A Coldwater Warm Hearts Christmas

by Lexi Eddings

  Angie smiled wryly. “Well, she’s going to be dressed as a star and flown over the Square, so being a spectacle is pretty much a done deal.”

  “I mean she has to listen to your instructions and follow them,” Crystal said. “Perfectly.”

  Perfectly. That was a tall order for anyone, let alone a six year old.

  “Maybe if you were at the rehearsals, too,” Angie suggested.

  Crystal pressed against the booth’s backrest as if she were trying to escape by melting into the green vinyl. “Oh no, I can’t. My schedule is . . . well, I just can’t.”

  Angie had the feeling that other than showing up for work, Crystal didn’t want to be seen in public much. The fact that she and Noah were separated had been making the gossip rounds and Crystal didn’t come out looking good in most of the accounts. She was too demanding, folks said. Too much of a nag. According to the wagging tongues, she’d driven her husband away.

  Angie thought Crystal deserved a chance to learn to accept imperfection and that meant being around other people.

  “I’ve found the best way to get anything done is to ask a busy person to do it,” Angie said. “And you are one of the best organized, most meticulous people in town. Everyone says so.”

  That was the kindest spin she could put on it.

  “Maybe I used to be, but now I—” Crystal stopped herself. “All right. If being a star means so much to my daughter, I’ll let her do it and I’ll try to be there, too.”

  “Great. Wonderful. Now, I have one more favor to ask,” Angela said. “As long as you’re going to be at the rehearsals anyway, would you be willing to play Mary’s cousin Elisabeth?”

  “Me? Why? I didn’t audition.”

  “No, but I’m casting quite a few parts with people who didn’t audition.”

  “You’ll face some criticism for that,” Crystal said.

  “I’m beginning to think there’s nothing I do that won’t be criticized,” Angie admitted. “I never said everyone who auditioned would get a part, but, back to Elisabeth. I think you’d be perfect.”

  “Trust me, I’m not perfect for anything right now,” Crystal said softly.

  “Maybe perfect isn’t the right word,” amended Angie, who prided herself on choosing the right word. Crystal was so touchy, so raw, she would have to tread with care. “Elisabeth wasn’t perfect, and she didn’t have an easy time of things. A woman’s main reason for being in biblical times seemed to be to bear children. Elisabeth couldn’t have any, so she was likely the focus of unkind comments. But she didn’t give up. She eventually became pregnant, but at such an advanced age, her neighbors were still gossiping about her.”

  “Advanced age?” It was all Crystal seemed to hear about Elisabeth. “You think I’m perfect for the part because of my advanced age?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that.” As the oldest of the Evans siblings, Crystal was probably closer to forty than thirty. “We’ll have to do a pretty intense makeup job for you to look old enough to play Elisabeth.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  Angie drew a deep breath and fell back on the Christmas story. When in doubt, grammar and the written word were always her friends.

  “When Elisabeth’s unmarried pregnant cousin turns up on her doorstep, she welcomes her. She believes Mary’s child is from God and encourages her. She rejoices with her when others might hide their faces. Elisabeth is strong. She’s the sort of person you want with you in a crisis,” Angela said. “I see that strength in you, Crystal.”

  Crystal worried her bottom lip, destroying the clean line of her lipstick. “I don’t feel strong.”

  “But you’ve already shown me you are. I don’t know what’s going on in your life, but I know you’ve got more on your plate than most. And just like Elisabeth, you’re willing to lay your issues aside to help someone else. You’re making it possible for your daughter’s dream to come true, for her to be a star.”

  “All right,” Crystal said. “But if I do, you have to do something for me too.”

  “Sure. What?”

  “You have to come to Thanksgiving dinner at my folks’ house, you and Seth.”

  Angie already knew George and Shirley Evans and was comfortable around them. It would save her from having to meet Seth’s parents. “Won’t Seth’s family expect him to be with them?”

  “You can go there for supper. The Evans family is celebrating Thanksgiving at noon.”

