The Trouble with Christmas

by Amy Andrews

  She may have battled with her muse these past five days, deliberately trying to curtail her, but she was back, and Suzanne was very much afraid that if she handed these paintings over, her muse would go away again. Because what if they were the key to this artistic rush? This flow had been so new, too new to know how tenuous it might be, and if the paintings were gone, would her inspiration go with them?

  What if she couldn’t paint again? She felt like she was fighting for her artistic life here.

  Having this body of work to look at gave her courage that she could do it. That this wasn’t a flash in the pan. That she could find her own voice. Yes, her muse needed to stop being such a tyrant and let Suzanne stretch her wings. And Suzanne needed to stop playing it safe by falling back onto the crutch of other people’s art. But right now she was painting again, and she needed to trust that this was all part of the process and that she’d find her true artistic self in there somewhere.

  So yeah, these paintings were priceless. To her. Grady might not be a fan, her mother certainly wouldn’t be, but how did she put a price on getting her mojo back?

  She had these paintings to thank for that. And Joshua Grady.

  …

  Grady walked into The Lumberjack, or Jack’s, as it was known, about three in the afternoon. He was still ticked off from his encounter with Suzanne, despite trying to exorcise his anger through hard physical labor. Jack’s was at least a distraction. Grady usually drank alone, so it was a measure of how desperate he was right now that he was seeking out company.

  “Hey, Grady.”

  Tucker Daniels greeted him. He’d taken over running Jack’s from his daddy quite a few years back, before Grady had returned to Credence, and was the kind of bartender who could tell when a customer wanted to talk and when they wanted to be left the hell alone.

  Grady usually always wanted to be left alone. Not today.

  “Tucker.” Grady nodded. “I’ll get a Bud Light, please.”

  Tucker grabbed the requested bottle of Bud and opened it, setting it on the bar. When Grady sat his ass on a stool, Tucker cocked an eyebrow. Grady normally took his beer to a booth and drank it, because he didn’t do chitchat.

  Sometimes Burl, who was king of fucking chitchat, joined him. His uncle was Grady’s self-appointed are-you-okay person, appearing regularly for welfare checks and always seeming to know just where to find him.

  “Business looks good.” The whole single-women thing from the summer had definitely helped out Jack’s customer base.

  Tucker shot a puzzled look in Grady’s direction before glancing around at the mostly full booths and the group of women crowding around the jukebox. “Yup.”

  Grady took another swig of his beer as the Backstreet Boys sang about wanting it that way. He winced as he placed his beer down. “Shit music, though.”

  “It’s an acquired taste,” Tucker agreed with a laugh.

  “Thought it was illegal to play anything but country in Credence?”

  “I’m being inclusive.”

  Grady barked out a laugh. “Boy bands?” As far as he was concerned, boy bands had always been a bad idea and should definitely have stayed in the nineties.

  “Sure, why not?” Tucker shrugged, then grinned as he indicated the women by the jukebox with a lift of his chin. “Frankly, if they’d asked me to load up hardcore thrash metal, I’d have done it. Don’t worry, you can still find Dolly and Waylon. Come back next week and the Christmas songs will be loaded.”

  Christmas. Shit. Schmaltzy Christmas music. Grady made a mental note to avoid Jack’s until the New Year. Still, he forced himself to be polite and conversational because that’s what people did when sitting in bars. “Any holiday plans?”

  Tucker’s eyes narrowed. He leaned forward slightly and clicked his fingers in front of Grady’s face. “Hello, are you in there, Grady? Blink twice if you’ve been abducted by aliens.”

  Grady shook his head. “You’re hilarious.”

  “Seriously.” Tucker flicked the dishcloth in his hand over his shoulder, resting it there for easy access. “Who are you?”

  “What? I can’t sit at a bar and talk?”

  “No offense, dude, but you’re not a shoot-the-breeze kind of guy.”

  Grady had probably spoken less than fifty words since he’d sat his ass down. “This is being chatty?”

