit sweater with a Burberry plaid scarf looped around his neck, and Gucci loafers.

“Weezie, you bad girl!” he chided. “Manny is in back, in an absolute dither over the flowers. You were supposed to be here hours ago.”

He scooted me through the aisles of the shop and through a swinging door to the stockroom, which now resembled a florist’s warehouse.

Flowers and plants lined every available surface of the room. There were towering buckets of pink lilies, freesias, hollyhocks, stocks and orchids. I counted four full-sized potted pink dogwood trees in full bloom, and buckets and buckets of tightly closed pink tulips.

In the middle of everything, Manny Alvarez stood, wearing a white lab coat, with a pair of garden clippers in one hand and a huge roll of pink silk ribbon in the other.

“Oh my,” I whispered.

Manny beamed. “Isn’t it glorious? Can you believe all this fabulousness will transform your townhouse in one week?”

I blinked. “All of it? Manny, it’s beautiful—but we’re having a wedding, not a coronation. Where do you intend to place all this stuff?”

He waved his hand airily. “Everywhere. The dogwoods will go in those gorgeous urns on either side of your front stoop—I’ll have them all decked out in tiny white lights, of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed.

“Then I’m doing banks of arrangements on your mantel, on that table in your entry hall, your coffee table, and every other flat surface in the parlor. Interspersed with thousands of little white lights and the palest pink wax taper candles. Which reminds me—you need to dig out all those sterling candlesticks of yours. The dining room is going to be my pièce de résistance.”

“Oh?”

“Tell her about the altar,” Cookie urged.

“Shhh!” Manny said. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.” He turned to me. “You don’t mind a surprise on your wedding day, right?”

“As long as it’s a good surprise,” I said cautiously. “But nothing too outlandish, right?”