Mistletoe Bay

by Marcia Evanick

  “For what?” Dorothy kept trying to glance over her shoulder.

  “At Estelle’s Beauty Salon. You are getting your hair and nails done—my treat.” She finally got Dorothy out of the day care center and into her car. “I’m getting my nails done and just a trim to get rid of some of these dead ends.”

  Dorothy perked right up. “We can do that?”

  She had to laugh at the excitement in Dorothy’s voice. It had been so long since they hadn’t had to plan every minute of the day or shuffle the boys around that Dorothy had forgotten how to live. “Yes, we can do that, and a lot more. If you behave yourself, I think we can stop somewhere for lunch too. I’m tired of bologna or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

  Jenni had two teenage girls coming after school today for an interview. The business was doing so well that she had to start thinking about hiring someone.

  Dorothy tilted the rearview mirror her way as they drove down Main Street. “Do you think we’ll have time for me to get it colored? I swear, I’m noticing more gray hair every day.”

  “Sure.” It didn’t take Dorothy long to forget the boys. Jenni pulled into a parking spot, directly in front of Estelle’s. “I heard this place is pretty good.” Since moving to Mistletoe Bay, they had been hitting the hair salons at the mall in Bangor for quick trims while shopping. “One of the mothers in Chase’s class recommended it to me during Back to School Night.”

  “It looks nice.” Dorothy got out of the car and studied the front of the shop.

  The white building with black trim looked to be over a hundred years old. The huge plateglass window had Estelle’s name in flowing black and pink script. Pink curtains blocked people standing on the sidewalk from seeing in. She was glad they wouldn’t be on display for the entire town to see as they got their eyebrows waxed or their hair highlighted. “Come on, slowpoke, it’s time to be spoiled for an hour or so.”

  Dorothy hurried into the shop after Jenni and crashed into her back as she came to a screeching halt.

  The pink was blinding. Who in the world would paint walls that color, let alone the chairs and countertops? Jenni felt like she was standing in a Pepto-Bismol bottle. Good Lord, how did anyone stand being in the place?

  “Hi, you must be Jenni and Dot.” A woman who could have played Mrs. Claus on a holiday float came to meet them. “I’m Estelle. Welcome.”

  Estelle was wearing pink spandex pants, white sneakers with pink polka dots, and a pink sweater with a white poodle, rhinestones, bows, and a bell on the front. To top off this striking outfit, she had a pink frilly gossamer apron that covered her from the bow on the poodle’s head to midthigh. The woman actually tinkled when she walked. It was hard to tell, but Estelle’s curly mop of white hair might have had a tint of pink to it. Then again, maybe it was the reflection of the shiny pink bow she had in it, or the walls might have been bleeding into everything around them.

  “Thank you.” Randy’s mom had said that Estelle was a little unorthodox, but an excellent stylist who demanded nothing but perfection from her employees. There was unorthodox, and then there was preposterous. The jury was out on where Estelle fell. “I’m Jennifer Wright, and this is my mother-in-law, Dorothy.” She emphasized Dorothy’s name. No one called her Dot, at least no one who lived to tell about it.

  “We were wondering when you two would be stopping in.” Estelle’s fingers played with the ends of Jenni’s hair. “Please tell me you aren’t cutting your hair. It’s gorgeous. A little trim won’t hurt, but don’t take off any more than two or three inches. You have a face that can carry off the long, straight look.”

  “Um, thanks.” Most beauty salons did whatever the customer asked, and it really didn’t matter if you walked out of their door looking like Bozo on a bad hair day as long as you paid your bill.

  “Lauren will do your trim and nails.” Estelle nodded to a woman a couple years younger than Jenni who was finishing up with a customer. “And may I be so bold as to suggest, discreetly, of course, that you consider having Lauren give you a quick wax job.” With a fingertip, Estelle traced her own brown brows. “They are a tad woolly.”

  “Woolly?” she gasped in horror. Her brows were woolly. She quickly walked over to the nearest mirror and looked. They weren’t woolly, maybe a bit thick, but she didn’t have a unibrow or anything.

  “Jenni, dear,” purred Estelle, who had joined her at the mirror, “they aren’t that bad. Maybe we should just do a little plucking here and there.”

