The Christmas Company

by Alys Murray

  “What in the world does he think he’s doing? Is he going to shut this place down, too?”

  “Maybe he’s just hungry.”

  “No.” Kate shook her head. He wasn’t a diner breakfast kind of guy. He was a protein bar and kale smoothie kind of guy. Dallas men always gave off a clean living vibe; it made them unable to function in a small town like Miller’s Point. “He’s got to have something up his sleeve.”

  “Shh. Mel’s going to take his order.”

  They fell into silence as Mel’s heavy steps took him towards the booth behind Kate. She tuned her ears for any whisper of underhanded moneygrubbing. The first time Clark tried to barter over the price of eggs, she was going to flip.

  “Hi, stranger.” Mel greeted him with the same warmth and openness with which he greeted everyone. His friendliness crawled under Kate’s skin. Clark didn’t deserve Mel’s good nature. He deserved a one-way ticket straight out of town. She believed in universal good. Everyone had wonder and joy inside them. Everyone could be reached with kindness. But…this guy made her so mad she could spit. “What can I get you?”

  “Yeah, can I have a double stack of buttermilk pancakes and a black coffee to go? With a side of bacon, too.”

  Even with her back turned, Kate could picture him in her mind’s eye, sitting unmoved with the perfect winter backdrop behind him. His voice was as flat and lifeless as she’d heard it. Still, she applauded his order. Simple, direct, and he even got some of Mel’s famous double-crispy bacon. Maybe he was human after all.

  “To go? You off somewhere?”

  “Work.”

  “Work? It’s Christmas Eve, kid. Didn’t anyone tell you?” Mel chuckled. He always made conversation with his customers. Maybe it was a small-town gossip thing or maybe it was a Mel thing, but he liked keeping up to speed with the movement of his community.

  “It’s a Tuesday. I work on Tuesdays.”

  Apparently, Clark didn’t appreciate the perceived intrusion.

  “Ah. I see.” There was a pause, awkward in its length. Kate picked at her own pancakes to give off the appearance of not eavesdropping. “It’s just…I don’t know if anyone’s gonna be in the Woodward office this morning. Most people would have the day off for the festival. Besides, even if anyone is in, they won’t be there until nine, at least.”

  “All because of Christmas?”

  “Yeah. Christmas is kind of a thing around here.”

  Understatement of the century. Christmas was a way of life, and Clark couldn’t even begin to understand how terribly he’d disturbed it. A pang of sympathy tugged at her. His cronies in Dallas almost certainly worked on Christmas Eve, the poor big city stiffs.

  “I’ll just have my breakfast here, then. Thanks.”

  “Don’t you have a family or anything to visit? I know it’s not any of my business, but you seem pretty young to be wasting your holiday in a boring office.”

  “You’re right.” Newspaper pages rustled. “It isn’t any of your business.”

  “Buttermilk pancakes, bacon and coffee.” Another awkward pause spread between them like butter on a biscuit, ending only with Mel tapping his pen against his tiny ordering notepad. “Coming right up.”

  The interaction ended with Mel whistling as he returned to the kitchen and Michael turning back to Kate with untamed shock. He probably expected to see steam coming out of Kate’s ears. If anyone had told her she wouldn’t be hopping mad at Clark for speaking to someone in her town that way, she would have laughed in their face. But her mind caught on something and unraveled like a home-knit sweater.

  Don’t you have a family?

  It isn’t any of your business.

  For the first time since meeting him, the anger and hurt serving as Kate’s most recent and dear best friends were nowhere to be found. In their place stood a different creature altogether. She no longer hated the man threatening to take her life away.

  She pitied him.

  All of her assumptions about him had to be, on some level, incorrect. In her mind, she fancied him living the perfect, big-city rich boy life. A huge family who lavished him with gifts and privileges, love and understanding.

  Yet, here he was. Alone. In a diner booth. On Christmas Eve. Waiting for his office to open so he could spend the day working.