  “For you it is.”

  Lifting his beer, Grady took another swallow, neither confirming nor denying alien abduction but seriously contemplating it as a reason for his irrational attraction to Suzanne St. Michelle. Surely only something woo-woo could explain that?

  “Ah.” Tucker nodded sagely as Grady’s silence stretched. “It’s a woman thing.”

  Grady placed the Bud on the bar. Say what now? “A woman thing?”

  “You have that I don’t know what just happened to me expression that, in my experience, usually involves a woman.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  Tucker laughed. “God’s truth,” he said, hand on heart. “You want to talk about it? I’ve been doing this bartender thing for a while; I’m practically a social worker.”

  “Nope.” Grady would rather be gored by one of his bulls.

  “C’mon, dude,” Tucker cajoled. “Try me. First session’s free.” He grabbed a cardboard drink coaster out from under the empty beer a little farther down the bar. “Tell me what you see in the wet spot.”

  “Think I’m going to need a couch if we’re talking wet spots.”

  “The couch will cost you.”

  Draining the remainder of his beer, Grady said, “It’s not a woman thing.” Then he handed over his empty bottle and nodded to indicate he wanted another.

  “And how does that make you feel?” Tucker asked as he grabbed another Bud.

  Grady was about to tell Tucker to shove his barstool psychology, but a woman’s voice from somewhere behind him entered the conversation. “What’s not a woman thing?” she asked.

  Turning slightly, Grady found a curly-haired Amazon sliding onto the stool beside him. He recognized her instantly as Winona Crane, Suzanne’s friend. She was building a house out near the lake. Burl had pointed her out once when she’d been in Annie’s at the same time and gleefully told Grady all about the erotic romance author who had arrived in Credence with the influx of women over the summer.

  “Grady’s come in here looking like a slapped ass and pretending it’s not a woman thing.”

  Winona took one look at him and nodded. “Yep,” she said, turning back to Tucker. “It’s a woman thing.” And then she frowned and said, “Wait…Grady? You’re Joshua Grady.”

  Grady also frowned. The woman flat-out ogled him, putting Grady on high alert. What was it with the women in town suddenly? “Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed and swallowed half his beer in one go.

  “Ohhhhh,” she said, all breathy and speculative. “I see.”

  See? What did she see? “Ma’am?”

  She didn’t answer him, turning back to face Tucker instead. “It’s definitely a woman thing.”

  Grady blinked. What?

  Tucker grinned. “Okay now, Miss Winona, what do you know?”

  “You remember me telling you my friend from New York was coming to stay for a little while over the holidays?”

  Tucker nodded. “Sure. She’s an artist.”

  “Yes.” Winona nodded enthusiastically. “A painter. Well…” She tipped her head sideways to indicate Grady. “She’s staying in his cottage.”

  “Ah.” Tucker’s gaze returned to meet Grady’s. So did Winona’s. He was beginning to understand how one of those bugs pinned to a board felt. “That does explain it.” He glanced at Winona again. “What’s she like?”

  “She’s awesome. She forges art—legally—for a living. Her work is amazing, so accurate, and museums and galleries and private
collectors pay her boatloads of money for it.”

  A legal art forger? That was a thing? He couldn’t even wrap his head around that one. But at least it explained the accuracy and the professionalism of those paintings. Apart from one or two major deviations, of course…

  “But she’s grown up in the shadow of her very famous mother, who’s probably the country’s most prominent sculptor. Between the pressure of that and her job of reproducing other people’s art, she’s lost her way a little. I’ve been telling her for months she should take a break and come to Credence for some inspiration.”

  “And has she found it?” Tucker asked.

  Winona glanced in Grady’s direction, a little gleam in her eyes. “I think she has.”

  Tucker’s gaze also swung over him, and Grady felt hot and then cold all over. “You know I’m right here, yeah?”

