Cornelia knew how to turn on the computer, flush the john, and even open the box of Tender Vittles when someone left it sitting on the kitchen counter.
“You going to miss me, Linda?”
“Does Cornelia need whipped cream on her catnip? Of course I’m going to miss you. That was a silly question, Amy. But things slow down at this time of year and you’re only a cell phone call away. You said your mom has a fax machine so I think we’re good to go in case something crops up. In a way, I envy you. Going home for the holidays is always kind of special and going all out on your mom’s project to help the Seniors is the icing on top as far as good feelings go. If anyone can make it work, you can.”
Amy flopped down on her swivel chair, her long legs stretched out in front of her. “Easy to say, Linda. Mapping out a PR campaign to sell cosmetics or corn flakes is a lot different from selling Christmas trees. I know zip about Christmas trees other than you put them in a stand, string lights and ornaments and flick the switch. Instant gratification.”
“You got a plan, boss?”
Amy laughed, the sound ricocheting off the walls. “Sort of, kind of. I’m thinking three tents. One for the stuff Mom wants to sell. You know, ornaments, lights, gift wrap, the big red velvet bows. I ordered tons of stuff a week ago when Mom hit me with this. I jumped right on it. Mom’s got the Seniors lined up to work the store, as she calls it. They’re going to be serving gingerbread and hot mulled cider the way they used to do at Moss Farms. I told you about that wonderful place from my childhood. I hate it that Mr. Moss let the farm go to ruin. I have such nice memories of going out there with my father. He always made it a special event. One year it actually snowed the day we went to pick up the tree. I was so excited I could hardly sleep the night before. Memories are wonderful, aren’t they?”
Linda flicked the long braid that hung down to the middle of her back. “Memories are super as long as you don’t dwell on them. Maybe you’ll meet Prince Charming when you go home. I see it now: he appears out of nowhere, asks you to help him pick out the perfect tree. You do, and then he asks you to deliver it and help him set it up. You agree. You fall into his arms in front of the tree and voila, you now have a boyfriend!”
“In your dreams! I don’t have time for boyfriends. I’m trying to build this business and working sixteen hours a day is more than any guy can understand. All in good time.”
Linda eyed her boss. She would never understand how someone as personable, as pretty, as intelligent as Amy didn’t have men falling all over her. “Your clock is ticking, Amy. There’s more to life than building a business.”
Amy sniffed as she fiddled with the comb that controlled her long, dark, curly hair. She fixed her green eyes on Linda and said, “You’re a year older and I don’t see you in any hurry to settle down.”
“Yeah, well, at least I have a prospect. George loves me and would marry me in a heartbeat if I said the word. I’m thinking about it. I want us to have enough money saved up to put a down payment on a house. There’s no way I’m going to live in an apartment with kids. I want lots of kids and so does George. By next year we’ll have saved enough for a starter house. It’s my plan. You don’t even have a prospect, much less a plan, Amy.”
Linda was right even though she didn’t want to admit it. She longed for Mr. Right but so far he had eluded her. Maybe Linda was right and she needed to cut back on the hours she worked and get some kind of personal life. Or she could go to the Internet and sign up on one of those match-making sites. Like that was really going to happen.
Amy shrugged as she continued to stuff her briefcase. She had to sit on it so she could lock it. “I don’t know why I’m taking all this. Better to be prepared for anything and everything. Okay, okay, I’ll work on my social skills and try to snag a guy when I get home. You realize single guys do not buy Christmas trees. They buy artificial ones. Families, moms and dads and kids, buy trees. Having said that, I will do my best to find a man who will meet with your approval. If I come back empty handed, I will explore one of those dating sites, okay?”
“Yeah. Look, if you need me, give me a call. I can take the train and be there in three hours. I’m going to miss Corny,” Linda said as she scooped up the tabby to settle her in the carryall. She pulled the zipper.
