4 Christmas on Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  Chapter Seven

  In Which Mother’s Intuition Rules

  They were still chuckling when Lori’s car door slammed and she bounded up the front steps, followed at a more sedate pace by Ida Mae.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” Paul greeted her, saluting her with a fruitcake cookie from the platter. “Your mom was just telling us about your first Christmas—the one before you were born.”

  Lori bent to kiss his cheek. “That’s a good story,” she said. “But not as good as the one about Whiskers.”

  “Get over Whiskers, already,” her mother said. “How was your drive?”

  “It was great.” She hugged Derrick and helped herself to a cookie. “How do you like the cookies?”

  “The best I ever had,” Derrick declared, and Lori cast a triumphant look at Ida Mae as she came up the steps.

  “I told you,” she said.

  Ida Mae gave a little harrumph. “Better than nothing, I guess.”

  Lindsay said, “You didn’t happen to pass Noah on the road, did you?”

  Lori shook her head, munching the cookie. “Maybe he decided to go to Charlottesville, after all.”

  Lindsay’s eyes widened with a mixture of alarm and disbelief. “He wouldn’t do that. Not without telling me, he wouldn’t. Not if he values his skin. Would he?”

  Ida Mae pulled open the screen door and stopped short at the threshold. “What’s that smell?” She turned a dark, suspicious look on the group on the porch. “Y’all didn’t burn up my yeast rolls, did you? It takes four hours to make a good batch of rolls!”

  “The rolls are fine,” Bridget assured her quickly.

  “It’s a long story,” Cici added.

  Lindsay frowned a little into her empty glass. “I think I’ll go call Noah. Just in case he does have some crazy idea about taking off for Charlottesville.”

  She got up and went inside, and Bridget, sighing wistfully over her own glass, rose as well. “As much as I’d to sit here sipping and talking, I’ve got cookies to decorate.”

  “And I’ve got presents to wrap,” Lori said.

  Derrick stood too. “I’ll get started on the pate for tonight.”

  Cici said, “I guess that string of lights isn’t going to fix itself.”

  Paul grinned at her. “Are you sober enough to get on a ladder?”

  Lindsay came back to the door, looking worried. “Noah doesn’t answer his phone.”

  “He’s probably on his way home,” Lori said, giving her a light pat on the shoulder as she passed. “You know he can’t hear it over the noise of that motorcycle.”

  “He’s supposed to keep it on vibrate. I told him to.”

  “You don’t want him to answer the phone while he’s driving,” Bridget pointed out.

  “I suppose not,” Lindsay admitted, but she still looked troubled. “I wish he’d taken one of the cars.”

  Cici said, “Take the advice of someone who’s been at this for awhile. If you worry about him like this every time he leaves the house, you won’t survive the first year of motherhood, much less the rest of his life.”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s the law of averages, sweetie,” Paul said easily, getting to his feet. “How many times has he left the house on that motorcycle? And how many times has he come home safe and sound?”

  Lindsay tried to look reassured, but didn’t do a very good job. “I suppose.”

  Lori came back to the door. “Hey,” she said, “what happened to the Christmas tree on the balcony?”

  Cici grinned. “Aunt Lindsay will explain. And then the two of you can decide what to do about the empty space it left. Come on, Paul, help me get the ladder.”

  Perfume. In the end, all he had been able to find was perfume. He had looked at jewelry, but the gap between the dollars on the price tag and the dollars in his wallet was a little wide. Some salesgirl had tried to talk him into a sweater with pearl beads on it; easy for her to say in a store where the air conditioning was turned down to sixty. Coats, gloves, boots, scarves… the merchants had been no more prepared for a Christmas heat wave than the customers were.

  Everybody else had been pretty easy. Bridget had been after him for months to make her a knife rack, so he’d cut one out of red oak, tole-painted some Dutch flowers on it to match the tiles in the kitchen, and sealed it with his own compound of shellac and turpentine that gave it a nice soft shine and would stand up for years against kitchen grease and knife marks. For Cici, he’d painted a portrait of Lori sitting under a shade tree. Lori liked books with pictures of vampires on the covers, so he picked her up a couple from the drugstore. He got Ida Mae an apron with pot holders velcroed onto the pockets, because he thought that was cool. But Lindsay was different. She deserved something special.