  Two holiday meals in one day. Angie’s stomach ached just thinking about it. “Your mother won’t have a problem with us crashing the party?”

  “Remember the Evans family motto. If a little is good, a lot’s a whole bunch better. I’ll have her call you with a formal invitation if it’ll make you feel better.” Then Crystal dropped her voice to a whisper. “Please. I need a few extra faces around the table.”

  Oh. That meant Crystal hadn’t told her parents she and Noah were on the outs. Offering up Seth and Angie as a distracting buffer was actually kind of diabolically brilliant.

  “I’ll talk to Seth about it and see if I can get him on board.”

  “Good.”

  “We’re having a first walk-through practice for the pageant at the park right after school today.”

  “Riley and I will be there.” Crystal rose and headed toward the door. “If you have any trouble from Seth about Thanksgiving, remind him he owes me for that fishing boat incident and he’ll come to heel,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Good to know.” Angie made a mental note to corner Seth about it first thing when she saw him that evening. Then she took one last gulp of coffee, and even though Heather had left a prodigious tip for Ethel, Angie put a couple of dollars by her plate as well.

  When she opened the door to go out, she was nearly bowled over by a guy trying to come in.

  “Peter, what are you doing here?” Seth had told her he was in town, but it had totally slipped her mind.

  What do you know? I really am over him.

  “I’m here for breakfast,” he said with an easy smile. “I hear it’s the best place in town for Belgian waffles. Join me.”

  “I have to get to school.” She pushed out the door and started walking across the Square. Peter dogged her footsteps.

  “Then let’s meet for supper. Harper’s again?”

  “No, I can’t. I have plans.” Seth had pretty much demanded a do-over after their special evening had been scuttled by Emma’s predicament.

  “Change them.”

  “You can’t expect me to drop everything just because you breeze into town on a whim.” Oh, yeah. I’m so over this guy.

  “Trust me, Ange. You really want to hear what I have to say.”

  “Peter, I’m in a relationship now.”

  “It’s that Parker guy, isn’t it?”

  Angie nodded.

  “This isn’t about you and me. I blew my chance with you long ago. I know that,” Peter said, his handsome face looking so earnest she was tempted to believe he was truly sorry about how he’d ended things between them. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about your welfare. Your future. Give me a chance to explain what I have in mind.”

  Angie stopped walking and crossed her arms over her chest so she could look up at him. Her crap-detector was pinging off the charts, but Peter’s clear-eyed gaze looked so sincere.

  That must really go over in the courtroom.

  “You’ve got one minute,” she said, pointedly looking up at the clock tower on the courthouse. “Explain.”

  “I can’t cover it all in a minute.”

  She started walking, but he caught her by the arm and stopped her. She pulled away and he held his hands up in the international gesture of surrender.

  “Okay, look, Ange. My firm’s been in preliminary talks with Bates College and, well, let’s just say there are some exciting developments I want you to know about.”

  “About which I want you to know.”

  He laughed. “Some things never change. Th
ank God.” Then he sobered. “Seriously, if not dinner, how about meeting me for drinks?”

  She ran through her schedule in her head. Preliminary pageant practice slated for right after school. Seth had done mock-ups of the sets and the whole thing had been laid out at the park next to Lake Jewell. Angie had wanted to use the high school football field, but Coach Thompson wasn’t having any of it. The Fighting Marmots were in contention for the state playoffs and there could never be enough football practice to suit him. The lake park would have to do for Angie’s walk-through with as many principle actors as she could muster. The pageant practice shouldn’t last more than an hour, and Seth wasn’t coming to pick her up until seven.

  “Okay,” she told Peter. “I can meet you for a drink at six, but that’s it.”

  And with that, she relegated Peter Manning to just another box to tick off on her very busy evening. The fact that her insides hadn’t fluttered in the least when she literally bumped into him meant she was well and truly over him.

  Besides, what harm could there be in a single glass of Chardonnay?

