“Are you going to finish that one?” she asked.
“Bailey!” Addison protested, making sure the gathered company knew that at least one of the children in this family knew their manners. “We just met them!”
“My dear,” Frank said, taking another bite, “I’m afraid I am.”
As he did, Luke came into the dining room, carrying a loaf of bread and a blue ceramic dish of butter toward the buffet on the side table in the corner, where juice, milk, and water were already set out.
“Fresh bread,” he announced as he came through. “Anybody want a piece?”
“I do, I do, I do!” Bailey said, bouncing again as if her chair had been spring-loaded.
“Well, here you go,” Luke said, stopping to put a piece on her plate. She pounced on it with delight.
“And how are you young ladies enjoying the snow?” he asked.
“It’s very pretty,” Addison said politely.
“Pretty?” Luke said. “But what’s it like when you play in it?”
“We didn’t go outside,” Bailey informed him. “We stayed in here.”
Luke’s eyes opened in mock shock. “Stayed in here?” he said. “Why on earth would you do that when there’s so much beautiful snow outside?”
At this, both girls glanced at their father, checking to see who this strange guy was. But when they saw that Marcus knew Luke, and even seemed friendly with him, they began to open up.
“Our sled is at home,” Bailey told him.
“Well,” Luke said seriously, pretending to consider this, “is your sled the only sled in the world?”
Bailey searched his face for a moment before breaking out into a grin. “No,” she said, giggling.
“Has it occurred to you,” Luke said, “that there might, in fact, be other sleds right here, at this very inn?”
“We can go sledding!” Addison said, glancing at her dad for approval. “Dad! Are we going sledding?”
“What do you say, Dad?” Luke asked. “My favorite sledding hill is right past the drive. And I’d be glad to take them. As you may know, I’m a trained professional.”
“It’s fine with me,” Marcus said. “If the girls want to go.”
Bailey, who had been making very quick work of her slice of bread, popped the last bite into her mouth, and slid down from her chair.
“I’m going! I’m going!”
“We need snow pants,” Addison said, slipping off her chair as well to follow Luke. “We have coats and hats and gloves in the hall.”
“Well,” Luke said as the girls trailed after him, “let’s see what we can do about that.”
Smiling at Frank and Eileen, Marcus excused himself to help get the girls into their things.
A few minutes later, fully bundled up in hand-me-down snow pants the inn kept for just such emergencies, the girls roared out the door, squealing with delight at the sight of a pair of sleds that Luke had brought back earlier that morning from a trip to the barn.
As Marcus watched them scamper through the snow toward the crest of the steep but gently sloping hill the inn sat on, he felt the same little cocktail of freedom and loss he felt whenever his girls weren’t with him. It felt good to have a minute to himself, but also a bit lonely.
For some reason, as he turned away from the window, wondering what to do with himself, his mind wandered to Molly, writing upstairs.
It was a strange feeling to find himself thinking about anyone but Elyse, the girls’ mother. In the days after her loss, there had been times when he wished he could stop thinking about her, and times when she was all he wanted to think about, as a way to keep her alive, at least in his own mind and heart.
That’s what this trip had been about, in fact. Elyse had been a serious outdoorswoman, and there was nothing she loved more than skiing. She and Marcus had taken a visit to the Starlight Lodge together shortly before her diagnosis, and it was one of the last purely happy memories he had of her. He’d made the reservation this year as a way to help the girls get to know a place and an activity that their mother had loved, and as a way to try to stay in touch with her memory himself.
But more and more, memories of her had begun to recede from his mind as he dove into the details of daily life. Marcus wasn’t sure if that was a good, healthy thing, or if he wanted to fight it with all his might. In those moments, just a look into his daughters’ eyes was enough to reassure him she’d never be fully gone.
As he thought back on his last interaction with Molly, he suddenly wondered if he hadn’t been too short with her when he was trying to hustle the girls out of the room.
Had he seemed rude to her? He felt a little pang of shame at the thought. That was the last thing he had meant to do, especially since she had been so kind to them.
Then again, he thought, there was no reason to think she had noticed anything about him at all.
He doubted, actually, that she had given it a second thought.
Why would a famous writer spend any of her precious time thinking about him?
JEANNE LOOKED AROUND THE kitchen, feeling a warm rush of satisfaction.
The yeasty smell of bread emanated from her beloved old cast-iron stove, which gave it a thick but flaky crust unlike anything else you could produce with even the most modern appliances. The zing of citrus zest, orange and lemon, wafted from her waffle batter with a faint but unmistakable bite. The three dozen eggs that Luke and Hannah had brought in from the barn sat in a wire basket in the center of the kitchen island, and she’d been enjoying endless dreams about what they might become: afternoon omelets, evening meringues, savory crepes, a light, fluffy cake.
She already had the jump on lunch, with quick-pickled onions and goat cheese prepped into gorgeous croquettes for a light salad, and the beginning of a rich beef stew bubbling on the stove.
As she poured a pleasingly frothy ladleful of waffle batter onto her solid, ancient waffle iron and brought the top down with a faint sizzle, she smiled.
As she did, Tim came in from outside, stamping his feet against the cold, bearing a load of firewood for their wood-burning stove.