Amy took a last look around. “It feels right, Linda. Going home, I mean. I hate leaving you for two whole months but like you said, I’m just a phone call away. You don’t think I’m making a mistake, do you?”
“Am I hearing right? The famous Amy Baran is asking me if she’s making a mistake? The short answer is, no. Look, my mom passed away. I’d drop everything, even George, to have her back calling me to help out. You always have to give back, Amy. If you don’t, you’re just a shell of a person. I expect you to be an authority on Christmas trees when you get back. I can go on the Net and research Christmas tree farms and send out some query letters asking if they want to use our services next year. That’s assuming you pull this off and raise the money you need.”
You don’t know my mother, Linda. “Good idea. You know what bothers me the most is the trucking fees. We’re starting out in debt. I don’t like that. If bad weather sets in, the trees might not be cut in time. I’m at growers’ and truckers’ mercies. Mom did all the initial contacting. I wish she had left it up to me instead of going with the first person she contacted. You need to shop around to get the best price. Well, I gotta be going. I packed everything up last night. Yes, yes, I will call you along the way and will call you when I get to Mom’s house. I’ll miss you, Linda. Two months is a long time,” Amy said wistfully.
Linda threw her arm over her boss’s shoulder. “I think you’re going to be too busy to miss this place. Go on now before we both start blubbering.”
Amy picked up Cornelia’s carrying case and threw it over her shoulder. The briefcase weighed a ton and she probably wouldn’t even open it once she got to Virginia. Her mother always said she overcompensated for everything. Her mother also said she was anal retentive, was an overachiever and needed to think inside the box instead of outside. So much for her loving mother.
Amy settled Cornelia on the passenger seat before she unzipped the carryall. Cornelia poked her head up just long enough to see her surroundings before she curled up to sleep. Amy slipped a disc into the player and settled down to make the trip to Fairfax, Virginia.
Four hours later with four stops along the way, Amy pulled into her mother’s driveway on Little Pumpkin Lane. She leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment. She was home. The house where she’d grown up. A house of secrets. The house where she’d been lonely, sad, angry. So many memories.
Now why had she expected her mother to be standing in the doorway waiting to greet her? Because that’s what mothers usually did when an offspring returned home for a visit. A stupid expectation, Amy decided as she climbed out of the car. She left Cornelia in the car while she unloaded her bags and the boxes of things she’d brought with her. Four trips later, Amy carried Cornelia into the house and settled her and her litter box in the laundry room. She called her mother’s name, knowing there would be no answer. Her mother was a busy lady who did good deeds twenty-four/seven. All she did was sleep at the house. It was like that while she was growing up, too. Tillie Baran for the most part had always been an absentee mother with various housekeepers picking up her slack. When the housekeepers went home, her father took over, making sure she ate a good dinner, brushed her teeth, helped her with her homework and tucked her into bed at night. For some reason, though, she’d never felt cheated.
All of that changed when her father died of a heart attack in the lobby of the Pentagon on the day after she graduated from college. If her mother had grieved, she hadn’t seen it. Armed with her substantial inheritance, Amy had relocated to Philadelphia where she worked for a PR firm to get her feet wet before she opened her own small agency.
She called home once a week, usually early Sunday morning, to carry on an inane conversation wit
h her mother that never lasted more than five minutes. She returned home for Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas—just day trips, because her mother was too busy to visit. For the past two years, though, she hadn’t returned home at all. Her mother didn’t seem to notice. No matter what, though, Amy kept up with her early Sunday morning phone calls because she wanted to be a good daughter.
And now here she was. Home to do her mother’s bidding. For the first time in her entire life her mother had asked for her help. She couldn’t help but wonder if there was an ulterior motive to this particular command performance.
Amy carried her bags, one at a time, to her old bedroom on the second floor. It all looked the same, neat as always, unlived in, smelling like lemon furniture polish. A cold, unfeeling house. Her mother’s fault? Her father’s?