  Chapter 24

  Christmas pageants were invented to prove that

  Murphy’s Law isn’t just a suggestion.

  —Angela Holloway, who’s losing sleep over how many things can go horribly wrong

  By the time Angie arrived at the park after school was out, the temperature had dropped to the midthirties and showed no sign of stopping its rapid descent. Heavy clouds threatened to loose shards of icy precipitation on the town.

  “There’s nothing colder than freezing rain,” Angie muttered as she doubled her long scarf around her neck and wished she’d put her cable-knit beanie in her jacket pocket that morning.

  All the prototypes for her sets were arranged along the park that sloped down to the Lake Jewell shoreline. Seth had built a humble-looking house set for Mary, and one for her cousin Elisabeth’s home. There was a flat with a lick-and-a-promise of a pastoral scene roughed out on it. The shepherds abiding in the field would actually be abiding in front of the flat, which neatly hid the step ladder propped behind it. The angel would appear to them from the top of that not so dizzying height. Nearer to the lake, the manger scene was set, along with another house into which the Holy Family could migrate. Nobody would notice the move while the magi were processing their way to the center of the Town Square, following Riley, in the guise of a star suspended on a cable above them.

  These weren’t the final version of the sets. They hadn’t been painted and the manger had no side or back walls yet, no stall stout enough to corral the cow and calf Junior Bugtussle would bring for the actual pageant, but the rough backdrops would do for a first run-through. Seth had obviously been busy, but Angie didn’t see him there.

  Instead, she found Junior’s truck parked near the manger. He was trying to unload a bale of straw so big it barely fit into the bed of his pickup. Junior had tied ropes to the manger’s main support on either side and then looped them around the bale.

  “What are you doing, Junior?”

  “I figure we need to get the cast used to trompin’ through straw, so I thought as how I’d spread a little round for us to prac-tize on.”

  “No, I mean why have you tied the bale to the manger supports?”

  “Oh, this here’s an example of usin’ my head and savin’ my back, Miz Holloway. It’d take three men and a boy to move that big ol’ bale by hand. This way, my truck’ll do all the work. You see, when the truck goes forward, the ropes will pull on the bale and it’ll slide right out, slick as snot.”

  There was something terribly not right about this plan, but Angie had majored in English not physics. She couldn’t quite put her finger on the problem. Still, something made her call out “No! Wait!”

  Junior didn’t hear her. He was too busy jumping into his pickup and gunning the engine. The truck lurched forward, tearing up deep ruts in the dead grass.

  The bale stayed firmly wedged in the bed. The ropes, however, pulled hard on the manger’s main supports. It creaked, gave way, and then tumbled to earth like an out-of-balance Jenga tower.

  Junior climbed down from the cab of his truck and lumbered around to survey the damage. Clearly befuddled, he took off his cap and scratched his head.

  “Honest, Miz Holloway, I didn’t see it going that-a-way,” he said. “Want me to go home and get another bale?”

  “No!” she said with more force than she’d intended. “We’ll just have to use our imagination and pretend we have a manger this time.”

  Deek Atwood hurried up to her, clutching a long coil of electrical cables in his too-clean-to-be-normal hands. He’d been the town’s resident computer and electronics geek before Michael Evans relocated part of his dot-com business to the area. Now Deek had plenty of other nerds to hang out with, and as a result, he’d come out of his shell.

  And the apartment in his mother’s attic.

  “This is not going to work, Miss Holloway,” he said emphatically. “There’s no way to amplify the choir at each station. The mics we have are too directional to pick up a big group. The best you could hope for is one or two voices and—”

  “And heaven help us if it’s the wrong two voices,” Angie finished his thought.

  “It was a mistake to make the pageant choir open to all,” Deek said. “Your ad in the Gazette invited both the tuneful and the tone-deaf. Everyone was encouraged to make a joyful noise.”

  When Angie wrote up the ad, she thought the alliteration gave it a little oomph. Now she wished she’d left the matter to the director, Mr. Mariano.

