Hope Falls_Almost Merry

by Frances Elliot

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One – December 24

  Chapter Two – December 25Afternoon

  Chapter Three – December 25Evening

  Chapter Four -December 26 Afternoon

  Chapter Five – December 26 Evening

  Chapter Six – December 27

  Chapter Seven – December 30

  Chapter Eight – December 31

  Text copyright ©2016 by the Author.

  This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Melanie Shawn. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Hope Falls remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Melanie Shawn, or their affiliates or licensors.

  For more information on Kindle Worlds: http://www.amazon.com/kindleworlds

  Almost Merry

  by

  Frances Elliot

  Chapter One – December 24

  One more day, thought Emily. She finished brushing her teeth, wiped the mist from the mirror with her hand, and studied her reflection carefully. Definitely overdue for a haircut, she thought, but there wasn’t time, and somehow she doubted Joe would care one way or the other.

  She grinned at herself. For the past three weeks, ever since she’d returned to Boston from her short trip home, people had been complimenting her on her looks. After getting off a red-eye from the West Coast at six-something in the morning, she’d gone straight to the office. “You are disgustingly perky-looking for someone who flew all night. Here, take these and get out of my sight,” her boss had said, handing her a thick sheaf of papers. “And don’t come back with questions – I’m going to close my door and try to get a couple hours sleep.”

  And the praise had continued, from other co-workers, acquaintances, her regular barista. “Wow, guess you had a great Thanksgiving.” “Got a lot of rest, I see.” “You look nice – you get a facial or something?”

  Or something. Emily had settled on “I met someone” as the simplest response and everyone would nod and say “Ah, that explains it.”

  She was glad no one asked for details, because the whole story might sound a little fishy to the uninformed. Well, yeah, she’d have to say, there was this kind of screwed up guy – he lost his family in an accident when he was young – who was staying at our house for the holiday. And he was incredibly attractive, so I slept with him and it turned into more than we intended. But I had to come back to Boston for a work emergency, so we never had time to figure out what was going on.

  People would listen to that and say, “Oh, I see. You got laid. What are you going to order – do you want to split an appetizer?”

  Now and then, Emily wondered if she was twisting the facts to explain her behavior – memories of the three days they’d spent together were, she had to admit, pretty much dominated by sex. Whenever she tried to think rationally, get some kind of grip on the situation, she’d be distracted by thoughts of his touch, the sound of his voice, the look in his soft brown eyes right before he kissed her. It was impossible to know for sure if the deeper connection she’d felt was real.

  It bothered her a little that Joe must have the same misgivings, but all she could do now was wait and see. She’d been sitting on the taxiing plane, thinking over the horrible, no-reason-for-it quarrel they’d had on the way to the airport, when she realized she had no way at all to get in touch with him. Frantically unbuckling her seatbelt, she’d half-risen, as though she could bolt from the flight, make a mad dash across the tarmac and chase down his car on the highway.

  “See you at Christmas,” was the last thing he’d said to her – and even that was a major concession. He was a drifter, a low-wage worker who’d take any job that paid the rent, a polite and charming guy until someone tried to get too close. He moved endlessly around the West, always avoiding attachments, always trying to outrun the tragedy in his past. He had no fixed address, no cellphone, no real friends, no real future. And Emily thought she was falling in love with him.

  She thought of Joe all day long, dreamt of him at night. The guy she’d been dating before her trip seemed unrecognizable to her; she had trouble placing his name the next time he called. They parted amicably and Emily hardly noticed.

  Her work, formerly her main pre-occupation, suddenly seemed less important – the driving ambition that always propelled her forward was definitely losing steam. Oomph, she thought, what’s happened to my oomph? I’m about one step away from becoming that high school girl who spends math class writing “Mrs. Joe Chandler” all over a notebook page.

  Okay, maybe not quite that goopy, she told herself, but you absolutely have to get at least one foot back on the ground. She needed someone to talk to, a friend whose judgment she could trust. Problem was, her list of good, close friends was, um, nonexistent. She blushed, remembering that odd moment last week when she’d poured out her heart to a bemused neighbor.

  Her smoke alarms had started shrieking about six that morning and for once Emily awoke with something other than Joe on her mind. She’d scrambled out of bed and though she could definitely smell something, everything in the apartment seemed fine. She poked her head into the smoky hall to find several neighbors milling around in bathrobes, but no one seemed terribly agitated.

  “What’s going on?” she’d asked Mr. Campbell, the retired cop who lived next door.

  “Kitchen fire down on two,” he replied. “Bacon in the broiler would be my guess. Smell it?”

  Now that he mentioned it, she did. “Even burned, it’s making me hungry,” she said.

  “Me too. Throw some clothes on and we’ll go down the block for breakfast.”

  Emily didn’t hesitate. “Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll knock.”

  It was half an hour later, after she’d ordered the “Linebacker’s Special,” that she looked across the table and said, “How did you meet Mrs. Campbell?”

  He seemed only mildly surprised. “Ah, the moment that changed my life, you mean. Hate to put it this way, but it’s true – I remember it like it was yesterday.”

