Bluegrass Christmas

by Allie Pleiter

  “Um…I already asked her.” Talk about the worst idea ever. Why had he gone and asked her?

  “She seems very nice,” Gil conceded, still grinning. “A little more delicate that I would have picked for you, but it seems to bring out your hero tendencies. Snake-hunter. Actor. A regular renaissance mayor.”

  Mac launched off his chair to pace the small room. “You can be a real jerk sometimes, you know that, Sorrent?”

  “Emily says so, especially when I’m right.” He motioned for Mac to sit back down. “So she got to you. It was bound to happen sometime—why not now? You said you were feeling restless. Maybe it was more than just political unrest.”

  “Why not now? Because this is the worst time ever. She’s not in the same place as me, faith-wise. And in the middle of this mayor thing? If I do bring Mary on Friday, it’ll just encourage Ma. She’s already more than a bit nutty about the thought of having a thirty-year-old still-bachelor son. She’d be all over this, knitting for grandbabies by Saturday morning.”

  “It’s not like you’ve never dated before, Mac. You can handle your Ma and anyone else who jumps to conclusions. Bring her Friday.” His grin made Mac want to throw him in a horse stall. Headfirst.

  “I have to, now. That was the stupidest thing to do. Seriously.”

  Gil pulled a clipboard off the tack room wall and headed for the door. “Maybe not. You’re always talking about how no one in Middleburg is willing to explore the possibilities.”

  Mac followed, glad to know this ridiculous conversation was coming to a close. “You want me to date her?”

  “I want you to be happy. My baby deserves a happy godfather.”

  “Like you’ve ever really cared about…” Mac stopped. “What did you just say?”

  Gil turned with the strangest look Mac had ever seen on his face. “I said my baby deserves a happy godfather. Mayor or not, no miserable man gets to godfather my baby.”

  Mac picked up his jaw off the floor. “Emily’s pregnant?”

  “She is indeed.”

  Gil was going to be a father. The guy he’d thrown into mud puddles in second grade was going to be a father. “You’re gonna be a dad.”

  “It generally works that way, yes.”

  Mac grabbed his friend and pulled him into a quick hug. Gil and Emily were going to start a family. It was one of the best shocks he’d ever had. “Congratulations. Wow. When?”

  “Sometime in June.” We haven’t told too many people yet. Emily’s had a few complications and we thought it better to keep it private for a little while longer. The Mary role is a big deal for her, and now you know why. But you need to keep this under your hat for a while, especially on Friday. Consider it your first duty as godfather. You will, won’t you? ”

  “Godfather? Of course. And sure, I’ll keep quiet. But man, that’s amazing news. Are you excited?”

  Gil actually looked jittery, which was saying something on his usually stoic features. “Excited, freaked out, worried, amazed, running out of ways to cope with that herd of hormones putting up a Christmas tree in my kitchen…I’m all sorts of things. Just not sane.”

  His kitchen? Gil’d been married for how long and still thought of it as “his kitchen”? He could just imagine how well that was going. Gil had been surrounded by men—farmers, foremen, the teenagers and twenty-something men whose lives he had helped rebuild—just a little bit too long. Mac slapped Gil on the shoulder. “You’ve been raising great big kids for five years. How much harder can one tiny guy be?”

  “If it’s a guy.” Gil practically gulped the sentiment.

  The thought of what Gil’s frilly, vintage-loving wife would do with a baby girl made Mac break into an amused grin. He imagined Gil holding a frothy bundle of pink lace in those great big farmer hands, and broke out laughing. “Now who’s in more trouble? You or me?”

  Pastor Dave came to Mary’s office door early in the afternoon, as she was marking lighting cues on a script. The high school had lent the church two spotlights, both of which had a selection of color choices, so she had the chance to add a few small-scale special effects to her production. Now, when Mary and Joseph walked through the Bethlehem night, it could actually look like night onstage. Progress in inches, she thought. “Mary?” Pastor said as he knocked on the open door. He’d brought her a cup of coffee. People were always bringing each other coffee in this town.

