Once Mitchell was situated, Richie, seeming doggedly determined to be civil, walked over to Beth’s car and bent to peer at her through the open window. “Are you sure you don’t want to come into the restaurant and have coffee with Starla and me? It’s a long drive back.”
“No, thanks,” she said, biting the words off sharply and trying not to let on that she was a basket case.
“Beth, it shouldn’t be like this,” he said. The waistband of his pants strained across a beginning paunch, and his hairline had receded at least half an inch since this time last year. These observations should have given her satisfaction but only made her sad.
“How should it be, Richie?” Beth asked wearily. “All sweetness and light? When I no longer have a husband? And Mitchell no longer has a live-in daddy?” She’d tried hard to forgive Richie and Starla over the past three years but had failed utterly.
Richie studied the wet asphalt. “We need to get over this,” he said finally. “For Mitchell’s sake.”
Beth swallowed, forcing down the taste of bile. Scenes of Richie’s betrayal flashed through her mind: the nights he’d said he was working late, his sneaking into their bed after midnight reeking of Patchouli, a scent Beth never wore. His lies, his denials, his defense of nineteen-year-old Starla of the trim thighs and enormous breasts, who had set her sights on Richie and had never let up until she’d lured him away from his wife and child. Not that Beth blamed Starla, exactly. Richie should have made it clear that he wasn’t interested, shown some self-control.
Beth inhaled a bolstering breath. “Mitchell’s duffel is in the back seat.”
Wordlessly, Richie opened the back door and scooped it up.
She didn’t speak until he’d slammed the door. “I’ll be here at one o’clock on December twenty-eighth. Call me if you’re not going to be on time,” she said.
“Okay, Beth. Have a safe trip. And a merry Christmas.”
When Beth only stared at him blankly, Richie said lamely, “I mean it, Beth. I really do.”
After it became obvious that Beth wasn’t going to speak, he straightened and walked away. Mitchell, happy and excited, turned and waved out the window of Richie’s car, and Beth waved back. His new red sweatshirt gave him a festive air, and she could hardly bear the thought that he was going so far away.
She wouldn’t have anyone to jump squealing onto her bed on Christmas morning, anyone with whom to share breakfast after opening presents or to cuddle with in front of the TV while watching favorite holiday movies. Mitchell had become her whole life since Richie left; Beth often felt that it was the two of them against the world. While Mitchell was gone, she would be miserably alone.
It was against the natural order of things. No one should be alone at Christmas. This was the season to be jolly, wasn’t it? A time to be with family, right?
Wrong. Her family now consisted only of Mitchell, and he would be away for twelve whole days.
Chapter Four
Driving home from Fort Worth, Beth couldn’t stop thinking about the situation that had produced this sad state of affairs. In fact, she’d been wandering through all the could’ves and should’ves since the divorce.
Back when she was still married, she could’ve questioned Richie more thoroughly when he’d said he had to work late, but she’d been exhausted from dealing with a toddler all day and hadn’t wanted to rock the marital boat. She should’ve made it clear to Richie that she suspected his infidelity sooner. She could’ve sought counseling earlier; she should’ve realized that she was in denial about the disintegration of her marriage; she—
But she hadn’t. And if she had, would the course of events have changed? Would she still be married to Richie, who by this time seemed woefully deficient as a husband? And now that she felt that way about him, would she even want to be married to him?
Probably not, she admitted. Certainly not. She’d lost all respect for Richie somewhere along the way, and that didn’t bode well for a marriage.
She inserted a cassette of Michael Martin Murphey’s “Rollin’ Nowhere” in the tape deck, and by the time she rolled into Farish, Beth felt better. The song was about wasting time and having no particular aim in life, which wasn’t the case with her. She had her son, her business and her own place to be—Farish, Texas.
Beth always got a positive feeling when she crossed the steel girder bridge spanning the Sabinal River and spotted the sign at the edge of town proclaiming Farish to be “The Small Town with the Big Heart,” which Beth’s friend Chloe often joked should be amended to add “And Big Ears, Big Eyes and Big Mouths”—a reference to the ever-active gossip mill. Not that Beth found that particular feature of small-town life troublesome; she knew a lot of caring people in Farish.