  How sad was that?

  Kate’s entire heart smashed open, and the blindness of her own rage smacked her in the face. Guilt bittered the coffee in her mouth, but it was soon replaced. Her eyes widened, she reached for Michael’s hand, and let her hopes get as high as they pleased.

  This was a solvable problem. Clark Woodward’s loneliness was 100% solvable.

  “Can you distract him for a few hours?” she asked, knowing full well the monumental burden she’d shoved onto her friend’s admittedly toned shoulders. Michael’s eyes widened. As usual, he was an open book. Fear wrote itself on his every page.

  “What?”

  “I think I have a plan.” Well, half a plan. Quarter of a plan. A fraction of a plan. She’d work out the rest on her bike. “Can you distract him until, like, noon? And then bring him to the old Woodward place? I think that’s where he’s staying.”

  “You wanna leave me with that?”

  Kate stood and threw on her layers of sweaters and scarves, all while her mind wrote plans and made to-do lists. When she was done, she gave him a firm pat on the back for good luck. She wouldn’t want his job, either, but he was the only person she trusted with the task. No one said no to Michael. Even in a world with Tom Hanks, Michael took the top prize for most effortlessly likable guy on earth.

  “You’re the best guy in town. If you can’t do it, no one can. I believe in you.”

  “But—!But—!”

  His protests faded as she sprinted from the diner and hopped on her bike, which was waiting outside for her. As she pedaled towards the massive mansion on the far side of town, speeding past Dickensian facades and garlands, Kate’s motives solidified. There was only one way to save Miller’s Point. There was only one way to save the festival. There was only one way to save the solitary man in the diner from his own self-imposed darkness and isolation.

  She had to make Clark Woodward believe in Christmas.

  Chapter Three

  It was so provincial. Clark Woodward couldn’t think of any other word to describe Miller’s Point. Provincial in every sense of the word. Nearly everything about them revealed how small they were, and what was worse, they reveled in their smallness. They clung to their superstitious belief in the holidays. They fought the inevitable march of progress he was going to bring to the company and their backwater enclave. The diner didn’t even have avocado on the menu.

  As he waited for his pancakes, Clark opened the newspaper. They didn’t get the Dallas Observer out here, so the local gossip would have to do. He scanned the words, each one sinking in less deeply than the one before it. Out of the window framing his booth, he could see the entire town square, including the town hall, where only yesterday he and Kate—he never got her last name—had faced off.

  Last night, he hadn’t allowed himself the time or the thought to take in the beauty of the town’s historic district. And it really was beautiful, even if it being beautiful just reminded him how wasteful the entire enterprise was. How much money did they spend on these facade recreations of London’s Cheapside? How much of his family’s fortune got washed away every night with those fake snow machines? And the lights! They might as well have built a fire out of all the greenbacks they wasted.

  Wasteful and beautiful. The worst combination.

  More dangerous, though, was thinking about the beauty who’d dared to challenge him. She’d burned herself into him yesterday with her persistence and the fiery passion behind her eyes.

  He appreciated how strangely alike they were, even as they fought for completely different goals. If
he hadn’t been spooked by her insistence that his uncle would have saved the festival, he could have stayed on those steps and talked to her for hours. She was a sharp debater with a biting wit. In a town like this, he’d expected to be greeted as a king. His family, after all, was responsible for their survival. But she didn’t bow and scrape; she challenged him.

  She was wrong, of course, and he was right. But the challenge still thrilled him, even if he didn’t dare let it show on his face. He didn’t want anyone thinking they had any kind of power over him.

  The most striking thing about her, perhaps, was her ability to embody everything he despised about Miller’s Point. That dichotomy of wasteful and beautiful dwelled within her. She had much to offer; he saw that even in their brief interaction. Yet, she chose to stay in Miller’s Point, where she could do nothing but waste her life putting up tinsel.