  This was why he lived alone and drank alone. He didn’t have time for high school bullshit in his life. And he didn’t want to be anyone’s inspiration.

  The music changed to Justin Bieber, and Grady figured that was a sign.

  “Well…” He threw back the rest of his beer, placed the bottle on the bar, and slid off the stool. “That’s my cue to leave.”

  He should have stayed at home. People could be a distraction, but they could also be pains in the ass. He forgot that sometimes when he was away from them for a while. These two were a classic example. He didn’t need to spend his Sunday afternoon being tag-teamed by the psychological equivalent of Laurel and Hardy.

  “Methinks he doth protest too much,” Winona said to Tucker.

  Christ, they were breaking out the Shakespeare—definitely time to leave. Grady shot them both a grim smile as he threw a ten dollar bill on the bar. “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” he said as he turned and walked away.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Suzanne woke late the next day not in a lather of excitement about what she was going to paint but with a lump of dread feeling like a cement block tied to her feet. Her muse was nowhere to be found. Just as she had been nowhere yesterday after Grady had slammed out of the cottage.

  His disapproval had hung like a big storm cloud over her head, sapping all her creative energy. After her five-day burst of productivity, it felt like death.

  So she’d gone back to bed—the cold, dull weather perfect for such denial—crawled under the covers, and binge-watched the last season of Portrait Artist of The Year, a British television show to which she was addicted. She followed it up with reruns of Antiques Roadshow because some of the art that people brought along was amazing.

  Her favorite had been a young woman whose grandmother had recently died and left her a painting she’d bought in a garage sale for ten dollars more than twenty-five years ago. Everybody who’d ever seen the painting had hated it except for the woman and her granny. It turned out to be an early Gainsborough worth several hundred thousand dollars.

  Suzanne had almost peed her panties, she’d been so excited.

  Glancing down the bed, over her body and the jut of her toes, the paintings of Grady stared back at her. The sum total of her work. Her work. Five lousy paintings. What if this was all she had? What if this feeling she had today persisted, and she only ever had this one week of creative magic?

  Suzanne shut her eyes against a wave of emotion that felt very much like loss, which was absurd. How could she mourn something that had only been fleeting?

  Dragging the covers over her head, she pulled her knees to her chest and lay in a fetal ball for several minutes. It was cocoon-like but empty, which was how it felt inside her body at the moment—a big black hole, a yawning empty well.

  Her cell rang, and Suzanne didn’t even bother emerging from the covers, just groped for the phone on the bedside table and pulled it under the covers with her. She didn’t look at the display as she hit the Answer button. She knew it would be Winona, who’d called several times last night.

  “Hello.”

  “Suzanne, darling…is that you? Are you sick?”

  Suzanne blinked at her mother’s cultured accent, the shock of hearing her voice profound. Her mother had not been impressed about Suzanne up and leaving for Credence. And when her mother was annoyed, she tended to freeze people out for a while.

  Displacing the covers, Suzanne sat bolt upright. “Mom?”

  “You sound all muffled and stuffy. I told you that you’d catch something going all the way out to eastern Colorado. It blizzards there.”

  Suzanne was too speechless to ask bigger questions at the moment. “It blizzards in New York, too, Mom.”

  “Yes, but at least there’s a Duane Reade on every corner, darling. Do you have tea? I’ll make sure there’s plenty for when you come home next week.”

  There followed a thirty-second monologue on the merits of different kinds of tea, but it took Suzanne only five seconds to zero in on the most salient part of the conversation thus far.

  When you come home next week. Yeah…about that…

  She had told her parents she’d come home for a few days over Christmas. They’d been so set against her going to Credence it had been a concession she’d been willing to make to get them off her back about her Colorado plans. Not that she needed their approval or permission to leave—she was a grown-ass woman who left home regularly for painting gigs all around the country.

  She’d just been tired of the constant conversations they’d had about it, and frankly, Suzanne wasn’t the kind of person who liked to cause her parents angst. She’d been primed from a young age that it wasn’t good for her mom’s creative process.