She still lived in the house that she and Richie had bought when they moved here five years ago, a small white-frame, green-roofed bungalow on the outskirts of town. It was meant to be their starter home. They had figured that they’d be able to move up to a bigger house in the new upscale Hillsdale development outside town after Richie became manager of the local feed and seed store and before their first child started school. However, after the scandal with Starla, Richie was fired and he and his new wife moved away.
The divorce had wrecked their finances, as divorces often did, and moving to Hillsdale was out of the question now. Fortunately, Beth loved her house, which nestled in a grove of pecan trees, and she had decorated it in a shabby-chic cottage style abounding in soft, faded colors. Even though she was able to acquire new furnishings at wholesale prices, she’d avoided suites of expensive furniture, instead shopping carefully for gently used pieces that conveyed an atmosphere of warmth and coziness.
The bungalow, which had no near neighbors, was set back from the two-lane highway that curled down out of a series of hills and continued around a small pond. On the shores of the pond were a county park and playground, where Beth sometimes took Mitchell to play. Today, perhaps due to the cloudy skies and the chill wind sweeping out of the hills, the park was empty. If she hadn’t been so upset about saying goodbye to Mitchell, she might have gone for an invigorating walk after pulling her car in the garage, but now she had no intention of doing anything more than putting on the teakettle.
Her kitchen was welcoming and cheerful, with cabinets that she had restored to their original maple finish and blue-and-white checked wallpaper above the beadboard wainscoting. As soon as she walked in the back door and hung her jacket in the closet, her phone rang. It was Leanne.
“You are coming to Tom’s housewarming tonight, aren’t you?” Leanne demanded.
“No,” said Beth, cupping the phone between her chin and shoulder while filling the teakettle with water.
“It’ll be good for you.”
“My nose is red and my eyes are puffy. I miss Mitchell. I wouldn’t be good company, Leanne.”
“Don’t be silly. Why stay home and mope when you can hang out with a bunch of fun people? Chloe is coming, and Julie and Steve, and Divver and Patty, and some of the members of the Breakfast with Santa committee.”
“They’ll try to cheer me up. I want to wallow in my misery,” she said, only half joking. Chloe had been her best friend since they’d both attended the University of Texas, and Leanne, Julie and Steve had been supportive throughout the divorce, but she really wanted to be by herself tonight.
Leanne let out an exasperated sigh. “Tom will be disappointed,” she said, employing her best carrot-in-front-of-the-horse technique.
For a moment, Beth couldn’t place the man’s name. Then she recalled a pair of piercing gray eyes, and the rest of Tom filled itself in. Wide shoulders, ropy muscles, chiseled cheekbones and a shock of dark hair falling across one eyebrow.
She unwrapped a tea bag, her favorite Earl Grey. “How’s Tom’s wrist?” she asked, being polite. Not that she’d forgotten the rare camaraderie between them on that day at his house when she’d helped him tame a runaway faucet, but she didn’t want to seem too interested.
“It’s better. Not perfect. So, will you join us?”
“Maybe,” Beth said, although she had no intention of going. She’d told Leanne as much when she received the invitation, but her friend never took no for an answer.
“Good. Be there at eight or so. ’Bye.” And Leanne hung up.
Beth brewed the tea and turned on some funereal music before carrying her teacup and saucer to Mitchell’s room, where she curled up on the narrow bed with her head on his pillow, inhaling deeply of his sweet little-boy scent. Mitchell had fallen in love with the gentle cartoon ogre Shrek, and she’d decorated her son’s room with a matching plaid comforter and curtains that coordinated with Shrek’s chartreuse complexion. Mitchell had Shrek coloring books and Shrek T-shirts and a lonely stuffed Donkey that made her tear up when she nudged it aside to make more room on the bed. After a while, lulled by the music and the patter of rain on the roof, she dozed.
When the phone rang some time later, she thought it might be Richie phoning to let her speak to Mitchell before bedtime. She scooped up the receiver and said eagerly, “Hello?”
“Why aren’t you here?” asked a familiar male voice, deep and somehow intimate.