  The perfume was nice enough. It smelled like lilies, and it came in a gold box with blue velvet inside. But it was still perfume.

  It was a good day for a ride once he got off the main highway and onto the more sparsely traveled mountain back roads. The air billowed his tee shirt and the sun baked his shoulders, and for a long stretch of road there was nothing but the pulse of the engine and the blue and lavender mountains curving behind the spiky branches of winter woodlands. He relaxed and eased back on the throttle, enjoying the scenery and trying not to worry about the stupid perfume. After all, Lori thought it was good enough for her mom. And she had been giving Christmas presents a lot longer than he had.

  Except for a few tall pines and scrawny cedars, the trees on either side of the road looked naked and exposed: A squirrel’s nest here, a few dead leaves clinging there. But then he saw something that made him look twice. Nestled in the fork of a tree a few hundred feet back into the woods was a cluster of green mistletoe. One of the few good memories he had of his dad was going out at Christmastime and tramping through the crisp cold woods, shooting down mistletoe with a twenty-two. His dad would cut it up and sell it to tourists and Christmas tree lots and such. Of course that had been before he turned completely drunk and the law took his guns… or maybe he sold them for more rye whiskey, Noah had never known. But those days hunting for mistletoe had been nice.

  He came around a curve and spotted a dirt road going off into the woods that looked as though it might lead right up next to the tree with the mistletoe. On impulse, he turned hard left onto the road. He didn’t see the white van barreling toward him until it was too late. He swerved right, the van swerved left. His front tire caught a patch of gravel and went into a skid. The motorcycle flew out from under him, and that was the last thing he knew.

  “I think,” Lori decided, surveying the empty balcony from below, “a Nativity scene. A big one, with sheep made out of cotton balls.”

  “Very funny.” Lindsay regarded the empty space with folded arms, affecting thoughtfulness, but her expression was distracted.

  “Whoever heard of two Christmas trees, anyhow?” Ida Mae observed disdainfully, moving past them with a broom to sweep the porch. “Miss Emily never saw the need for more than one tree. It’s a blessing you didn’t set the house afire with the dang fool thing.”

  “I’ll agree with that, Ida Mae,” Lindsay said. “It’s a blessing.” Her eyes wandered toward the telephone. “Maybe I’ll try Noah again.”

  “You just called him five minutes ago,” Lori said with a touch of exasperation. “You keep that up and he’ll never come home. How about a big wreath?”

  Lindsay replied absently, “We’ve got too many wreaths already.”

  “It can be a theme.”

  “You got bigger problems than what kind of worthless Christmas decorations to crowd up the landing with,” Ida Mae said. “Fifty people coming tomorrow and the house smells like burnt shoes. What’re you gonna do about that?”

  All the windows were open, the fans were on, and the air-exchange system that cooled the house in the summer was going full blast in an effort to rid the house of the odor. A happy side effect was, of course, that the house was pleasantly cool for the first tim
e in days.

  “We’ll boil some cinnamon sticks and orange peels on the stove,” Lindsay replied. “It’ll be fine.”

  Ida Mae gave another harrumph, and went out to sweep the porch.

  “Poinsettias?” suggested Lori.

  Lindsay glanced uneasily toward the phone again and rubbed her bare arms, as though chilled. “Did you ever get a bad feeling about something?”

  Lori, who could be very single-minded, looked at her in bewilderment. “Not about poinsettias.”

  Lindsay gave a small laugh, and seemed to forcefully shake off her preoccupation. “Come on,” she said, “help me get some buckets from the barn. I have an idea.”

  They took five gallon feed buckets, spray painted them gold, and banded each one with a red velvet ribbon. Then they lined them up behind the railing of the balcony and filled them with towering evergreen clippings from the cedar trees that grew along the fence line of the sheep pasture. Lindsay decorated the branches with glittering red glass balls carefully selected from the big Christmas tree in the parlor.

