The 24 Days of Christmas

by Linda Lael Miller

  Jackie McCall came back on the line. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Addie,” she said. “It’s crazy over here. Would you mind if I called you back?”

  “That would be convenient,” Addie replied.

  Miss Pidgett waited, none too patiently, at the counter, while Addie and Jackie exchanged good-byes and hung up.

  “I don’t think it’s proper for you to spend so much time with Frank Raynor,” the older woman blurted out, her expression grim.

  Addie took a deep breath. Smiled harder. “Frank is an old friend of mine,” she said. “Now, about that advertisement—”

  “He’s an outsider,” Miss Pidgett insisted.

  “He’s lived in Pine Crossing for thirty years,” Addie pointed out.

  “His mother was the town tramp,” Miss Pidgett went on, lowering her voice to a stage whisper. “God knows who his father was. Anybody but Eliza Raynor would have refused to take him in, after all that happened.”

  Addie felt a flush climb her neck. She couldn’t afford to tell Miss Pidgett off, but she wanted to. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, approaching the counter. “Were you interested in a classified ad, or something larger?”

  “Full page,” Miss Pidgett said, almost as an aside. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know that Janet Raynor ran away with Eliza’s husband. That’s why they have the same last name.”

  “I didn’t know,” Addie said carefully, feeling bereft. “And I don’t think—”

  Miss Pidgett cut her off. “Your father hired Eliza out of the goodness of his heart. She was destitute, after her Jim and that trollop ran off to Mexico together. They got a quickie divorce, and Jim actually married the woman, if you can believe it. A few years later, he ditched her, and Janet had the nerve to send that boy to live with Eliza.”

  Addie’s face warmed. Oh, well, she thought. She could always apply for a waitress job at the Lumberjack. “I didn’t know any of those things,” she reiterated quietly, “but it doesn’t surprise me to learn that Eliza took in a lonely, frightened little boy and loved him like her own. After all, none of what happened was Frank’s fault, was it?”

  Miss Pidgett reddened. “Eliza was a fool.”

  “Eliza,” Addie corrected, “was the kindest and most generous woman I have ever known. You, on the other hand, are an insufferable gossip.” She paused, drew another deep breath. “If I were you, I’d keep a sharp eye out for the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future!”

  “Well!” Miss Pidgett cried, and turned on the heel of one snow boot to stomp out the door.

  The bell over the door jangled frantically at her indignant departure.

  Mr. Renfrew, just returning from his Rotary breakfast, nearly collided with Miss Pidgett on the sidewalk. Through the glass, Addie saw the old woman shake a finger under his nose, her breath coming in visible puffs as she ranted, then stormed off.

  “I’ll be darned if I could make heads or tails of what that was all about,” Mr. Renfrew observed when he came inside. He looked affably baffled, and his ears were crimson from the cold. “Something about taking her business to the Statesman.”

  “I’m afraid I told her off,” Addie confessed. “I’ll understand if you fire me.”

  * * *

  “The old bat,” Frank said at six o’clock that evening as he hung a fragrant evergreen wreath on Addie’s front door, after listening to her account of Miss Pidgett’s visit to the Wooden Nickel. The children were in the yard below, running in wild, noisy, arm-waving circles around the snowman, joyously pursued by Floyd the beagle.

  Addie hugged herself against the chill of a winter night and gazed up at Frank, perplexed. “No one ever told me,” she said. “About your mother and Eliza’s husband, I mean.”

  Frank gave her a sidelong glance. “Old news, kid,” he said. “Not the kind of experience Aunt Eliza would have shared with her employer’s little girl.”

  “There must have been so much gossip. How could I have missed hearing it?”

  He touched the tip of her nose, and Addie felt a jolt of sensation, right down to her heels. “You were Judge Hutton’s daughter. That shielded you from a lot.”

  Addie bit her lower lip. “I’m so sorry, Frank.”

  He frowned, taking an unlikely interest in the wreath. “About what?”

  “About all you must have gone through. When you were little, I mean.”