  “Estelle, you’re scaring her.” Lauren, the younger woman who was going to do the plucking or the waxing joined them. “Don’t pay her no mind, Jenni.” Lauren led her over to a chair in front of a large sink and draped a pink fabric cape around her neck. “Now, tell me what you want.”

  “Just a trim, a couple inches at the most.” Jenni glanced at Dorothy standing in the middle of the shop looking unsure if she wanted to go or stay. “And maybe something done with my brows.” Since Estelle mentioned them, there had to be something wrong with them besides a few stray hairs.

  “Who’s going to do my hair?” Dorothy asked Estelle nervously while glancing around at the other two hairdressers. One was giving an older woman a perm, and the other was doing the nails of a birdlike woman who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. The bright orange polish made her fingers look like claws.

  “Well, I am, Dot.” Estelle walked a circle around Dorothy while poking at her hair. “You have wonderfully thick hair, Dot. Why haven’t you dyed it?”

  Dorothy cringed. “I’m just starting to get a few grays now.” Dorothy tried to smooth her hair back down. “I was thinking of maybe dying it today. You know, nothing drastic, just covering up some of the gray.”

  Jenni and Lauren both raised their brows at that. Dorothy didn’t have a few gray hairs, she had streaks. Jenni blessed Estelle’s heart when she didn’t contradict her. Her mother-in-law was in good hands.

  “May I suggest going one shade lighter than your natural color, and letting me put a few strawberry blond highlights throughout?” Estelle said. “I swear it will make you look ten years younger.” Estelle led Jenni’s mother-in-law toward what had to be Estelle’s station. The mirror was framed in a pink boa.

  She couldn’t hear Dorothy’s reply, but she saw her smile and then frown as she looked in the mirror and traced one of her brows. It looked like Dorothy would be getting her woolly brows waxed too.

  “Estelle, how come you never did anything to make me look ten years younger?” asked the woman getting a perm.

  Jenni tried not to smile while Lauren rolled her eyes. The only thing that would make that woman look younger was maybe losing a hundred pounds.

  With a perfectly straight face, Estelle replied, “Why, Priscilla Patterson, don’t you know you can’t improve on perfection?”

  Jenni bit her lip and leaned back. Estelle either had the biggest heart in town, or she was on some heavy-duty medication. All she knew was she was glad it wouldn’t be Estelle waxing her brows.

  Twenty minutes, and three inches of hair on the floor, later, Jenni sat in front of the mirror as Lauren blow-dried her hair. She didn’t have to tell anyone about herself or Dorothy; it seemed everyone in town knew everything already. It seemed they all even knew about Corey getting lost. Norma, the woman getting her nails done, had a nephew on the football team.

  Estelle and Priscilla were talking Dorothy’s ears off on the other side of the room, while Jenni had the misfortune of sitting within speaking distance of Norma. Once the woman starting talking, there was no shutting her up. Not even the blow-dryer could drown out her voice.

  “I heard Cooper Armstrong was the one to find him.” Norma wiggled her fingers, trying to dry her nails faster under the light.

  “That he did. Mr. Armstrong has performed quite a few rescues when it comes to my boys. I don’t know what I would have done without him.” She felt funny talking about Coop with a stranger. For some reason, it just seemed personal.

 
Norma gave a loud “Hhmmmpppph,” then added, “He used to be such a nice boy. I’m glad he hasn’t forgotten all the manners his parents and teachers taught him over the years.”

  “I’m sure he hasn’t.” What did Norma mean by “used to be”? As far as Jenni knew or had seen, Coop was still nice. She hated small-town gossip with all its hidden innuendos.

  Lauren must have felt her stiffen beneath her pink fabric cape. “Hey, Norma, guess who I saw at the movies Saturday night in Franklin?”

  “Who?” Norma perked up and even stopped wiggling her fingers as if the movement would affect her hearing.

  “Gracie and Abraham.” Lauren gave Jenni a wink. “They were in front of us when we were buying our tickets. They were holding hands and whispering like newlyweds. Of course, since they are newlyweds, I guess it’s okay to act like that.”