  “Terrific,” declared Bridget from the foyer below. “You know, I think I like that better than having a Christmas tree up there. And you can’t even see the smoke smudges on the wall.”

  “I don’t know,” Lori said, standing beside her. “I think it needs lights.”

  “No lights!” chorused Bridget, Lindsay, Derrick and Cici, who came through the front door just then, followed by Paul.

  Cici added, “The string on the outside of the house is up again. We tested it, and all systems go.”

  “I like the monochromatic theme,” Paul said, admiring Lindsay’s work.

  “I hope the chickens won’t mind being fed out of gold buckets,” Bridget said, a little uncertainly.

  “It’ll make them feel like rock stars,” Cici assured her

  “It’s too bad all the ornaments were broken when the tree fell,” Lori said. “I still think it needs a little something.”

  Cici said suddenly, “Maybe you’re right. More red ornaments would be perfect.”

  Paul said, “I don’t know. I like it like that. Minimalist.”

  “Minimalist is not exactly the Ladybug Farm style,” Cici pointed out.

  Lindsay said, “Listen to the expert, Cici. The man writes a style column for over sixty syndicated newspapers. It’s fine. And I’m over this. Is there any more eggnog?”

  Cici turned to Paul, her eyes wide with unspoken meaning. “Paul, you don’t mind running into town and trying to find another box of red ornaments, do you?”

  Paul locked his gaze onto hers, clearly trying to read the subtext while he said hesitantly, “I guess not.”

  “The general store is open until five today,” Cici said, taking his arm and turning him toward the door.

  Lindsay straightened up and peered over the balcony, her face creased with alarm. “Is it that late?”

  Cici walked Paul to the door. “Listen,” she said, sotto voce, “I don’t want to add to Lindsay’s hysteria, but it’s not like Noah to blow off chores when he knows how important this is to us. Maybe you could just drive to town and see if you see him anywhere?”

  Paul’s eyes darkened with concern. “You’re not really worried are you?”

  She shrugged a little, but her brow was knotted thoughtfully. “There is such a thing as mother’s intuition, you know.”

  “I’m not one to argue with that. On my way.” And then he smiled. “I’ll even try to find you a box of red Christmas ornaments.”

  He started toward the door. Cici caught his arm, casting a quick, furtive glance back toward Lindsay. “Maybe,” she added softly, moving close to him, “when you get to town and get cell phone reception, you could call the state patrol and see if there’ve been any accidents.”

  Paul met her eyes for a moment, and then nodded soberly. Then he turned and gave a cavalier wave toward the balcony. “More glass ornaments,” he called, “definitely. Be back before you know it.”

  Lindsay’s brows drew together unhappily. “That’s what Noah said six hours ago.”

  The screen door closed behind him and Lori said, “We’ve got plenty of ornaments on the big tree. Maybe we could just steal some more. Oh! I know!” She hurried toward the parlor. “We can take my old Raggedy Ann doll, and that antique train car, and the teddy bear, and make a vignette…”

  “No,” Lindsay said firmly. She started down the stairs. “Not the teddy bear. He stays on the tree.”

  Derrick said, casting a critical eye toward the balcony, “I don’t know what Paul is thinking. It doesn’t need a thing. “

  “Maybe a few sprigs of holly,” suggested Bridget.

  Lindsay stood beside him and gazed up at the arrangement critically. “A little mistletoe wouldn’t hurt.”

  Cici glanced at her. “What is the deal with that teddy bear, anyway? You’ve had it on your Christmas tree every year since I’ve known you.”

  Lindsay glanced at her, looked a little embarrassed, and made a wry face. “Longer than that, actually.”

  Bridget said, “Come to think of it, I’ve noticed that too. What’s the story?”

  Derrick said, “It sounds to me like it’s time for a break.”

  “It sounds to me like it’s time for more eggnog,” Lindsay said. “It’s low-cal, right?”

  Derrick grinned and lifted a warning finger as he left the room. “Don’t start till I get back.”