  The story was a familiar one. She was the prettiest girl in the neighborhood with the very strict family; he was the wild, always-in-trouble boy who changed his ways when they met. Emily was enjoying herself – they always chatted when he came over to help with a plumbing problem or stuck window, but never quite like this.

  “And I still miss her, every single day,” he concluded. After a pause he added, “You know what I’m going to say next, of course. Why do you ask?”

  She’d just about finished her enormous plate of food and the waitress had been by with the coffeepot. Outside the window, people were slogging through the snow, clutching hats against the wind, but it was warm and cozy here in their booth. Without knowing why, Emily launched into the tale of her Strange Thanksgiving Vacation. She told Mr. Campbell all about Joe, the car accident that killed his parents and little sister when he was just a kid himself, described his restless roaming from town to town and tried to explain how close they’d become in only three days.

  The sex stuff she omitted, but she was certain Mr. Campbell – like any good cop – had filled in those blanks in the story. He’d had a much smaller breakfast and was now working on a slice of apple pie. “Beth always said that if I had to eat sweets, do it early in the day, give myself a chance to work it off,” he said, smiling.

  As he stirred cream into his coffee, he studied Emily carefully, then looked out the window for a while before he spoke. “Know what I think you’re missing? I’d consider the fact that you have all these feelings despite the fact that this young man is so obviously wrong for you. Doesn’t that mean you should give them e
ven more weight?”

  Emily sat back in the booth – she’d never looked at it that way. Mr. Campbell looked satisfied with her reaction. “Keep in mind,” he said, “giving young ladies advice isn’t exactly up my alley. But lord knows, I do think I know a thing or two about falling in love.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Time to get you off to work I suppose,” he said, and made the scribbling “check, please” motion over to the waitress. “You say you’re going to see this Joe fellow when you get home next week?”

  “He said he’d be there,” she replied, sliding out of the booth, “but I can’t be sure. I have no way to get in touch with him.” She’d thought at least a dozen times of asking her mother if she’d heard from Joe or knew where he was, but then her mom would wonder why. And Emily wasn’t ready to answer any questions yet.

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Mr. Campbell said. “If he shows up, you’ve got your answer on how he feels about you right there. From what you’ve told me, if he’s not interested, you’ll never see him again. And on that cheery note, let us, as my generation used to say, blow this pop stand.”

  Out on the street, he patted her on the shoulder, wished her a good day at work and then added, “Remember. I was halfway down the road to the penitentiary when I took up with Beth. In the old days, that was a pretty common career choice in this neighborhood, but a good woman can work miracles with the average ne’er-do-well.”

  Everything he said stuck with Emily. She could continue to doubt herself, tell herself she was crazy, but nothing was going to change the way she felt – happy, glowing from the inside, and full of expectations. So okay, she thought over and over. Wait and see.

  *

  Joe pounded one more piece of drywall into place and paused to strip off his shirt. Sooner or later, if he was ever going to sell the old place, he was going to have to get someone in to replace the thermostat. That was one more thing to add to the “Things That Need to Wait for $” list that just kept growing and growing. So at the moment, he was able to take his pick between two temperatures – South Pole or Death Valley.

  It was easier to work in the heat, he’d discovered. Yeah, it was hard to hold the nails with sweaty fingers, but at least his hand wasn’t too numb to grasp the hammer. And he had to keep working, keep himself busy, and at the same time, avoid thinking too much about what he was actually doing.

  What he was doing was patching, re-tiling, or painting over every square inch of his childhood home. The real estate woman had told him he had two options – he could re-do everything from attic to cellar, or sell it “as is,” adding in a less than convincing voice that someone might find it “charming” in its present state.

  Option A suited Joe fine. He had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do anyway, so he’d taken on the project with grim determination. As he progressed, it had become a kind of psychiatric boot camp exercise, a way to force himself to confront the past.

  Here, here was the kitchen wallpaper his mom had loved in the sample book and detested from Day One after it was up on the walls. Steamed, shredded and gone, Mom. The living room carpet where his little sister had crawled and taken her first steps – gone, too.

  He’d bought a disposable camera with the idea of creating a record of each room before he destroyed it, but quickly abandoned the idea. The first time he looked through the little viewfinder, all he saw were the blank spaces where his mother, father and sister should have been.

  Some days went well, and he felt lighter, as if he’d cleared out another dark pocket of bitterness inside his mind. Other days were not so wonderful – he’d sat down and wept halfway through re-painting the slightly crooked shelves his dad had installed in the dining room.

  Today he was working in his old bedroom with surprising detachment. What in the world had upset him to the point that he’d obviously thrown something – a baseball, probably – across the room with enough force to crack the drywall? Team loss? Lousy grades? A girl, most likely, had to be a girl. He shook his head, marveling at the unbridled passion of his teen-age self.

  Nowadays he kept that kind of passion firmly under control, with one exception of course – Emily. That was another mystery – what the hell had happened to him there? He was working hard to avoid thinking any of that “never felt this way before” stuff, but it was damn hard to do. She was different in all kinds of ways, of course, but it was the way he reacted to her that baffled him.