  He turned to face her, spread his hands, and spared her a crooked grin. “Do I look traumatized?” he asked. “Believe me, after five years of sitting outside bars, waiting for my mother, the gossips of Pine Crossing were nothing. Aunt Eliza loved me. She made sure I had three square meals a day, sent me to school with decent clothes on my back, and taught me to believe in myself. I’d say I was pretty lucky.”

  Addie looked away, blinked, and looked back. “I was so jealous of you,” she said.

  He touched her again, laying his hand to the side of her face, and the same shock went through her. The wheels and gears of time itself seemed to grind to a halt, and he bent his head toward hers.

  “Daddy!”

  They froze.

  “Damn,” Frank said, his breath tingling against Addie’s mouth.

  She laughed, and they both looked down to see Lissie gazing up at them from the yard, hands on her hips, tinsel halo picking up the last glimmers of daylight. Henry was beside Lissie, the lenses of his glasses opaque with steam.

  “You can’t kiss unless there’s mistletoe!” Lissie called.

  “Says who?” Frank called back. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he took Addie’s face in his hands, tilted her head back, and kissed her soundly.

  Afterward, she stared up at him, speechless.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “A shepherd,” Henry said when the matchbox was opened the next morning. Lissie peered in, as if doubting his word. Frank had brought the child to Addie’s door before dawn that morning, haloed, still in her pajamas and wrapped in a blanket. There had been an automobile accident out on the state highway, and he had to go.

  “Hurry up, both of you,” Addie replied with an anxious glance at the clock. “I don’t want to be late for work.” To her way of thinking, she was lucky she still had a job, after the scene with Miss Pidgett the day before.

  An hour later, Frank showed up at the Wooden Nickel, looking tired and gaunt. He filled his coffee mug from the pot in the small break room. “Where is everybody?” he asked, scanning the office, which was empty except for him and Addie.

  “Mr. Renfrew had a doctor’s appointment, and Stella went to Denver with her sister to shop for Christmas presents,” Addie said. The office, never spacious to begin with, seemed to shrink to the size of a broom closet, with Frank taking up more than his share of space.

  Frank rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and sighed before taking a sip of his coffee. “Hope she’s careful,” he said. “The roads are covered with black ice.”

  Addie waited.

  “The accident was bad,” he told her grimly. “Four people airlifted to Denver. One of them died on the way.”

  “Oh, Frank.” Addie wanted to round the counter and put her arms around him, but she hesitated. Sure, he’d kissed her the evening before, but now he had the look of a man who didn’t want to be touched. “Was it anyone you know?”

  He shook his head. “Thanks for taking care of Lissie,” he said after a long silence. He was staring into his coffee cup now, as though seeing an uncertain future take shape there.

  “Anytime,” Addie replied gently. “You okay?”

  He made an attempt at a smile. “I will be,” he said gruffly. “It just takes a while to get the images out of my head.”

  Addie nodded.

  “Have supper with us tonight?” Frank asked. He sounded shy, the way he had when he asked her to his senior prom, all those eventful years ago. “Miss Pidgett is casting the play today. I figure Lissie is going to need some diversion.”

  Addie ached for the little girl, and for th
e good man who loved her so much. “My turn to cook,” she said softly. “I’ll stop by St. Mary’s and pick up the kids on my way home.” There was no daycare center in Pine Crossing, so the children of working parents gathered in either the library or the gym until someone came to collect them.

  “Thanks,” Frank said. He was on the verge of saying something else when Mr. Renfrew came in.

  The two men exchanged greetings, and the telephone rang. Addie took down an order for a classified ad, and when she looked up from her notes, Frank was gone.

  “Nice guy, that Frank,” Mr. Renfrew said, shrugging off his overcoat.

  “Yes,” Addie agreed, hoping she sounded more casual than she felt.

  “Miss Pidgett been back to place her ad?”

  Addie felt a rush of guilt. “No,” she said. “Mr. Renfrew, I’m—”

  He held up a hand to silence her. “Don’t say you’re sorry, Addie. It was about time somebody put that old grump in her place.”

  With that, the subject of Almira Pidgett was dropped.

  * * *

  Henry raced toward the car when Addie pulled up outside the elementary school that afternoon, waving what looked like a brown bathrobe over his head. Lissie followed at a slower pace, head down, scuffing her feet in the dried snow. Even her tinsel halo seemed to sag a little.