  Lindsay looked at Cici, trying to keep her expression, and her tone, calm. “Noah knows we’re having dinner in a few hours. He wouldn’t do this on purpose.”

  Cici slipped her arm through Lindsay’s and turned her toward the parlor. “Come on, let’s sit in here by the tree where it’s cool, and take a break. We’ve been working all day. What’s the point of Christmas if you can’t enjoy it?”

  Lori said curiously, “Seriously, Aunt Lindsay. What’s the story with the teddy bear?”

  Lindsay hesitated, and then her lips twisted into a reluctant smile. “Well it’s kind of silly, really. Just something that happened to me when I was a little girl…”

  Chapter Eight

  Ghosts of Christmas Past: Lindsay

  My mother and daddy divorced when I was seven and my sister was nine, and that was not an easy year for me. We moved out of our house into a little duplex apartment that didn’t even have a back yard. I had to go to a new school, and I didn’t have any friends. The only way I could cope with it all was by convincing myself that my daddy was coming back any minute now to make everything all right again. My sister was brutal about trying to disabuse me of my fantasy; being the oldest, she was probably the most hurt, and she felt it was her duty to make sure everyone else around her hurt as much as she did. Looking back, I know that my sister had an even worse time of it than I did, but all I could see then was that she was always picking on me.

  My mother got a job at a department store and the two of us had to go to a babysitter after school. All I remember about our babysitter was that she was a dour old woman who gave me butter on saltines for a snack and made me sit at the dinette set and look at picture books while she watched her soap operas on television. Suze was okay; she had homework to do. But there were only two picture books for me, and after the first couple of days I had them memorized. My mother was always so tired when she picked us up, and we ate a lot of boxed macaroni and cheese for dinner.

  As the holidays approached, my mother had to work longer hours. She was in retail, after all, but I think she was also trying to put aside a little extra for our Christmas. The problem was that the babysitter wouldn’t keep us after six. So my mother would come and pick us up on her dinner break, and take us back to work with her. This was back in the day before malls, and the department store in town was the big-deal go-to place for Christmas shopping. But it was also a place where everybody knew everybody else, and as long as we were well-behaved and didn’t get in the way we were welcome to hang out in the break room while our mother worked the last three hours
of her shift.

  For me it was a paradise. Can you imagine? A seven year old set down smack dab in the middle of Toyland? But of course my big sister had to be all bossy and in-your-face know- it- all. She figured that since Dad left it was her job to be in charge. Too bad she was the only one who saw it that way.

  The store had an on-site Santa set up in the middle of the toy department, surrounded by a fake winter wonderland of plastic evergreens and cotton batting, with a peppermint striped North Pole marker and plaster reindeer suspended overhead on wires. My sister couldn’t wait to tell me that Santa Claus was a fake. Well, I knew that. Everyone knew that the department store Santas just worked for the real Santa Claus, because he was too busy at Christmas to be everywhere at once. Besides, the Santa Claus display was, for me, the least impressive part of the store. What I was enchanted with, what I coveted and adored, was the Christmas tree that stood in the entrance of the store. It was covered with white lights, and every branch was decorated with a white teddy bear with a red plaid ribbon around its neck. The teddy bears were the department store’s mascot—Tedmore was the name of the owner—and every teddy bear represented a needy child that the store customers were sponsoring for Christmas. Of course, I didn’t know that. All I saw was a Christmas tree filled with teddy bears, and I was sure some lucky kid was going to get them all for Christmas.

  My mother was determined to make this first Christmas without our dad was as normal as it could be, and she did her best. There was a guy selling Christmas trees out in front of the store and she managed to talk him into a half-off discount for a scraggly little pine that was half dead when we got it, and she kept us busy making paper chains and popcorn strings to dress it up. I thought it was fun until my sister started calling it the “poor peoples’ tree” and told me the only presents we’d be getting that year would be poor people’s presents, because the only Santa Claus there had ever been was our daddy dressed up in a Santa suit, and since we didn’t have a daddy any more Christmas wouldn’t be coming this year.