  “They should act their age, that’s what Gracie should be doing.” Norma’s thin nose actually got thinner. “Gracie is a whole year younger than I.”

  Lauren chuckled. “You big phony. I saw you crying into your hankie at their wedding, Norma. You don’t fool me.”

  Norma sniffed. “I was crying over the fact that she had the audacity to wear white to her own wedding. It was scandalous.”

  Lauren laughed out loud. “You’re just jealous because Gracie’s getting some, and by the look on her face, I’d say old Abraham was doing a mighty fine job of it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Dorothy glanced around her kitchen and wondered when she had lost control. It seemed everyone wanted to help get dinner ready—except for the men. They were all in the basement banging, muttering words she knew she was better off not hearing, and laughing. Although the heater wasn’t sounding any worse, it sure wasn’t sounding any better.

  Coop had shown up for dinner three hours early, with his parents and two toolboxes in tow. Lucy, Coop’s mother, was as nice as could be and had insisted on helping wherever she could. Dorothy had had her peel potatoes, a lot of potatoes. Now Lucy was out in the family room helping Jenni set the long makeshift table.

  Who would have thought that her fine china set, with twelve settings, wouldn’t have been enough? Tonight she was making a Thanksgiving feast for thirteen. One had to wonder if that was a bad omen. She hoped not.

  Before Coop and his father, Fred, could get down to the basement, Sam and the rest of his family had shown up. Sam’s sisters, Hope and Faith, were typical teenage girls. They had giggled a lot and were now upstairs in Felicity’s room, doing makeup and such. She shuddered to think what they were going to look like when they came down. Her daughter had been known to go overboard with the glittery eye shadow on occasion. Eli Fischer didn’t look like a guy who would appreciate having his very young and impressionable daughters made into streetwalkers.

  It had been Sam’s father who had thrown her off-kilter. Eli Fischer wasn’t what, or who, she had been expecting. After talking to him on the phone the other day, she had been picturing a bigger, older Sam dressed in mechanic’s bib overalls. What she got was a six-foot-two-inch, dark blond, gorgeously rough and fit male in a poorly ironed shirt. The woman in her wanted to rip that shirt off him.

  To iron it, of course.

  Dorothy picked up the empty platter she had set out for the turkey and fanned herself.

  “Are you okay?” Lucy Armstrong asked as she came back into the kitchen. “You look flushed, Dorothy.”

  Nothing a little hormone replacement therapy won’t cure. “I just had the oven open,” she lied. She’d just committed two of the deadly sins, lust and lying. Was lying one of the seven sins? She couldn’t remember. She was going to go to hell for sure. Eli Fischer was years younger than her and, by the glint of interest in his blue-gray eyes, had a lot more energy.

  “Anything else I can help you with?” Lucy stood at the counter and waited for her next instruction.

  “Thank you, but nothing needs to be done right now.” She liked Lucy, who was in her early sixties and tended to fuss about her husband, Fred. So far Lucy had been in the basement twice on the pretense of delivering hot coffee and a few cookies. “Let’s sit down and have a cup of tea.”

  Dorothy had put on the kettle while Jenni and Lucy had been setting the table in the back room. They wouldn’t all fit in the dining room, so they had set up the table in the long family room that ran the length of the house. Felicity had been so excited to have Sam’s family over, she had helped clean the room this morning. For once it looked neat and orderly.

  It was a real shame it wouldn’t stay that way with the boys. Her grandsons liked to spread out when they played, and currently Corey was into making tents with blankets and anything else he could find.

  “It will be a mad dash the last fifteen minutes to get everything onto the table while it’s hot. I could use some help then, if that’s okay with you.” She got out three mugs and set them on the counter. She had never cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for thirteen before. Even when her own parents and a couple of elderly aunts were still alive, they had never had more than eight at the table. Entertaining just wasn’t what she had the time or opportunity to do very often.

  “I’ll be more than glad to help, Dorothy.” Lucy glanced around the kitchen. “I must say, you have a wonderful kitchen. Who designed it?”