Her heart sank to her stomach. It was Tom Collyer.
She levered herself to a sitting position and propped herself against the pillows. “Because—because I’m here,” she blurted, saying the first stupid thing that popped into her head. But Tom treated it as if she’d said something witty, and chuckled.
“Everybody’s got to be someplace,” he agreed. “I was thinking that your someplace should be at this party.” She heard lighthearted laughter in the background and glanced outside, where darkness had settled in.
“I’ve sort of got car trouble,” she said. This wasn’t entirely untrue, since the minivan had spewed a thick cloud of exhaust all down I-35 today. She’d called from her cell phone on the way home and made an appointment to drop it off at a local garage tomorrow for repair.
“I’ll come and get you.”
“No,” she said hastily. “My car could probably make it.” But the minivan was almost out of gas, though she knew better than to say so.
“Good. Can you be here in fifteen minutes?”
She’d trapped herself. “I’m busy.”
“Leanne said you’d driven your son to meet his father and were planning a quiet evening. Stop by and let us cheer you up.”
“I—” Beth began, but she heard a muffled rustling and Leanne spoke.
“I’ve got to rush home, Beth, because two of the kids have temperatures, and I don’t doubt that they’re finally coming down with Eddie’s flu. I need someone to stick the canapés in the oven and make sure they emerge as cheese puffs, not incinerated bread crumbs. All you have to do is sit in the kitchen and keep an eye on things. Otherwise, this will go down as the coldest housewarming in history. Will you help? You’re the only one I trust with my recipe.”
“Do the guests really need jalapeño cheese puffs?” This month she’d already gone over and above what was required of a good friend. Hadn’t she fashioned twenty fresh-fir-and-balsam centerpieces for the pancake breakfast and stuffed herself into a silly elf outfit for three hours?
“Yes, or they’ll revolt. Steve refuses to go home until he’s slaked his cheese-puff craving.”
Beth sighed. Although the menu at Farish parties seldom varied from the usual barbecued baby ribs, hot chicken wings and potato chips with onion dip, Leanne’s cheese puffs were famous. “Okay,” Beth said. “But only until the cheese puffs are all gone.”
“Tom says he’ll pick you up.”
“I’ll drive myself.”
“Tom says you have car trouble. He’ll be there to get you shortly.”
“I—” She wished she’d stopped for gas on the way home today.
“Thanks for doing this, Beth. You’re a pal.”
“And I hope you won’t forget it,” Beth muttered after she’d hung up the phone. She quickly ran a brush through her hair, pushed a few strands behind her ears, peered at her image in the mirror and applied a new coat of lipstick. Her eyes were still shot through with red, and her nose was swollen. Her blouse and skirt were wrinkled, too, and she didn’t have time to change. But she could certainly handle shoveling cheese puffs in and out of the oven for an hour or so.
While she straightened the living room, shoving wallpaper books off the couch and prying the remains of one of Mitchell’s half-eaten granola bars off the coffee table, she noticed that her collection of glass and ceramic hearts was dusty, and she went to get a clean cloth.
Beth had been collecting hearts since high school and had received her first ceramic one for her seventeenth birthday. At the time, she’d lived in Houston with her grandmother, a dour old soul who’d never gone out of her way to make Beth’s life any easier, and Beth had been working at an ice cream shop to earn money to decorate her tiny, airless and extremely ugly room in Josephine Mitchell’s big old house.
The room was a former hallway, assigned to her by Josephine because it wouldn’t cost much to heat. It featured faded, torn wallpaper printed with hunt scenes, circa the 1940s, and the wood floor was scuffed and scarred with age. Beth, wanting to make the space hers, had used her first paycheck to buy an area rug in a scrumptious shade of raspberry pink, and when she’d seen the heart-shaped vase in a gift shop, she’d exclaimed over it with her friend Shari. On her birthday three months later, Shari had presented her with the vase over hot fudge sundaes.
