Bad Heiress Day

by Allie Pleiter

  “Yeah, I’ve thought about that.” Darcy stirred her tea, seeing not the brew but an image in her mind. “Seeing Dad, I mean. I found a picture of him and me from a couple of years ago—before he got sick—and I thought that’s what he’ll look like.” Darcy felt a lump rise in her throat. “Not all thin and pale, but stocky and tanned and running.” The tears welled up in her eyes. “Full of life, not fighting for it. I think of him…in heaven…that way.” She was crying now, ambushed by the sudden force of emotion. “I want to see him like that again. I know I will.”

  Tears brimmed out of Glynnis’s own eyes. “It’ll be even better than that, hon. Better than we can even imagine. You hang on to that thought. That’s how you can hold those antlers high.”

  Antlers, chickens, who knew what images Glynnis would conjure up next? Darcy realized it was one of the reasons she loved the woman.

  And she did. She had come to love Glynnis as a mentor, and, well…as a mother. Could you adopt a mother like you adopted a child? Darcy had a friend who adopted a little girl from China, and she called her the “child of my heart.”

  That’s what Glynnis was. The mom of her heart. There weren’t enough Christmas presents in the whole wide world to repay her for that.

  “Thanks, Glynnis,” she heard herself say, “I love you.”

  With that Glynnis’s eyes overflowed. “Oh, hon,” she said in a thick voice as she pulled Darcy into a gigantic hug. “That’s the whole point. The whole blessed point of it all.”

  Two weeks later, Darcy sat in the kitchen updating a new 2002 calendar with school break and early-dismissal days.

  Jack’s voice bellowed from somewhere upstairs. “Dar!”

  Darcy turned her head in the general direction of the stairway. “What?” Such calls were usually preceded by “Mom!” and were almost always the precursor for questions like “Where’s my jeans with the flowers on them?” or “I can’t find my baseball cleats!” You’d think such helplessness would be confined to children, but Jack would occasionally—and most especially in times of stress—fall into the same pattern. Mom, find my everything mutated all too easily into Hon, find my everything!

  Dar had a friend who was always saying it takes both eyes and estrogen to find most household items. She wasn’t that far off. Darcy would frequently find Paula, Mike or even Jack howling to help them find an object when they were standing right in front of that very thing.

  “Dar!” came Jack’s voice again, more sharply now. “Come up here!”

  She tried to stem her anger as she started up the stairs. Jack’s work had been miserable. Rebounding from missing five days down with the stomach virus, he had been a ball of tension. Even though it was Sunday afternoon, and Dar had made not one, but two of his favorite meals, he still hadn’t loosened up.

  Darcy turned into their bedroom only to find it empty. There were sounds—the rustling of plastic and paper bags—coming from the guest room. She looked down the hall and saw the guest room door open. What on earth could Jack be looking for in there?

  Stepping into the room, she found Jack surrounded by shopping bags. Her Christmas shopping. She’d been picking up things for the past few weeks, tucking them inside the guest room closet where she always stashed her Christmas shopping. Jack had evidently pulled it out of the closet.

  And the pile was enormous.

  Surely she’d not bought that much, had she?

  “What is all this?” Jack’s face broadcast that he already knew the answer.

  “Christmas presents. Decorations for the house.”

  “How many presents are in here?” Jack’s voice was tight and precise. The tone he took when he was threatened or angry.

  “I don’t count them, Jack.” How dare you get on me for this, after all we’ve been through, she thought as she bit back her growing anger. She couldn’t believe his attitude.

  He pulled four more bags out of the closet, practically sending them airborne as he did. “Okay, then, do you have even the vaguest notion of how much you’ve spent so far?” He was patronizing. That really made her mad—she hated when he did that, explaining things as if she had Paula’s ability to grasp economics instead of a grown woman’s. As if she were irresponsible or something.