Amy hated the house. She thought about her cozy five room townhouse, chockful of doodads, knick-knacks and tons of green plants that she watered faithfully. In the winter she used her fireplace every single evening, not caring if the soot scattered from time to time or if the house smelled like woodsmoke. She had bright-colored, comfortable furniture and she didn’t mind if Cornelia slept on the couch or not. Her garage was full of junk and she loved every square inch of it. There simply was no comparison between her mother’s house and her own. None at all.
Amy stopped in the hallway and opened the door to her father’s old room. It still smelled like him after all these years. How she’d loved her father. She looked around. It was stark, nothing out of place. A man’s room with rustic earthy colors. She opened the closet the way she always did when she returned home. All her father’s suits hung neatly on the double racks, exactly two inches apart. His shoes were still lined up against the wall. This was a room that didn’t include her mother. Amy had always wondered why. She backed out of the room, closing the door behind her.
She had no interest in checking her mother’s room. Instead, she opened the door to her room. A bed, a dresser, a bookshelf and two night tables on each side of the twin bed. The drapes were the same; so was the bedspread. She hated the patchwork design.
Long ago she’d taken everything from this room, even the things she no longer wanted. There was nothing here that said Amy Margaret Baran ever resided in this room. It was a guest room, nothing more. Well, she didn’t do guest rooms. In a fit of something she couldn’t explain, Amy carried her bags back down the hall and opened the door to her father’s room a second time. She would sleep here for the next two months. The bed was king-size, and there was a deep reading chair and a grand bathroom, complete with a Jacuzzi.
As Amy unpacked her bags she wondered if her father’s spirit would visit her. She didn’t know if she believed in such things or not but she had an open mind. If it happened, it happened. If not, her life would go on.
She set her laptop on her father’s desk, her clothes hanging next to her father’s. The picture of her and her father on her sixteenth birthday—taken by the housekeeper whose name she couldn’t remember—went on the night table next to the house phone. She looked around as she tried to decide what she should do next. She walked over to the entertainment center that took up a whole wall. Underneath was a minifridge. She opened it to see beer and Coca-Colas. She wondered when the drinks had been added. She popped a Coke and looked for the expiration date. Whoever the housekeeper was, she was up-to-date.
Amy settled herself in the lounge chair and sipped her drink. All she had to do now was wait for her mother.
Cornelia leaped into her lap and started to purr. Amy stroked her, crooning words a mother would croon to a small child. Eventually her eyes closed and she slept, her sleep invaded by a familiar dream.
…She knew it was late because her room was totally dark and only thin slivers of moonlight showed between the slats of the blinds. She had to go to the bathroom but knew she wouldn’t get up and go out to the hall because she could hear the angry voices. She scrunched herself into a tight ball with her hands over her ears but she could still hear the voices….
Chapter Three
Exhausted from his long trip, Cyrus antsy to get out and run, Gus pulled up to the entrance of Moss Farms and looked at the dilapidated sign swinging on one hinge from the carved post. A lump rose in his throat. A few nails, new hinges, some paint, and it would be good as new. The lump stayed in his throat as he put his Porsche Cayenne into gear and drove through the opening.
Gus ascended a steep hill lined with ancient fragrant evergreens, their massive trunks covered in dark green moss. His mother always said it was so fitting because their name was Moss.
At the top of the hill, Gus shifted into park and got out of the car to look down at the valley full of every kind of evergreen imaginable. He saw the Douglas firs; the blue spruce field; and to the left of that, the long-needle Scotch pine. He shaded his eyes from the sun to better see the fields of balsam fir, Fraser firs, and Norway Spruce. To the left as far as the eye could see were the fields of white pines and the white firs. The Austrian pines looked glorious, and the three fields of Virginia pines seemed to go on to infinity. Thousands and thousands of trees. The lump was still in his throat when he tried to whistle for Cyrus, who came on the run.
Gus coasted down the hill to the valley where his old homestead rested. It looked as shabby and dilapidated as the entrance sign. What does my father do all day?