Later, she’d bought or received as gifts heart-shaped wall plaques, jewelry boxes, paperweights and perfume bottles. When she and Richie had become engaged, he’d given her a heart-shaped music box. Leanne and Eddie had presented them with a candy dish featuring entwined hearts as an anniversary present shortly after they’d moved to Farish. All of these had been amassed on the shelves between her living and dining rooms, and as she carefully wiped them off, she realized with a jolt that the only ones she’d collected since her divorce were either broken hearts or halves of hearts. Well, that was fitting, she supposed, but now she pushed them to the back of the shelf. The misery that Richie had brought down upon her wasn’t something she needed to contemplate right now.
When the doorbell rang, she called, “Come in, it’s open.”
“Hi,” Tom said as he ushered in a rush of cool air. He was wearing his Stetson and a leather jacket, and he stuffed his hands deep into the pockets as he swept his gaze over her. The cold had brought a flush to his cheeks.
Suddenly self-conscious, she dropped the dust rag on the nearby couch and smoothed her hair. “I’ll get my coat,” she said.
He rocked back on his heels. “No hurry. Only a dozen or so of my closest friends waiting for a cheese puff.”
She narrowed her eyes, then decided he was joking. She wasn’t in a mood to respond in kind, however, so she went to the closet and pulled her coat off its hanger. Tom sauntered over to the shelf and studied her collection of hearts.
The phone rang as she was sliding her arms into the coat sleeves.
“Excuse me,” she said to Tom. “That might be my son.” She clicked the phone on. “Hello?”
“Mommy, Mommy, guess what? Ava has a new tooth!”
“That’s wonderful, sweetheart,” Beth said warmly as she sank onto the hall bench.
Tom continued to survey her collection of hearts, seemingly uninterested in the conversation. He picked one of them up, turned it over in his hands. It was the clear red paperweight from Italy, brought to her by Richie’s parents, who had vacationed there a few years ago.
“Yes, it’s a big tooth, and she’s getting another one. Starla says I can help feed her. Isn’t that neat?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Beth said, thinking wistfully of Ava sitting in a high chair and waiting with a gap-toothed grin as Mitchell moved the spoon closer and closer to her mouth. Babies were easy to love, and she had always wanted a houseful of kids.
“Mommy, my room in Dad and Starla’s new house is enor
mous, and guess what—I have bunk beds now! Starla bought me Shrek blankets like at home and every stuff.”
“Everything,” she corrected automatically.
“Yes, and we just ate spaghetti and meatballs. I love spaghetti and meatballs, Mommy. I could eat it every single night.”
“We’ll have spaghetti when you get home,” Beth said.
“You never make meatballs, only plain old hamburger crumbled in it,” Mitchell said.
He’d always loved her spaghetti sauce, which she painstakingly prepared from scratch. “I can do meatballs,” she said in her own defense, but she was beginning to feel annoyed. It was always like this when Mitchell was at his father’s house; nothing she did seemed as good to him as what Richie and Starla did.
Tom sent her an inquiring glance, which reminded her that they’d been about to leave.
“I miss you, Mitchell,” she said. “It’s not the same around this house when you’re gone.”
“Oh, I miss you, too, Mommy,” Mitchell said. “I wish you were here.”
She had gone to great pains to explain to Mitchell why it was not possible for her to stay with him at his father’s, but the fact that he wanted her warmed her heart. “I’ll be thinking of you.”
“Me, too.” There was a pause, then a rustle at the other end of the line.
“Beth?” It was Richie.
“Yes?”
“Mitchell refused to drink his milk at dinner. What’s up with that?”
“He—he’s on a chocolate milk kick at present, and he only likes it made with Hershey’s syrup. In a coffee mug.”
“A coffee mug,” Richie repeated with a mystified air.
“Yes, um, Mitchell wanted coffee one morning, and I told him it wasn’t good for him, and he pitched a fit. I put chocolate in his milk, served it to him in a mug, and that’s the only way he’ll drink it now.”
“I’ll tell Starla.”
“And he likes bananas sliced very thin on top of his Cap’n Crunch. And don’t let him swallow the toothpaste,” she added hastily before Richie could hang up. She almost mentioned Mitchell’s tantrums, a fairly recent development, but had decided against it. Richie would no doubt get a taste of them soon enough.
Breakfast With Santa Page 4