  “No,” she countered, getting defensive. “I don’t. I’ve spent a lifetime bargain hunting, making Christmas as cheap as possible. Making do, buying knockoffs. I’m tired of it, Jack. We’ve been through enough already this year. I just wanted—once—” she almost spit the word out, she said it so harshly “—once—to go all out for the holidays. We need it.”

  “Need? Need? There’s not a thing in this room we need, Darcy.” He snatched a bag from the Lazarus department store and held it up in front of her. “Can you even tell me what’s in here? There must be fifty gifts in this room. More maybe.”

  “So I bought a lot of gifts. I like to buy gifts. You know that. Now you want to tell me I can’t?”

  “This is not a lot of gifts.” Jack stabbed his hand around the room, pointing at pile after pile. “This is way too many gifts. This is over the top, even for you, Dar. It’s too much.”

  “Why can’t you just let me enjoy this holiday?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re saying!”

  “All right, you want to know exactly what I want to say? What I think? I think this isn’t about Christmas at all. You’re—what do they call it?—you’re overcompensating.”

  She crossed her arms and glared at him, furious. Since when did he pull pop psychology into an argument? Had he been watching too many talk shows while he was home sick?

  Jack blew a breath out in exasperation. “I’m trying to see it your way, Dar, I really am.” He waded through the bags, pacing the room. “But you do something like this and I don’t get it. You want to give your dad’s money away like water, and you want to spend ours like we’ve got millions.” His eyes narrowed at her. “Which do you want? You can’t have it both ways.”

  Oh, that really sent her over the edge. She wasn’t going to let him play Scrooge. Not this year. “We have more than enough. We can afford one really nice Christmas. I won’t do what Dad did. I won’t sit on my money like some miserable old miser. We’re alive and healthy and our kids are here and it’s Christmas.”

  “Wise up, Darcy, we’re alive and our kids need to go to college and the economy’s in the toilet and we’re about to go to war and…and—” he turned to look at her, his eyes intense and almost painful “—and all this isn’t going to make your dad come back.”

  His accusation hung in the air, knocking the breath out of her.

  “You can’t see it, can you? Look around this room. Can’t you see what you’re doing here?” He softened his voice. “This is way too much. Wake up, Dar, and see what’s going on here.”

  “It’s not too much.” She knew it was, though, the moment the words left her mouth.

  She recoiled when Jack tried to pull her into the room. He pulled her in anyway. There were packages everywhere. There were even still more in the closet he hadn’t even gotten to. Piles upon piles of it. He was right—there were things she couldn’t even remember buying. “Stand here. Stand here and look at this, honey, and tell me it’s not too much.”

  Darcy couldn’t answer.

  Jack turned her toward him, tucking her head onto his shoulder. “We can’t do this. Somewhere down inside I think you know that. I know you love to give gifts, but this is…this is about something else.” He pulled her away to look into her eyes. “We can’t do this, Dar. Not with things the way they are.”

  “Jack…”

  “He’s gone. He’s gone and he won’t be here for Christmas.” Darcy started to cry, the sharp truth of it twisting inside her. “Your dad is gone and all this isn’t going to change that.”

  “It’s not…”

  “It is. It is.”

  “I…” She couldn’t even begin to actually say it. To speak it would bring it
all back up to wash over her and drag her under again and it was Christmas.

  Christmas.

  The pain would not stay down. It swirled up around her until she felt flooded by it. She clung to Jack as if he were a lifeboat in a hurricane. “I—I m-miss him so much. So much.” Darcy melted into sobs on Jack’s shoulder.

  He just held her.

  “I miss both of them.” She continued, unable to stop it now even if she wanted to. “I want my parents back. I don’t…I don’t want to be alone.” The last word came out as more of a wail than a word. “I can’t do Christmas without Dad. I can’t.”

  “I know. I know.” Jack stroked her hair, speaking softly, the way he did the night Paul died and she just didn’t have any more words or sobs. “We all miss him. There were times I could barely stand the guy but I miss him, too. And that’s just how it’s going to have to be this Christmas.” He pulled his arms around her more tightly, as if sensing her need to feel his strength. “Our Christmas has a hole in it. But this isn’t going to fill that. It’ll just make things worse.”