  Clark knew he should push all thoughts of her directly from his head. A distraction like her would only get in the way of his plans. His mission was simple, but like a fine watch even the slightest bit of sand carried the potential to destroy everything. In three steps, he could be done with this stupid festival. Step One: Dissolve The Christmas Company. Two: Sell off its assets. Three: Return to civilization and Dallas before New Year’s. He could only do that if all distractions were kept to a minimum and all pieces of sand stayed far out of his way.

  And he could only accomplish his three-step plan if people actually went to work instead of spending their Tuesdays watching Hallmark movies or whatever it is they did when they “celebrated” Christmas. Clark’s mind boggled at the way this town shut down on this useless holiday. The McDonald’s, where he first attempted breakfast, had locked its doors.

  “But—! But—!”

  Clark’s head popped up from the blurred words of his newspapers at the loud shouting of a stranger. He whipped his head around just in time to see a flash of a red-scarfed woman dash out of the door and a desperate man sitting at the diner counter. Clark was aware of small-town manners. A good citizen would have invited the freshly liberated man to join him for breakfast, but Clark wasn’t a good citizen, and even if he was, he didn’t think anyone in Miller’s Point would particularly want to share a meal with him.

  “Can you believe her?”

  It took at least fifteen seconds for Clark to realize the other man was talking to him. He focused on an article about a high school track meet. Apparently, this small town dominated at the recent district meet, held at Christopher Woodward Stadium. He wondered if they’d keep the name now that his uncle was dead, or if they’d turn it into the Christopher Woodward Memorial Stadium to acknowledge his legacy or whatever.

  “I wasn’t listening. Sorry.”

  Apparently, to the man at the counter, this was all the invitation he needed to join Clark for breakfast.

  “This seat taken?”

  No, but it isn’t open either. Please leave me and my pancakes in peace. Clark fought to keep the snark at bay. There was nothing he wanted less than company at the moment, especially when the entire town was afflicted with candy cane fever. He didn’t want any of that foolishness rubbing off on him. But it didn’t seem this guy was in the mood to take no for an answer.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks.”

  Balancing his array of half-finished plates across his forearms, he plopped into the seat, rattling the table. It took longer than a polite minute for the man to arrange his extensive breakfast, which only added to the heat flaring up the back of Clark’s neck. His lips flattened into a thin line of displeasure when Mel appeared with a piping hot plate and mug. He placed them on the table, and Clark pulled them close, grateful for the distraction. He couldn’t decide what the stranger across from him wanted, but if he thought he could convince him to change his mind about the festival, he’d be just as disappointed as Kate. Did these people have some sort of committee, dedicated to twisting the simplest of business decisions into a city-wide ordeal?

  “One order of pancakes and bacon. And a black coffee. Syrup’s over there. Can I get you anything else?”

  Clark started to say no, but was cut off.

  “Can I get some more coffee, Mel? Oh, and one of those blueberry muffins.”

  “They’re about two days old.”

  “Can you pop it in the microwave for about thirty seconds, then?”

  His easy intimacy with the diner owner put Clark’s transactional replies to shame. Without the protection of his newspaper, Clark had to actually interact with these people. His worst fears realized.

  “You got it, kid.”

  Mel departed. As Clark dug into his pancakes, he hoped the only frustration he’d have to deal with was the treacle-sweet music pouring out of the juke box, but his new guest proved him wrong.

  “You’re that Woodward guy, aren’t you?” he asked through a mouth of biscuits dripping with gravy.

  “Clark.”

  “I’m Michael.” Clark nodded once, an acknowledgment that he’d heard the introduction, but his new companion took his silence as an invitation for more conversation. “Some people call me Buddy, but I’ll answer to anything, really.”

  The urge to roll his eyes was unbearably strong. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be called Buddy when Michael was perfectly suitable. Buddy wasn’t a name for a man. It was a name for a puppy or a background character in a Flannery O’Connor novel.

  “Small towns,” he muttered.