  “Oh, I could sure use that. Thanks.” She rose and took the steaming mug, coming around her desk so they could sit on the pair of chairs in front. She had an office, with actual chairs, instead of her cubicle at the ad agency and her locker at the symphony hall. That felt so good.

  “You’re doing a great job. They can be an unruly bunch, even on their best days.” He sighed. “Tonight, they may be at their worst.”

  Evidently the coffee was for fortification. “What’s up?”

  “I just got off the phone with Sandy Burnside. Evidently Mac and Howard got in a bit of a row at the dime store this afternoon. The store started offering a ten percent discount to Epson supporters. Which made the car wash across the street offer a ten percent discount to MacCarthy voters. Mac and Howard ended up shouting at each other with the store owners in the middle of the street until a policeman had to ask everyone to leave. Quite a row, evidently. They’ve been civil so far, but things are clearly getting out of hand.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s gotten into folks.”

  Mary had visions of a cowboy saloon fight, with dusty buckaroos being thrown out swinging shutter doors by a star-studded sheriff. “Voting discounts? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Once people start taking sides, it doesn’t take much to get things out of hand.” He set his coffee down. “They’ll show up tonight, but they’ll be prickly, that’s for sure. You have your work cut out for you.”

  “Oh, boy,” she murmured over a gulp of her coffee.

  “It’s tough.” Dave nodded. “But this is exactly why you’re here. Folks need a place to put aside their differences for a common goal.” He rose from the chair. “You just hang onto the reins tonight, and don’t let ’em start up again. Forewarned is forearmed.”

  “Well, tonight’s the night they all have to have their lines memorized. Fortunately, that tends to put people in their place very quickly.”

  “You want me to come? Watch over things?”

  While it was an attractive idea, Mary thought it best to hold onto what little ground she had. “Well, keep your cell phone on and I’ll have you on my speed dial.”

  Pastor Dave laughed. “Pastoral 9–1–1? Good enough. Sandy’ll be there, too, and Gil, and those two could wrangle just about anyone if you need backup.”

  “Sounds like I’ll need every heavenly host I can get my hands on.”

  Mary did keep them in line, but only barely. The tension in the church hall was thick enough to cut with a hatchet, much less a knife. Howard said nothing all evening—except his lines of course, and bristled with annoyance and discomfort. Mostly he just frowned and made a point of sitting as physically far from Mac as possible.

  Mac, on the other hand, was openly prickly. More than once she’d had to “shush” him from a cutting comment or other whispered comeback to something someone else said. She’d spent half the rehearsal wondering whether or not to follow the policeman’s lead and just dismiss the two, but it was equally clear that dozens of other people would take up the argument in their absence. She pretended she hadn’t heard about the fiasco, hoping a feigned ignorance would save her from having to take sides.

  More spiritually mature, hm? Who’d say that based on how you just behaved tonight?

  Mac hung back after rehearsal, recognizing how he’d behaved and wanting to apologize for the jerk he’d been this evening. Actually, he’d been a jerk most of the day. With the discount stunt, Mac felt like Howard’s supporters were out to get him, and it was pretty clear Howard felt equally threatened. How had it eroded into this bickering? Mac didn’t run to create scenes like
this, and he doubted Howard found them useful, either. He did his best to put it behind him for the rehearsal, but he hadn’t done a very good job.

  Mary wasn’t exactly scowling when she gathered up her coat, but she was close. “Are you two going to be able to get this under control?” she asked in a tone that was way too teacher-ish.

  “I’m sorry,” Mac said in a tone that was way too much like a third-grade ruffian. “Things got out of hand today.”

  “You can say that again. I’m glad Pastor Dave warned me, or I’d have been blindsided.”

