Just a Kiss Away

by Jill Barnett

  “No! Sam . . .” She turned away from her brother and ran back to Sam just as the little Filipino man opened the door. Medusa flew inside and landed on Lollie’s head, like she always did.

  Her brothers stood stunned, staring at the bird. She smiled. “This is Medusa.”

  “Awk! I’m Medusa! I’m a mynah! Sam’s an ass!” Her brothers laughed.

  Sam didn’t.

  “Awk!” Medusa’s voice lowered to Sam’s timbre. “You taste like whiskey, fine, aged whiskey.” Her voice changed again to one that was breathy and female. “Oh . . . Sam.”

  Lollie’s brothers stopped laughing.

  “Awk! Come on, sweet. Come now. I want inside you.”

  There was a ponderous moment of silence, and five sets of Calhoun blue eyes turned from the bird to Sam, then to Lollie, then back to Sam.

  Lollie felt Sam stiffen and heard him mutter, “I thought Medusa was asleep.”

  She looked at her brothers. “Now, Jed . . .”

  Jedidiah threw the first punch.

  Lollie threw the second.

  Wedding bells rang from the Church of the Blessed Virgin the next morning. The curious filed into the adobe church and quietly sat in dark mahogany pews to watch the ceremony. The priest, in gold and white vestments, blessed the union, ignoring the squawking black bird with the dirty mouth, the battered, bruised faces on the bride’s brothers, who stood in a human wall around the couple. He ignored the cut lips, the black eyes, the occasional wince. He also turned the other way when the plain gold wedding band wouldn’t fit over the bride’s bruised and swollen knuckles.

  He did his job in the eyes of God, and he blessed the union. The instant the blessing was over the bridegroom, a tall, blacked-haired devil with a sinister patch on one eye and shiner on the other, grabbed the bride and kissed her, and not the length it took to give the Benediction, but as long as the Liturgy, the Apostles Creed, and the Eucharistic Prayer all combined. When the groom pulled away, not a soul inside those thick walls doubted his willingness to wed her.

  They walked down the aisle, this motley group that bore all the markings yet none of the actions of a shotgun marriage. The bride and groom were too happy. No one could doubt that. The priest watched them leave and, shaking his head at life’s little oddities, turned back to the altar, and suddenly froze.

  Deep booming laughter echoed in the rafters of the church. God was laughing.

  And God kept on laughing, for over the next ten years he gave Sam and Lollie Forester six little girls, all of them with hair as black as jet and light blue eyes the color of alpine ice. Each little girl had said her first word when she was ten months old and hadn’t stopped talking since.

  Samantha, the oldest, had her father’s strong, square jaw, determined nature, and stamina. She could out-run, out-think, and to her father’s secret pride, out-fight any boy in the neighborhood. Anna moved as slow as a Southern drawl, yearned to be a great actress, and always wore pink. Priscilla loved animals and had a menagerie of pets that kept the house in turmoil—two dogs, a cat, a parakeet, four hamsters, three goldfish, sixteen guppies, two turtles, three frogs, and her favorite pet, a twelve-year-old, peanut-eating, snoring mynah bird named Medusa who tattled on her sisters.

  Abigail was known for her mild temperament. She needed that sweet nature since not a week went past that she didn’t trip, slip, or break something. Most recently, she’d managed to get stuck in the dumb waiter, in between floors. It’d taken Sam an hour to get her out. Jessamine was the little chatterer. She fired questions like a repeating rifle fired bullets, but she’d learned to add numbers this Christmas and she was only four. Sam had taught her to add up the burnt batches of her mother’s Christmas cookies.

  Last, but certainly not the least, nor the quietest, was Lily, the baby. She was the screamer. All of McLean Virginia knew when Lillian Grace Forester was awake. Her father had been known to swear he had heard her from his office as a government military advisor at the capitol.

  But on Christmas night, 1906, it was fairly quiet.

  Sam picked up the magazine that lay on his favorite leather chair and sat down, dropping the magazine onto the table beside him. He leaned back and rolled his stiff shoulders, then locked his hands behind his head and stared at the flickering candles—thirty for every foot—on the huge Christmas tree. He wondered why women, of any age, had to have the biggest tree on the face of the Earth. In fact, the most quiet moment in the last week had been when he’d suggested getting a smaller tree and setting it on table. Six pairs of ice blue eyes had turned and stared at him as if he had just blasphemed.

  The giant fir tree stood ten feet tall, anchored in a heavy stone crock he’d filled with sand and water. Lollie had argued with him for fifteen minutes over whether or not the tree was straight. He eyed it for a moment. It still leaned a little too much to the left.