  “Buddy was my grandfather’s callsign during the invasion of Normandy. He won a Medal of Valor.”

  Clark choked on his bacon, ready to splutter out some kind of tense take-back of the insult, but he was awarded with uproarious laughter from the man across the table.

  “I’m just messing with you, Dallas. Buddy used to be my nickname, but getting a medical degree changes how people see you. I mostly just go by Michael now. How’re the pancakes?”

  “Good.”

  “Mel makes the best pancakes in the whole state, I think. On Christmas morning, he sets up an assembly line in the town hall and a bunch of volunteers chip in to help him make, like, two thousand pancakes so everyone in town can have breakfast before the festival starts. The 25th is our busiest day of the year.” Michael’s hurried excitement tapered off when he realized a tradition would be ending. He got a hollow look in his eyes, which Clark did his best to ignore. “I mean, he did. And it was. When the festival was still on.”

  The festival. He was tired of hearing about the festival. If these people loved the festival so much, why didn’t they put it on themselves instead of using his family’s money? Better yet, why didn’t they raise the price from a measly $10 a person to $25 a person? A fifteen-dollar increase meant big things for their bottom line, yet when he’d proposed it to Carolyn, the Director of Operations, she’d assured him she’d rather quit the whole thing altogether than keep poor families out and only cater to rich folks. She then glared at him as if the mere suggestion of raising ticket prices cheapened the entire heart of her operation.

  Clark said, “Listen, Michael. I’m not really looking for company. I’m fine on my own.”

  “Yeah. Of course. I was just thinking I could maybe show you around, you know, give you the lay of the land since you’ll be here for a few days. I can show you everything. Library, bank, even the parking lots so your car doesn’t get towed again.”

  News travels fast. He’d only told Kate and the tow truck guy about his car; twelve hours later, everyone knew. If I walk around with you for twenty minutes, will you leave me alone? Something in this town’s water must have made them especially persistent. As with his first interaction with Kate, Clark saw no other way to get rid of this guy than giving him a little bit of his time.

  “Sure,” he agreed, trying to hide his displeasure behind a half-hearted smile, only to be practically blinded by Michael’s blinding one.

  “Mel
! Make my muffin to go!”

  What Clark hoped would be a brief twenty-minute introduction became an almost three-hour walking tour of the most important historical and contemporary sites Miller’s Point had to offer. By the time Michael ran out of steam, Clark knew more about the remote ranching village than he’d ever known about Dallas. For example, he’d had no idea his family founded Miller’s Point outright. He assumed they’d settled and prospered here, not set up the first encampments of ranchers.

  At the first half-hour mark of the extensive tour, Clark considered bailing out and begging off to his office, but he couldn’t actually find it in himself to do it. Save for the workers taking down the decorations in the town square (as he’d instructed the night before), the town was empty and Michael was every bit the enjoyable host. Not that he ever let on, but he actually had a good time walking around the town and taking in its sights, provincial though they were.

  But he drew the line at a cemetery tour. Close inspections of ghosts and tombstones where Jesus wore cowboy boots did not fit his description of an acceptable way to spend a morning. He checked his watch.

  “I have to go to my office. I have things to do,” he said, curt and direct as possible. The tour may have been a fine diversion for a few hours, but it couldn’t last all day. He needed to be in the office, taking care of work, even if no one in this town seemed to understand the concept.

  “Great! I’ll walk you there.”

  “I’m fine, thanks—”

  “No buts! Besides, I know where they hide the spare key.”

  The Woodward Building was two blocks east off of the town square, and unlike the Dallas offices, it was not an imposing block of concrete and steel, made up in an intricate Art Deco style. It was a humble, two-story building with a flat roof and little else to speak of besides the embarrassment of Christmas lights decorating the front windows. A hand-painted sign with flippable numbers read: “0 DAYS ’TIL CHRISTMAS.” Clark ripped it from its hook as Michael went for the spare key.