  But, even as she’d made the concession, she’d had absolutely no intention of following through with it. Part of the reason she’d chosen to travel to Credence when she had was so she didn’t have to spend another soulless Christmas with her parents. She loved them dearly, but they just didn’t do Christmas.

  Not the way she’d always yearned for. Not the way all her friends’ parents had, the way the rest of the country seemed to, the way Winona had promised she would. Not in that big, fat Hallmark way with miles of garland and tinsel and mistletoe and a huge fuck-off tree bursting with baubles and lights and looking so damn pretty, a person couldn’t help but sigh every time they gazed upon its glory.

  Simone St. Michelle’s idea of a tree was a minimalist structure from the latest name in the art world made out of bent wire coat hangers she’d bought at a gallery twenty years ago. It had a single ice-blue light at the top, twisted within the wire like it was in some kind of prison. Apparently, it was a statement about the commercialization of the season.

  There wasn’t a piece of holly, a single candy cane, or a carol to be heard at the brownstone.

  Suzanne had complained bitterly about her parents’ lack of Christmas cheer over the years to no avail. She’d been so jealous of school friends’ houses that had glowed—inside and out—with seasonal joy. One of her favorite things to do in December was to go with her friends to check out the window displays at Bloomingdale’s and Barneys and Saks Fifth Avenue, then finish up at Rockefeller Center to ice skate beneath the massive Christmas tree.

  That ice rink was her Christmas happy place and made it bearable going home to a wire tree with a solitary blue light. And this year, her happy place was with Winona. It wasn’t at Winona’s house on the lake as they’d hoped, but the boardinghouse in town was going the full Christmas with garlands and a real tree and carols and homemade eggnog.

  And Suzanne wasn’t going to trade that for a wire tree and a posh restaurant that specialized in deconstructed festive menus. Seriously, who did that? Wasn’t that a sin against Jesus?

  Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet thought of an excuse to give to her parents for not returning to New York. Frankly, she’d been hoping the Colorado weather would come to the party and she could use unsafe travel conditions as a valid excuse. With snow predicted next w
eek, her chances had been looking up but, apparently, this conversation was happening now.

  Suzanne took a steadying breath and bit the bullet. “Mom…I’m not coming home for Christmas.”

  There was a long pause down the line. “What? But…we’ve never spent a Christmas apart.”

  The quietness of her mother’s voice was more effective than any other tone she could have adopted. If she’d yelled or scolded or even cried, Suzanne could have rallied against it, but her mother’s disappointed voice was the hardest to take.

  Suzanne just didn’t disappoint her parents.

  Shit. How did a person tell her mother she didn’t want to see her at Christmas without being disappointing? Winona’s mother had passed away three years ago, and Suzanne knew that Winona would give anything to have one more Christmas with her mom. And here Suzanne was trying to weasel out of this one with her mom.

  It was ridiculous; her parents didn’t even believe in Christmas. Not like other people did anyway. Why was it so important that she be there? Sure, it would be the first time in twenty-nine years they had Christmas apart, but…it had to happen sooner or later.

  Casting frantically around in her brain for a suitable excuse—something compelling—she grabbed hold of the first thing that sprang forth. “I’ve met someone. I’m spending Christmas with him.”

  Suzanne wasn’t sure who was more stunned at the blurted admission—her mother or herself. Met someone? That’s what she’d chosen? That was a degree of stupid she hadn’t even realized existed until now. An image of Grady stripped to his chest in the mudroom appeared unbidden, and she quashed it.

  Shit.

  “But, darling…you’ve not even been gone for two weeks.”

  “No…I met him before that. Through Winona. We’ve been keeping in touch online.”

  And just like that, she was off to the races…building this lie instead of trying to walk it back, which made her feel lower than a snake’s belly. But despite her initial panic, it was a good ruse. Her mother had always fretted about Suzanne’s lack of romantic entanglements.