  Great. Pastor Dave had found it necessary to warn her. It was the grown-up version of having the principal send a note home to your mother. He pushed the wave of annoyance back down into his gut and deliberately unclenched his fists as he pulled open the church door for her. “You didn’t deserve to get pulled into this.”

  She looked at him. “Actually, when you think about it, maybe I did. I’m supposed to be the distraction from all that. It’d be foolish to think it wouldn’t find its way into rehearsal now and then. It’s actually kind of amusing, from where I sit anyway. Discounts. You all are acting like children. Stomping and snorting around each other like angry bulls.”

  “No cow metaphors, please, this is horse country.”

  She laughed. “Actually, when Pastor Dave told me the police broke up your fighting in the street, that’s just what I pictured. The whole cowboy-burst-through-the-swinging-doors-of-the-saloon thing. So is that a cow metaphor, or a horse metaphor?”

  That made him laugh. “That question doesn’t even merit an answer.” The western-movie vision hit him anyway: him standing in a dusty alley, hand twitching over his holster, ready to shoot it out with Howard at the O.K. Corral. He laughed harder.

  “That’s better.” She pulled on her gloves and they walked in silence past the huge lit Christmas tree in the park. After a pause, she asked “Is it worth it? All this bickering?”

  “You mean am I sorry I ran? No.” He tucked his own hands into his pockets; the evening had turned cold and damp. “I’m sorry it gets messy like that, but this is a small town and people are all up in each other’s business all the time here. If we cut out just because we argued, we’d never do anything. Howard and I will be fine after this is over.” He turned to look at her. “Maybe not right after all this is over, but fine eventually.”

  “I find that hard to believe. Isn’t this the part of the country where families feud for generations? Hatfields and McCoys and all that?”

  “Oh, please. A woman as smart as you should know better than to buy into a stereotype like that. Short of the occasional ‘y’all,’ have you seen anything that would make you believe that?”

  A wry grin crept across her face. “Were you in the same church I was tonight?”

  “Okay, above and beyond the normal human bickering factor.”

  The grin didn’t let up. She was sparring with him, and he was enjoying it. “Is there a normal human bickering factor?”

  Mac shrugged deeper into his coat, pretending at an annoyance he no longer felt. “I thought we were discussing my call to civil service.”

  She mimicked his formality, the grin now a full-fledged smile. “Oh, yes, of course. Expound, please.”

  That made him raise an eyebrow. “Expound? Quite a ‘hundred-dollar word’ as Sandy would say.”

  “I do have an advanced education. I’m only two years and a eighty-page thesis away from a doctorate.”

  He chuckled. “And you write jingles. Wrote jingles. Or will you continue to sell blue bears on the side? I doubt the Christmas Drama Coordinator pays much of a living wage.”

  Now she played at annoyance. It satisfied him, on some level, that they’d reached the ability to joke—even lightly—about Bippo Bears. His dad always said you never really conquered something until you could laugh at it. “I believe we were discussing your call to civil service.”

  He nodded. “And I can’t miss my chance to expound now, can I?” They stopped to admire a shop window done up for the holiday, all full of snow globes and an elegant crèche.

  “Howard’s missing the point on too many things. Things that are going to be crucial for Middleburg in the next couple of years. We need more compromises if we’re going to survive. Howard thinks the way to stay charming and quaint is to make sure nothing changes. I think Middleburg can keep what makes it Middleburg and still walk into the future. It’s ‘change or die’ these days, and I don’t want to see my town die. A change of mayor, or even just the idea of a choice of mayor, is a good place to start.” He shrugged his shoulders, aware that he’d given her quite a speech. “I’ll get off my soapbox now,” he said, motioning for them to continue walking. “But I’ve got a question for you first.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Mary wasn’t sure what question Mac had in mind. “Okay,” she said a bit warily. She made herself promise to answer, even if it felt like tiptoeing out onto thin ice.

  “Why are you alone at Christmas? I know you have parents and a brother and his wife, you must have had other places you could have gone for the holidays than to come here where you didn’t know anyone.”