  “I did. It’s Jenni’s house, but she allowed me to redo the kitchen the way I saw fit.” Jenni had been so busy setting up her shop, she had been more than thankful to turn that job over to her mother-in-law. Dorothy removed the whistling kettle from the back burner. “Did Jenni say where she was going?”

  Lucy sat down at the kitchen table. “She said something about the table looking bare and she went outside to see what she could find.”

  “She’ll probably throw together some sort of centerpiece.” Dorothy wondered what they could use to brighten up the table. They had stopped using candles two years ago when Tucker had set his napkin on fire. “As you can tell, we don’t get a chance to entertain much.”

  “I understand you just recently moved to this part of Maine.”

  “Six months ago.” Dorothy cringed at the racket coming from the third floor of the house. By the sound of it, the boys had just given Sam’s sisters a surprise visit from Chase’s pet iguana. “As you can hear, we sometimes have our hands full.”

  Sam had parked his butt in front of their television and was watching the pregame show for the football game that was about to start. Bojangles was asleep next to his favorite visitor. Hearing all the football jargon on Thanksgiving Day reminded her of when George was still alive. George had loved watching football and rooting for his favorite teams.

  Lucy chuckled. “I hear about the boys from Coop a lot. Did Tucker really glue the cat to the wall?”

  Dorothy poured the hot water over the tea bags. “I would just like to say I was at the store when that one happened. For once it wasn’t on my watch.” Jenni had been home with the boys and the handyman.

  “Coop misses them now that they started day care.”

  “Talks about them, does he?” Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea inviting Coop and his parents to dinner. Maybe the UPS man was going to read a lot more into the invitation than she had intended.

  “Sometimes.” Lucy chuckled. “I have to admit, meeting Tucker was kind of a letdown. I was expecting someone a little different.” Lucy seemed disappointed. “He looks like Jenni and was polite as could be.”

  Dorothy rolled her eyes. “The day is still young. By about the time the pie is served, I’m sure his head will be rotating 360 degrees.” She carried two of the mugs over to the table and sat. “As much as I love that boy, there are days . . .” She let the sentence trail off. Any mother worth her salt would know how to complete it.

  Lucy laughed. “I vaguely remember days like that, and I only had the one child, Coop. He was an only child, but he filled our lives with nothing but love.”

  Either Lucy was making up stories, or the rumor Jenni had heard in Estelle’s the other hadn’t
been true. By the love gleaming in Lucy’s eyes, she would say the rumor mill had it wrong. It didn’t appear that Coop had disappointed his parents after all. “What kind of boy was Coop? You seem to have raised a very fine young man who goes out of his way to help people.”

  “Thank you.” Lucy sipped her tea. “He was a mama’s boy until he was about eight. By the time he was in seventh or eighth grade the coaches started noticing him on the football field. From tenth grade on he was cocky and arrogant. The school let him get away with anything he wanted, because he was such a natural on the field. The town loved Coop. The girls loved Coop. Our phone used to ring all day and night with girls asking him out.” Lucy shook her head.

  “Call me old-fashioned, Dorothy, but I just don’t agree with girls asking boys out.”

  “I know I never would have the nerve to ask a man out on a date.” She winked at Lucy. “There are just too many ways for a girl to let a boy know she’s interested.”

  “What ways are those?” Eli Fischer stood at the top of the basement stairs, staring right at her. “A man who’s been out of practice for the past seven years might miss those signals.”

  Dorothy prayed for the floor to open up and to fall straight into the gaping jaws of the oil burner beneath her. Talk about embarrassing. The man must walk like a cat when he wanted to, because the basement steps groaned and moaned under the weight of Bojangles, let alone a full-grown man. She glanced at Lucy to see if there was going to be any help from that direction.

  Lucy appeared fascinated as she glanced between Eli and Dorothy. “Why, Eli, have you really been on the market for the past seven years? It’s truly amazing that no one has gotten her hooks into you yet.”

  “Lord, Lucy, you make him sound like a cod down at Cosmo’s Seafood Shanty at the height of summer tourist season.” She couldn’t believe that Lucy had said that to Eli. The man didn’t look like he needed any help in the dating department, and she was more than positive that he knew every signal in the book. Eli had probably taught his son, Sam, each and every one of them.