  Darcy sniffed and looked up at him. The anger was gone out of his eyes, replaced by a tender sadness. “I don’t know,” she offered, loving him so very much at that moment, wanting to give him the whole world and everything he ever wanted. “Some of this stuff is pretty neat.”

  He laughed. She could feel it ripple through his chest. “Oh, I’m sure it is.”

  They stood quietly for a moment.

  “I think,” said Jack in his I-will-save-the-day voice, “that we need to find the middle ground between celebratory and fiscally reckless, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That’s somewhere between here and the Returns counter, isn’t it?” Darcy sighed.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Darcy looked down at the nearest bag, poked it with her toe and sighed. It was a fabulous sweater just the color of his eyes. With a pang she remembered that he already had a fabulous sweater just the color of his eyes. She winced.

  “Let’s not do this now.” Jack let his hand slide down her arm until it wrapped around her hand. “Go downstairs, make a pot of tea and we’ll sit down and figure out a number between celebratory and fiscally irresponsible, okay? I’ll use my manly skills to see if I can get all this back into the closet.”

  Darcy eyed him, pasting a look of mock indignation on her face. “You’re going to put me on a holiday budget this year, aren’t you, you cruel man?”

  Jack laughed again, his arms now full of bags. “That’d be a bit of a reach. I’m a realistic kind of guy. I was thinking more in terms of an x number of gifts per person equation.”

  “Holiday algebra?”

  “Think of it as more of a game plan.”

  Darcy groaned. “Oh, it’s so much more appealing that way.” She turned to go downstairs, then stopped and poked her head back into the guest room door. “What’d you come in here for in the first place, anyway?”

  “My dark-blue socks.”

  Sure Jack, I always put your socks in the guest room. It’s a game I play. It’s so much more interesting than just putting them in your sock drawer. Did everyone in this house think the laundry magically floated back upstairs into drawers once it was clean? “Downstairs, blue laundry basket, left-hand side. Five pairs at least.” She pronounced herself the noblest of all women for not adding like always.

  Chapter 20

  Pithy But Engaging Holiday Greatings

  Darcy loved the city done up for Christmas. Churches glowed like those ceramic village buildings they had in gift stores. Over on Fountain Square, even the fountain—the symbolic city centerpiece—glittered in a coating of tiny white lights next to a magnificent tree. Crowds still streamed out of the Tower Place Mall. It was just the perfect kind of cold—seasonal but not brutal. It was the Friday before Christmas, and downtown Cincinnati looked like it belonged inside a snow globe.

  “It’s a perfect night.” Jack had kept his promise. Once she’d done all the returning, whittling the Nightengale family Christmas down to four perfect presents per person—she’d haggled Jack up from three—they went out for a night on the town together. Nothing fancy, mostly just a time to step away from the holiday bustle and enjoy the season as a couple. After sitting through no less than five holiday choir programs, orchestra concerts and dance recitals, Jack and Darcy were ready for a little adult conversation.

  Darcy stopped in front of a gift store window. “These are all right, but their window display last year was much better.”

  Jack gawked at her. “You remember their window displays from last year?”

  “Sure. They had a north woods kind of theme, with ironware mugs and stuffed bears and such. Elves just don’t cut it. They should leave the elves to the toy store.”

  Jack touched the holly pin on her coat lapel. “Sometimes I forget just what a holiday nut you are.”

  “I admit, I enjoy the season.” She tucked her arm into Jack’s as they walked farther down the block.

  “You obsess the season. You are the season.”

  “Not really.”

  Jack hip-checked her as they turned the corner. “How many other women do you know who have a different Christmas pin for every day in December?”

  “Some of those were gifts. You know how people get—they see you with two or three of something and then everyone assumes you have a collection and suddenly you get them all the time as gifts.” Darcy thought of Glynnis’s chickens. She remembered that Glynnis was praying for her and Jack tonight and the plan the two of them were hatching. For the important step they were taking. “Oh, Jack, look.”