Gus wasn’t disappointed at the lack of a welcoming committee. He really hadn’t expected his father to run out and greet him. Still, it would have been nice. He parked the car at the side of the house and climbed out. He whistled for Cyrus, who was busy smelling everything in sight. “Hey, Pop!” he bellowed. Cyrus stopped his sniffing long enough to lift his head to see what was going on.
A tall man with a shaggy gray-white beard appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing a red plaid jacket with a matching hunting cap. “No need to shout, son. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing. You on your way to somewhere or are you visiting?”
Gus licked at his lips. What happened to, “Nice to see you, son” or “Good to see you, son”? Maybe a handshake or a hug.
“I came for a visit. I thought I’d help with the trees this year. Looks kind of dead around here. What’s going on, Pop?”
“Like you said, it’s dead around here. I let everyone go. I’m retired now.”
“Just like that, you retired? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Didn’t much think you’d care. Nice looking dog. Not as nice as old Buster, though. Buster was one of a kind.”
Gus jammed his hands into his pockets. “Why would you think I wouldn’t care? If you needed my help all you had to do was ask. Are you just going to let those trees grow wild? That’s just like throwing money down the drain.”
“You’re a little late in coming around, son. When I needed you, you were in California making fancy houses for fancy people. When you left here you said you didn’t want to be a farmer. I took you at your word.”
Gus flinched. The old man had him there. He didn’t want to be a farmer; he wanted to do exactly what he was doing. Well, I’m here now, so I’ll just have to make the best of it.
“I’m here to help. The first thing I’m going to do is fix the steps on the front porch before you kill yourself. Then I’m going to hire some people to thin the fields and then I’m going to set up shop and sell Christmas trees. I’ll find someone to operate the Christmas store and then when you’re back on your feet, you can take over.”
“Don’t need your help, Augustus. If that’s why you came here, you can just climb into that fancy rig of yours and drive back to California and all those fancy people you like so much.”
Gus dug the heels of his sneakers into the soft ground and rocked back. “I kind of figured you’d say that, Pop. So, let me put it another way. I came home to protect my investment, my half of Moss Farms. The half Mom left to me. If you don’t want me staying in the house I can get a room at a hotel in town. It doesn’t matter to me. The farm does matter. So, Pop, like it
or not, I’m going to go to work.”
“Won’t do you any good. Some group of women in town will be selling trees this year. A lady all prissy and dressed up came out here to ask me to sell her my trees. She wanted them at cut-rate prices. I said no. You want to go up against her, go ahead. I always said you were a smart aleck,” Sam Moss said as he turned to lumber away. “Stay in the house if you want; I don’t care, just pick up after yourself.”
“Yeah, Pop, you always did say that. And a bunch of other things that were even worse,” Gus called to his father’s retreating back. If the old man heard his son’s words, he didn’t show it. Gus wished he was a kid again so he could cry. Instead, he straightened his shoulders and climbed back into the Porsche, with Cyrus right behind him.
Gus backtracked and headed for town and a used car lot, where he bought a secondhand pickup truck the owner said he could drive off the lot with the promise that one of his workers would drive the Porsche back to Moss Farms by midafternoon.
With Cyrus riding shotgun, Gus drove to Home Depot, where he loaded up the back of the truck with a new chain saw, hammers, nails, lumber, paint and anything else he thought he would possibly need. When he checked his loading sheet and was satisfied, he drove to the unemployment office and posted a notice for day workers paying five dollars over minimum wage. All calls would go to his cell phone so as not to bother his father. The Fairfax Connection took his ad and promised to run it for a week. Again, he asked for day workers to run the Christmas store his mother had made an institution.
Gus made two more stops, one at a florist he remembered his mother liking. There he explained what he needed and was promised wholesale prices. The order, the nice lady said, would be delivered by the end of the week. His last stop was a gourmet shop, where he again explained his needs and was promised delivery in seven days.
I'll Be Home for Christmas Page 17