  It was decorated with sparkling, three-dimensional paper animals and scenes imported from Germany that his wife called Dresdens. There were striped candy sticks tied with Calhoun pink ribbons, lacy fans, and twinkling blown glass icicles. Hanging in gilded cages were musical birds that sang whenever someone would wind the aggravating little suckers.

  Sam patted his pocket. He had the winding key.

  Glass fairy-tale figurines and angels hung among the gold and silver crinkled wire and shiny paper cornucopias that he and Lollie had filled with sweets and were now empty. Crowning the tree top was a huge porcelain angel and here and there, among the laden branches of the tree, dangled a burned gingerbread man.

  Late last night, locked behind the huge sliding doors of the parlor after they’d laid out the gifts, filled the stockings, and lit the candles, he’d made long hot love to his wife by the light of that tree. Over the years, the kid from Quincy Street had learned to love Christmas.

  He looked at Lollie, who sat on the floor playing jacks with their daughters. She hadn’t changed much. She’d filled out a little from the births of their children, but only in the chest, which was fine with him. Her whiskey-colored hair puffed out around her head and topped in a lopsided knot that always looked as if the whole thing might tumble down at any minute. It reminded him of bedrooms, crumpled sheets, tousled hair, soft white skin and a husky Southern drawl . . .

  Sam moved his gaze to safer territory—Matilda, their housekeeper, or as he liked to refer to her—his Lolliekeeper. She was fifty years old, built as square as his new Pierce Great Arrow touring car, and ran the household with the command of the Kaiser. She sat at the piano, playing Christmas carols while Medusa sang “0 Holy Night” off key. Soon the girls stopped playing and joined Matilda by the piano. Lollie got up and came over and sat on the arm of his chair. He slipped his arm around her.

  After a few comfortable minutes, he glanced at the table next to his chair, looking for his pipe and hoping that Jessie hadn’t put soap in it again. He picked up the magazine but something in it caught his eye. It was the latest issue of The Ladies Home Journal and an article illustrated with bows and flowers and other frilly female stuff stared back at him. It was entitled, “The True Spirit of Christmas,” and Sam began to read:

  Children are God’s own angels, sent by Him to brighten our world, and what we do for these messengers from the sky, especially at that time of year which belongs to them, will come back to us threefold, like bread cast upon the waters.

  He looked at his family—his bread cast upon the waters. His daughters stood there, all dressed in white linen and lace with Christmas red sashes, singing like a group of motley angels. Samantha had a shiner and Annie had a giant Calhoun pink bow in her hair despite the fact that it clashed with the red on her dress. Prissy had that ever-present cat slung over her shoulder, a hamster in her pocket, and the parakeet on her head; Abby had her finger stuck in a candlestick, but managed to yank it out before he could get up, and Jessie was singing louder than Medusa except when she’d interrupt to ask Matilda who invented Christmas carols. Lily was upstairs, sound asleep. She had just turned
ten months old and said her first word today. But Sam smiled, anyway. The word had been “Daddy.”

  He turned his gaze to his beautiful wife, dressed in velvet and lace with her whiskey-colored hair piled on top of her head in a knot that looked as if it was going to tumble down any minute. Her love had given him those children and her harebrained ways had captured his heart. If their children were his angels, then she was his heaven.

  A lazy, comfortable smile cut across his jaw.

  Sam Forester lived for this.

  (Continue reading for a message from Jill)

  1991

  Dear Reader,

  I suppose I can breathe a relieved sigh—weaker than one of Lollie’s—because you’ve finished Just a Kiss Away. You’ve met Sam and Lollie. I hope you had a good time.

  Of course, there’s always the chance that you’re reading the last page first—I do that—and if you are, then I’d better make this compelling so you’ll want to read the whole story. But what can I tell you? We’re strangers, you and I, who meet only through the pages of a book. Should I tell you about my life? Nope. You’d put the book back, after you woke up.

  I’m thinking . . . Can you smell the smoke? Let’s see, maybe I should tell you what I want in a book, what’s important to me. Well, here goes . . .

  I adore the past. Of course, my husband would tell you that I adore the past because I’ve never done anything on time, and my father would add that my birth was the only time I ever arrived early. With men like that in my life—witty devils—it’s little wonder I believe that love and laughter go hand in hand.

  But on to romance . . . I want to read about people who do all those screwball things we do when we’re in love, characters you can laugh at and with, and who seem so real that you feel someone you know is on the page looking out at you. Add to that a taste of the past, tales rich in the flavor of a bygone era, when people loved hard and fought for what they wanted. A book should make you laugh at the antics of an animal, smell the bite of cinnamon in a hot apple pie, hear the joy in a song of the past, and feel a character’s heart ache.

  Those are the stories I want to tell. Then maybe you’ll open the book and drift into the pages, forget about today and experience the delights of yesterday, and maybe you’ll smile; that is . . . if I can just get that next book in on time.

  —Jill Barnett