“Just in time,” Jeanne said. “There’s still a few logs there on the side, but I was starting to worry what was going to happen when those ran out.”
Tim dumped the armload of logs he’d split himself into the fireproof metal box beside the stove, then came around the kitchen island to give his wife a kiss.
“You’re so cold!” she said, and shivered.
“Have I ever let you run out of firewood before?” Tim asked with a smile.
Jeanne actually stopped to think about it for a moment. But when she had, she gave him an answering smile. “Nope,” she said. “Not in over ten years.”
“That’s what I thought,” Tim said, sneaking one of the delicious crusty tendrils of waffle dough that had spilled out of the waffle iron, down the side, where it had cooked to its own kind of perfection. “I just wanted to check. This,” he said as he got a taste of the waffle, “is delicious.”
“You want one?” Jeanne asked. “I’ve got to send this out as soon as it’s done, but you can have the next one. You know that crazy old Brit we took in last night? The one who looks like he’d much rather be spending Christmas tormenting people in a medieval dungeon?”
“Did we have more than one crazy Brit check in last night?” Tim asked with a grin.
Jeanne shook her head at his teasing.
“Well,” she said, “he’s ordered basically the entire breakfast menu, such as it is.”
“You managed to produce an entire menu?” Tim said, mouth agape. “Last night, we were just hoping nobody would go hungry.”
“Well,” Jeanne said, “I had a few ideas, so I just had Iris print them up. It’s nothing much. Just the orange-lemon waffles.”
“My favorite,” Tim said. “If they only let me have one food in heaven, it would be your waffles. In fact, that’s how I’ll know if I’m there or not. By whether they’ve got your waffles.”
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Jeanne grinned under the praise. “I put some of Hiram’s bacon on there, in case anybody wanted a side of meat. And then I found some steel-cut oats in the pantry, so I put them on, with walnuts and apples stewed in brown sugar and brandy. And then I made up an apple-cheddar cheese toast, and an old-fashioned cinnamon toast, with butter and cinnamon sugar, just because plain toast is always so dry and boring.”
“I smell what you’re cooking,” Tim said. “It all sounds like a feast.”
“Well, he ordered all of it,” Jeanne said. “Oatmeal, waffles, both kinds of toast. And bacon. So much bacon. I sent him out a single order, and he sent back a request for more. And when I took that one out, he asked for another. Before I even set it down.”
“I guess he worked up an appetite last night,” Tim said. “Fighting his way through the storm.”
“Well,” Jeanne said, “I would have thought some of the edge would have been taken off that by the fact that he ate half a basket of those salted brownies.”
“That’s a lot of brownies,” Tim observed. “For such a skinny guy.”
“Another mystery,” Jeanne said. “Maybe that could be our next business. Figure out whatever lets him eat that much and still look like a scarecrow, and then sell it.” She pulled the waffle free from the iron, and settled it gently on a turquoise ceramic plate, beside the butter, syrup, and orange slice garnish she’d already arranged there.
“But we’ve got lunch almost prepped already,” Jeanne added, picking up the plate to take it out to the dining area. “Fresh bread, salad with goat cheese croquettes, bacon-beef stew . . .”
“So who did all this already this morning?” Tim said, looking around the kitchen. “Did we hire another three chefs, too?”
Jeanne shook her head. “It’s just your wife,” she told him. “She’s a genius.”
But as she turned to go, Tim wrapped her in a hug from behind, sheltering her shoulders with his own. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said, kissing her cheek, his own cheek still chilly from bringing the firewood in.
Jeanne sighed. Despite the chill, she let her head drop back on his shoulder and pressed her cheek to his.
“Today feels good,” Tim said. “Doesn’t it?”
Jeanne felt a twinge as he said it, because beyond it lay all the many days they’d lived through together that hadn’t been great. But today, she wasn’t going to dwell on those days, either. The kitchen was beautifully stocked and full of activity. The cozy house was full of guests, and a good many of them were enjoying the fruits of her and Tim’s labor at this very instant, in the dining area.
“It feels just the way I always hoped it would,” she said, setting the waffle plate down so she could thread her fingers through his at her waist.
“Even if this is our last Christmas here,” Tim said, “it’s a good one.”
Jeanne lingered a moment, giving him one last squeeze before she pulled free. “We can’t let our crazy Brit’s waffle get chilled,” she said, picking up a spatula from the counter to give Tim a playful squat. “Back to work, buster. The day’s not over yet.”
UP IN HER ROOM, Molly had already devoured every last crumb of the corn bread she’d saved from the welcome basket Jeanne had brought up the day before.
She’d read every scrap of the notes she’d been taking for herself over again, and then she’d collected them all neatly and tucked them away in a folder off the desk.
That had given her the room to sit and dream over the sketches that surrounded the blank page in the middle of the desk. She’d arranged them from small to large, then rearranged them according to various qualities: the alligator and the minnow, for instance, could both swim, while the robin and the kitten couldn’t, or at least didn’t want to. She spent a bit of time entertaining the idea of a book about an elephant who was also, improbably, a champion swimmer, before rearranging all her characters again by who she would like to walk her home on a dark and stormy night, from most to least.