  She felt her spine straighten, her defenses rise. “What makes you think I’ll be alone at Christmas?”

  “I don’t think you’d be pushing so hard for the potluck if you had somewhere else to be.”

  Her first thought was that he was shooting holes in her reasoning, knocking down her plan to get the town together on Christmas Eve. When she looked at him, however, she realized it was a genuine question.

  Tell him, she told herself. It’s no secret. Still, it felt like she was letting out private information she wasn’t quite ready to share. “My parents were planning to come at first. But my brother hasn’t been well. They called just after I took this job and asked if it would be okay with me if they spent the holidays with my brother since he needs the help. They invited me to come out, offered to pay my plane ticket to fly in on Christmas Day even though I can afford my own airfare. I almost did, but then it just seemed to me that maybe here was the best place for me to be after all.”

  “Why?”

  Mary wasn’t sure she was ready to get into this with him. He wasn’t prying, he just didn’t realize how personal a question that was. “It’s complicated,” she answered, just to buy herself a moment to think. “I haven’t been a Christian for very long. I mean I always believed, my parents took me to church every once in a while, but it was never anything real. Anything personal or meaningful. When you work in retail advertising and in music, Christmas is crunch season. You’re working long hours, and almost every working musician I know has a job on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day if not both. ‘Christmas is a music holiday, but it’s not a holiday for musicians,’ my college professor would say.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Mac said thoughtfully. “Never thought about it that way before, but it’s true.”

  “Last Christmas, it just struck me how empty it all was. The sales figures, the concerts, the drinking and hard partying. It was like we were all going out of our way to have fun just to convince ourselves we weren’t missing out on anything. Thornton used to proclaim ‘We make Christmas.’ Last year I realized I didn’t want to make Christmas, I wanted to have Christmas. Or what was behind Christmas.”

  “Meaning Christ?”

  “Yeah, although I didn’t know it at first. It was like I was gravitating toward church, being pulled in to places and people who seemed to have whatever it was that was supposed to be behind Christmas. And when it all finally clicked, when it fell into place and I realized that I needed Christ, needed that faith, then everything I did before seemed so…pointless. Hollow.” She allowed herself to look at him, to gauge whether or not her poor explanation was making any sense. “I’m not very good at explaining it.”

  “No,” he responded more warmly than she would have expected. Certainly more warmly than her parents had reacted. “I get it,” he agreed. “You didn’t need ju
st a minor alteration, you needed a clean break, a major overhaul. To go somewhere completely new and different. I get that.”

  “I’m glad somebody does.” She tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite work.

  “I take it your mom and dad aren’t exactly thrilled with your choice?”

  “They paid a lot of money for my education. This feels like a huge step backward for them, and they don’t understand why I’m leaving a lucrative career for a ‘Podunk part-time job.’”

  They’d reached his office and her apartment, and she found herself sorry this conversation had to end just when it had gotten started. It felt enormously satisfying to find someone else who understood why she’d turned her life upside down.

  He stood in the doorway while she got out her keys. “Faith rarely makes sense to folks who don’t have it. If you haven’t figured that out yet, you will. God asks us to do things that don’t follow logic.”

  “Like an unheard-of campaign for mayor?”

  “Yeah.” He laughed. “Just like that.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and took a step back as her key turned the lock. “You keep at it, Mary Thorpe. Middleburg’s a good place to launch a fresh start. You might do okay here.”

  “You think?”

  There was a look in his eye, a split second of carefully guarded affection, that tripped up her pulse before she could reason it away.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think. Don’t let that fool Thornton take that away.”

  The mention of Thornton’s name sucked the warmth out of the air. It struck her that she was going upstairs to an empty apartment, and for a moment she felt the urge to ask Mac to stay and talk awhile. Which was a really bad idea. Before she could stop herself, she heard herself ask, “We’re going Friday to Gil and Emily’s, right?”