  “I’ve heard the choir practicing,” Deek said. “There may be some joy, but the emphasis is on noise.”

  Angie sighed. “We’ll just have to hope the choir will carry without amplification, then.”

  “Oh, they’ll be heard all right. I’m just not sure the folks who hear them will thank us,” Deek said. “But that’s not the worst of it.”

  “What else is wrong?”

  “I’ve tried everything, but we don’t have enough wearable mics for the main characters, and even if we did, I can’t get the speakers to pick them up from one end of the park to the other. The speaker system nearest the action works with only a specific microphone.”

  “What can we do about that?”

  “Anyone who moves from one set to another will have to change mics to the one calibrated for the next speaker. Your Mary and Joseph, for example, are going to have to change mics about three times by the time they reach the manger.”

  Angie shook her head. “That won’t work.”

  “That’s what I told you in the first place.” Deek gave her a look that said he thought he was surrounded by incompetents and lesser beings who wouldn’t know a router from a thumb drive if it bit them on the backside. “What’s Plan B?”

  Plan B? Even Plan A is nothing more than amorphous goo floating around in my head. We don’t have a manger anymore. We don’t have a script that doesn’t involve sock puppets. We don’t have a choir that can carry a tune.

  What have I gotten myself into?

  Even though ending sentences with a preposition was her number one pet peeve, Angie was too silently distraught to correct her own internal grammar.

  “I’ll have to let you know about Plan B, Deek.” As soon as I know.

  Other members of the cast were arriving. Emma had walked from the high school and her cheeks were flushed bright red from the cold. Aaron, Junior’s son and official Second Shepherd, was walking with her. Aaron was a year behind Emma in school and it was obvious to anyone with eyes that he felt mighty important walking beside such a pretty girl.

  Angie was glad for her. Clearly, her secret was still just that. Secret. She deserved a chance to enjoy the holidays without news of her pregnancy making the rounds.

  If we can keep it quiet that long.

  Ian Van Hook’s sporty little mustang came to a stop on the street that flanked the park and the college freshman got out. Tall and lanky and utte
rly dependable, he’d make a good Joseph.

  Angie had cast Jadis Chu, Michael Evans’s personal assistant at MoreCommas.com, as the Angel of the Lord. The girl’s unique piercings, like the silver chain that draped from her nose ring to her ear, and her spiky purple hair already gave her an otherworldly appearance in real life. Jadis arrived behind Ian, looking furtively around her at the others gathering. Angie couldn’t wait to see what she could do with a little stage makeup to turn Jadis into a fiercely beautiful angelic being.

  The petite Asian was a relative newcomer to Coldwater who kept to herself when she wasn’t working. Angie had only met her because Jadis was friends with Heather, Michael’s wife. Quiet, but intensely observant, Jadis was the ultimate outsider. Angie wanted to include her in the pageant because she knew what it felt like to be on the outside looking in. If being in the pageant could ease Jadis into more friendships, Angie would count that a win.

  Dr. Gonncu and Mr. Elkin, two of Angie’s magi, came striding across the park together, deep in conversation. Both men tended to speak with their hands and nodded in agreement frequently.

  Angie smiled. A Muslim and a Jew at peace with each other. If the pageant accomplished nothing else, it looked as if these two very different men were finding common ground and becoming friends.

  If only all the rest of us could, too. Then maybe there really would be peace on earth.

  Angie’s third magi caught up to the other two.

  It was Noah Addleberry.

  Seth hadn’t wanted to cast him, especially after Angie had convinced Seth that Crystal should be Elisabeth and Riley the star.

  “Folks will say the pageant is too full of the Addleberry family,” he’d tried to tell her.

  Angie had reminded him that for years, Ike and Lucinda Warboy, along with whichever of their progeny was age appropriate to be Baby Jesus at the time, had served as the Holy Family. “How is this different?”

  “Ike and Lucinda weren’t ready to lob grenades at each other.”