She spent some time staring out the east window, because she had heard a creativity guru recently talk about the importance of letting your mind wander. And when her mind didn’t seem much inclined to wander over the freezing landscape, she tried the next window, with similar disappointing results.
Finally, she decided that what she must really be in need of was a change of scene—and maybe a replenishment of her welcome basket.
She hadn’t made it to breakfast yet, although she’d eaten her fair share of the remains of yesterday’s cornucopia. She didn’t like to eat breakfast before she’d written a page, and she hadn’t actually written a page yet. And some part of her felt a little shy at the prospect of accidentally barging into Marcus and the girls’ meal. Marcus had made it clear he didn’t want her to be part of it, and the dining area was so small that it would be hard to avoid them if they were seated at the same time, especially if the girls saw her and wanted to talk.
The delicious smells wafting up the stairs—bacon, cinnamon, lemon, orange—had kept the idea of a delicious snack high on her mind. And they only got stronger, and more delicious, as she descended the stairs, telling herself that since it had been a good hour, there wasn’t any reason to worry about running into Marcus in the dining room—or anywhere at all.
So of course the first person she saw when she descended the last step was Marcus, standing near the door in a full workman’s snowsuit and watch cap. Inexplicably, he had nothing on his feet but socks.
And of course he was the only person in the whole room, which made it impossible for her to get by without doing something to acknowledge him when he looked up and met her eyes.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Molly said, instantly averting her eyes so that he didn’t think she was trying to entangle him in some long, unwelcome conversation. Staring at the carpet, she started for the dining area, mostly by following her nose.
“How’s the writing going?” Marcus asked.
“Oh,” Molly said. She was startled to a stop by his question, and then immediately wished she hadn’t been, because she didn’t have anything like a good answer to give him. “I came down because I think I might need a little break.”
“It’s important to give your mind a rest on creative projects,” Marcus said. “A lot of my best ideas come when I get up from my desk.”
Molly nodded, trying to look like that was exactly what she was doing: just wandering around the inn, waiting to be smacked on the nose by one of her best ideas. “Yeah, I know what that’s like,” Molly said, wishing her best ideas would hit her just a little bit more often.
But part of her was also bemused, and maybe even a little annoyed. This morning, Marcus hadn’t been able to get his girls out of her room fast enough. Now he seemed weirdly eager to talk.
“Well,” he said. “What about going for a walk?”
From the way Molly looked askance at him, then peered out the window to double-check that, as far as either of them could see, the world was still blanketed in several feet of snow, he quickly realized that he’d need to give further explanation.
He leaned over, practically creaking in the thick overalls, and picked up a snowshoe from the bench by the door. “Ever used one of these?” he asked.
Molly shook her head. “Not once,” she said. “But I have to say, I did always kind of want to. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a duck, because of their big webbed feet. I mean, I didn’t want that for too long,” she amended quickly, but when she glanced at Marcus, she could see that he was smiling.
“I wanted to be a pigeon,” Marcus said. “Because I thought their feathers looked like gasoline in puddles.”
“It’s maybe a good thing not all wishes come true,” Molly said wryly. But she was also looking around the entryway, warming to the idea of getting out of the house.
Marcus was right. Sometimes a walk around the neighborhood was all she needed to get started again when she was in a story’s tricky spot. And maybe that was what ailed her now
—having been cooped up in the house for so long, because of the storm.
“I just don’t have any serious foul-weather gear,” she said, looking at his overalls in mild disbelief. “Do you always travel with those?”
“These?” Marcus said, looking down at himself. “No, these are Tim’s. He loaned them to me. But I saw a pair of Jeanne’s in the back room. I bet she’d let you borrow them.”
“And there are enough snowshoes?” Molly asked.
“There’s another pair right here,” Marcus said, waving one triumphantly.
“Ha, okay,” Molly said, heading for the kitchen. “Let me see what Jeanne says.”
Five minutes later, Molly marched out the front door of the inn, bundled into a thick, squeaky pair of blue work overalls, with slightly-too-large snowshoes sloshing on her feet.
She must look something like a cross between one of the blow-up floats in the Thanksgiving parade and a genuine Eskimo. But because she felt absolutely unattractive, some of the shyness she had felt in the face of Marcus’s handsomeness disappeared. At this point, there was no chance of impressing him, so she didn’t feel any need to try.
And snowshoeing was surprisingly delightful. She knew what it was like as a kid to try to play in snow that deep, punching through the icy crust so that your legs got stuck. But the snowshoes seemed to work like magic, distributing the pressure of each step so that she and Marcus both tramped easily over the pillowy drifts, never sinking in.
Marcus struck out toward the crest of the hill where the inn sat, a thin ridge of bare trees, with not a single human footstep between them and it.
As Molly followed him, the pressure that she’d felt indoors seemed to melt from her heart and shoulders, and she grinned into the sparkling world, feeling like a kid herself again.
Until Marcus turned back and shot a question over his shoulder. “So how’s that new book going?” he asked.
“What book?” Molly called, hoping to deflect him, and her own worries, with a joke.
The White Christmas Inn Page 14