  Something about her had seemed to heighten all his senses – colors were brighter, tastes sharper, sounds sweeter, and he was almost embarrassed by his ability to remember precisely how she smelled. With amazing clarity, he could recall that day she’d been baking, when the aroma of cinnamon still clung to her, or that morning he slid into bed beside her, inhaled the scent of her warm skin, and felt instantly at peace.

  The sex had been different, too. Her total lack of inhibition had startled him at first, but now memories of their few encounters sometimes swept through him with hurricane force. At times he would lose himself completely and re-awaken from fantasy to wonder why he was holding, say, the mustard jar. Sandwich, that was it – he’d been making a sandwich.

  The telephone rang, just as he was about to slip into another sex-fueled trance. He walked carefully over the drop cloths and down the hall to his parents’ former room to answer. “Hello?”

  “Is this Joe the Handyman?”

  Hearing the high-pitched voice, Joe sighed and said, “Yes, it is.”

  “Well, when can you come over and put your hands all over me?”

  Joe made his voice as deep and growly as he could. “I’m busy all day, how about midnight?” Then in a normal tone, he added, “Go ask your mom if that’s okay.”

  He hung up on the sounds of shrieking laughter and sighed again. He seemed to have acquired a following of very young admirers; he suspected the preteen who lived down the street was president of his motley fan club – he would see her in town, whispering and giggling with her friends when he passed.

  Just as he turned to leave, the phone rang again and he hesitated before picking it up. But it could be work. “Hello?” he said warily.

  “Joe? Is that you? It’s Ellie.”

  Ah, Mrs. Elmore, Emily’s mom and his own mother’s best friend for most of her life. “Sorry, Ellie, the phone startled me a little.”

  “Oh. Well, I was just calling to make sure you don’t want to drop in tonight. It’ll be a madhouse, I expect, but I’m doing a nice casserole and we’ll have—what?”

  Joe listened for a moment as she spoke to someone else, her husband Mike, presumably.

  “No, not the ground beef and tomato, why would I make that for Christmas Eve? And unless you want to do the cooking…” She left the dire consequences of further comment to the imagination.

  “I do thank you for the invitation,” Joe said when he had her attention again. “But I think I’d better stay home in case someone needs the handyman. Something always seems to go wrong at the worst possible time. That happened here a lot, as I recall.”

  There was a short pause and then Ellie laughed. “Do you remember the year your father tried to get the outside lights back on and blew every fuse in the house?”

  Joe laughed, too. “Yes, indeed. Had to horn in on your Christmas dinner, didn’t we?”

  “Ah, we had fun, though.”

  They were both quiet for a moment, remembering, until Joe broke the silence. “I’ll be with you tomorrow, though, I promise.”

  “Wonderful. Emily gets in around noon and I hope we can eat around three or four, all right?”

  “Of course. See you then.”

  Finally, the piece of information Joe had been waiting for – Emily gets in around noon. For the past few days he’d expected to hear she’d arrived and had begun to worry she couldn’t get off work or something. Or, when his mood was extra-dark, he’d think she’d decided to skip Christmas at home with her family rather than see him again.

  Of course, it
would have been simple to ask Ellie for a telephone number, but what reason could he give? “Oh, I just thought I’d give her a call” would sound ridiculous – as far as anyone knew, they were barely acquainted. So he’d let it go, but the waiting and wondering had driven him nuts.

  Ten minutes later, the phone rang again, but at least it turned out to be a job. Someone’s twelve-year-old grandson had put the fireplace poker through a window, she had the flier from the hardware store, could he come over and fix it right away? Be right there, he told the distraught grandmother, and went out to the garage to try and get his dad’s truck started.

  Chapter Two – December 25

  Afternoon

  Emily stood on the sidewalk outside the terminal, doing everything but jumping up and down with impatience. Where was her dad? Everything had gone so smoothly up to now – flying on Christmas Day had turned out to be wonderful. Short lines, a row to herself on the plane, super-cheerful people all around, but now this insanely long wait. She checked her watch. Her father was two whole minutes late.

  Yesterday had been one of the longest days of her life. She’d had to go to work – the news didn’t stop because it was Christmas Eve – but she’d spent the day in a haze, perking up only to check on weather reports for the fifteenth time.

  Luckily, the skies had been clear; now all she had to do was wait for her ride home. Would Joe be at the house when she arrived? Or would he wait, just come over at dinnertime? Or was he coming at all? She had to keep reminding herself he could be a thousand miles away, cuddled up with a new woman he’d picked up god knows where – Amarillo, Wichita, Nome, for all she knew.

  One minute later, which she’d spent conjuring up images of the sexy nightgown Joe was giving to his new girlfriend, her father’s car pulled up to the curb. “Merry Christmas, sweetheart. Glad you finally made it,” he said on his way around to help with her suitcase. “They’re all itching to see you at home, so let’s get this show on the road.”