  Addie’s heart went out to the child. She pushed open the car door and stood in the road.

  “I’m a shepherd!” Henry shouted jubilantly.

  Addie ruffled his hair. “Good job,” she said, pleased because he was so excited. She watched Lissie’s slow approach.

  “I’m the innkeeper’s wife,” the little girl said, looking wretched. “I don’t even get to say anything. My whole part is to stand there and look mean and shake my head ‘no’ when Mary and Joseph ask for a room.”

  Addie crouched, took Lissie’s cold little hands in hers. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. You would have made a perfect angel.”

  A tear slipped down Lissie’s right cheek, quivered on the shoulder of her pink nylon jacket. It was all Addie could do in that moment not to storm into the school and give Miss Pidgett a piece of her mind.

  “Tiffany Baker gets to be the most important angel,” Lissie said. “She has a whole bunch of lines about good tidings and stuff, and her mother is making her wings out of real feathers.”

  Addie stood up, steered the children toward the car.

  “That sucks,” Henry said. “Tiffany Baker sucks.”

  “Henry,” Addie said.

  “Last year she got to go to Denver and be in a TV commercial,” Lissie said as she and Henry got into the backseat and fastened their seat belts. In the rearview mirror, Addie saw Lissie’s lower lip wobble.

  “There are six other angels,” the little girl whispered. “I wouldn’t have minded being one of them.”

  Addie had to fight hard not to cry herself. The child had been wearing a tinsel halo for days. Didn’t Almira Pidgett have a heart?

  “Maybe we could rent some Christmas movies,” she suggested in deliberately cheerful tones.

  Lissie pulled off her halo, held it for a moment, then set it aside. “Okay,” she said with a complete lack of spirit.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Frank shoved a hand through his hair. “It’s been nine days,” he whispered to Addie in her kitchen that snowy Saturday morning. “I thought Lissie would be over this play thing by now. Is it really such a bad thing to play the innkeeper’s wife?”

  Addie glanced sadly at the Advent calendar, still taped to the bottom of the cupboard. Lissie hadn’t shown much interest in the daily ritual of opening a new matchbox since the angel disappointment, and that morning was no exception. The tiny sleigh glued inside looked oddly forlorn. “It is if you wanted to be an angel,” she said.

  “I haven’t seen her like this since Maggie died.”

  Addie sank into a chair at the table. Frank, leaning one shoulder against the refrigerator and sipping coffee, sighed.

  “I wish there was something I could do,” Addie said.

  “Join the club,” Frank replied, glancing toward the living room. Henry and Lissie were there, with the ever-faithful Floyd, watching Saturday morning cartoons.

  “Sit down, Frank,” Addie urged quietly.

  He didn’t seem to hear her. He was staring out the window at the fat, drifting flakes of snow that had been falling since the night before. “This isn’t about Lissie,” he said. “That’s what makes it so hard. It’s about me, and all the times I’ve butted heads with Almira Pidgett over the years.”

  Addie’s mouth tightened at the mention of the woman, and she consciously relaxed it. “It’s not your fault, Frank,” she said, and closed her hands around her own coffee cup, grown cold since the pancake breakfast the four of them had shared half an hour before. “Miss Pidgett is a Grinch, plain and simple.”

  Just then, Addie thought she heard sleigh bells, and she was just shaking her head when a whoop of delight sounded from the living room. Henry. Henry, who was wary of joy, already knowing, young as he was, how easily it could be taken away.

  “There’s a man down there, driving a sleigh!” Henry shouted, almost breathless with glee. “He’s got horses pulling it, instead of reindeer, but he sure looks like Santa!”

  “Who?” Frank asked, pleasantly bemused.

  Addie was already on her way to investigate. Henry was bounding down the outside stairs, followed by Floyd, and, at a more sedate pace, Lissie. Frank brought up the rear.

  Mr. Renfrew, bundled in a stocking cap, ski jacket, and quilted trousers, all the same shade of red, waved cheerfully from the seat of a horse-drawn sleigh.