  In one store window was a stunning white porcelain crèche. The figurines had a remarkable grace and beauty, lifelike and yet unearthly all at the same time. The artist had somehow given special touches to each figure. The three wise men were off to the far right, making their way down a green velvet mountainside. They had robes that swished and flowed in some imagined wind, and you could just picture them out on the desert landscape, walking, seeking. A trio of shepherds, awestruck and humbled, knelt near the manger. One’s head was turned back toward a companion, as if they were still asking each other questions, still struggling with the wonders they had seen that night. The angels billowed like clouds, their bodies caught in motion, their hands spread in joy. She thought, as her glance returned to them, that they had moved since the last time she’d looked at them.

  Darcy caught herself with her nose pressed up against the window like a child. She’d read the Christmas story from Luke’s gospel five or six times in the past weeks. It echoed deep in her heart now in a way it hadn’t before. Jack wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. The two of them stood and admired the display.

  Joseph stood under a balsa wood barn silhouette amid tiny wisps of straw. He leaned over his new family with a protective stance. You could not tell if his eyes were on Mary or Jesus, but his expression was one of wonder and love. His hand held tight to a staff, as if saying to the world that this child was under his protection and would come to no harm if he could help it.

  In the center, reclined, cradling her child in the smitten love of a new mother, was Mary. Proud, fragile, willowy in stature, Darcy’s mind recalled the verse “Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” Darcy’s own heart was full to bursting with pondered things as well. With a surprising peace, and a growing seedling of faith. She stared again at the figure of Mary. She was beautiful, young and innocent, but with a face that looked comfortingly familiar. As if she knew her.

  And the child—he was the best of all. This Jesus was not a peaceful, iconic child, but a child of life. A chubby, joyful baby. She could almost see him wiggle. Tiny fingers reached out for his mother’s cheek, his eyes were wide and his mouth open in such as way as she could just imagine his exuberant squeal. This was a Christ Child glad to be in the world, eager to “Let Earth receive her King.”

  “I don’t think this was here last year,” said Jack from bes
ide her.

  “No,” Darcy whispered. “This is new.”

  It was all new this year. Or so it seemed. Sure, there were gaping “holes” as Jack put it; bittersweet memories and missing pieces. Yet, there were new things, fresh things, parts of the holiday that had powerful meanings that had never been there before. Darcy couldn’t help thinking that last year she might have passed this crèche by without a second thought. This year, it captured her imagination and warmed her spirit. Her faith was no mere mustard seed anymore. No, it was growing. Spreading, taking root, taking hold.

  Jack kissed her forehead, and the world seemed an absolutely perfect place.

  There!

  She and Jack heard it at the exact same time. The rhythmic ping of the Salvation Army bell. There must be a kettle just around the corner, in front of the bank building.

  They caught each other’s eyes, sparks flying between them. The moment had come.

  It had been Jack’s idea, initially, thrown out more as a joke than anything else. But the minute he suggested it, something clicked between them and they knew it was the perfect solution. The key to “between celebratory and fiscally reckless.” And it was; knowing it was in the works enabled Darcy to return all the extra gifts without a moment’s remorse.

  Darcy watched Jack’s hands slip to his coat pocket. “Got ’em?” she whispered, her face close to his.

  Jack patted his pocket. “Got ’em.” He leaned his forehead in to touch hers. “Ready?”

  “Yep. You ready?” Darcy could hardly believe Jack agreed to the scheme, much less be the one who proposed it. She kept waiting for him to call it off, to come to his Jack the Numbers Guy senses, but he seemed to get as much of a thrill out of it as she did. That was the beauty of it, though; Jack had come up with a sensible half and a celebratory half—something for each of them. In the perfect symmetry of it, it had become something for both of them.

  And that was nothing short of amazing. Miraculous, actually.