  “Merry Christmas!” he called. “Anybody want a ride?”

  Henry was jumping up and down. “I do!” he shouted. “I do!”

  “Can Floyd come, too?” Lissie asked cautiously.

  Mr. Renfrew’s eyes twinkled as he looked over the children’s heads to Frank and Addie. “Of course,” he answered. Then, in a booming voice, he added, “Don’t just stand there! Go put on your cold-weather gear and jump in!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  There were two bench seats in the back of that old-fashioned sleigh, upholstered in patched leather and facing each other.

  “Want to ride up here with me, boy?” Mr. Renfrew asked Henry, his eyes twinkling.

  Henry needed no persuading. He scrambled onto the high seat, fairly quivering with excitement. “Can Lissie have a turn, too?” he asked, his breath forming a thin, shifting aura of white around his head.

  A sweet, almost painful, warmth settled over Addie’s heart. She glanced at Frank, who hoisted the overweight beagle into the sleigh to join Lissie, who was already seated, facing backward.

  “Sure, Lissie can have a turn,” Mr. Renfrew said, turning to smile down at the child.

  Lissie, who had been subdued since putting away her tinsel halo, perked up a little, grinning back at him. Floyd, perched beside her, gave her an exuberant lick on the cheek.

  Frank helped Addie up into the sleigh, then sat down beside her, stretching his arm out along the back of the seat, the way a shy teenage boy might do on a movie date. He wasn’t quite touching her, but she felt the strength and substance and warmth of him just the same, a powerful tingle along her nape and the length of her shoulders. The energy danced down her spine and arched between her pelvic bones.

  It was all she could do not to squirm.

  Mr. Renfrew set the sleigh in motion, bells jingling. There was a jerk, but then they glided, as though the whole earth had suddenly turned smooth as a skating rink. Addie bit down on her lower lip and tried to focus on the ride, wincing a little as Lissie turned to kneel in the seat, her back to them, ready to climb up front when she got the nod.

  “Addie.” Frank’s voice. Very close to her ear. Fat snowflakes drifted down, making silent music.

  She made herself look at him, not in spite of her reluctance, but because of it. The decision was a ripple on the surface of someth
ing much deeper, churning far down in the whorls and currents of her mind.

  “Relax,” he said. “You think too much.”

  Some reckless sprite rose up out of that emotional sea to put words in Addie’s mouth. “You might not say that if you knew what I was thinking about.”

  Frank lowered his arm, let it rest lightly around her shoulders. “Who says I don’t?” he countered, with a half grin and laughter in his eyes. But there was sadness there, too, and something that might have been caution. Perhaps, like Henry, Frank was a little afraid to trust in good things.

  Addie blushed and looked away.

  They rode over side streets and back roads, and finally left Pine Crossing behind, entering the open countryside. After getting permission from both Addie and Frank, Mr. Renfrew let Henry drive the team, then Lissie. The snow came down harder, and the wind grew colder, and Floyd alternately barked and howled in canine celebration.

  Addie had a wonderful time. Something had changed between her and Frank, a subtle, indefinable shift that gave her an odd thrill, a feeling both festive and frightening. She decided to think about it later, when Frank and Lissie weren’t around, and Henry had gone to bed.

  After an hour or so, they returned to Pine Crossing, traveling down the middle of the main street, between parked cars. Frank sat up very straight, looking imperious and waving in the stiff-handed way of royalty as various friends called amused greetings from the sidewalks.

  Lissie climbed back down into the seat beside Floyd as they passed the school, and Addie noticed the deflation in the child’s mood. Her small shoulders sagged as she looked at the reader board in front of St. Mary’s.

  PLAY REHEARSAL TONIGHT, 6 PM MARY, JOSEPH AND ANGELS ONLY.

  Addie bristled inwardly. The sign was obviously Almira’s handiwork, and it might as well have said, Innkeeper’s wife will be turned away at the door.

  “No room at the inn,” she murmured angrily.

  Frank squeezed her hand, so she knew he’d heard, but he was watching Lissie, who sat with her head down, obviously fighting tears, while Floyd nibbled tentatively at the pom-pom on top of her pink knitted cap.