Scrooge and the Single Girl

by Christine Rimmer

  “Have you got a picture of your grandmother around here anywhere?”

  He blinked. “Did the subject just change again, or am I imagining things?”

  She laughed. “Sorry. I do that. My boss at the Press-Telegram calls me the queen of the non sequitur. I think it’s something to do with the creative mindset.”

  “Ah.”

  “And about that picture?”

  He shrugged. “There’s a bunch of stuff in boxes and trunks stuck in the crawl space behind that closet.” He gestured at another makeshift curtained affair in the corner, similar to the one downstairs. “I’m pretty sure there are some old photographs of her in there. We can look tomorrow, since I’d venture a guess we won’t be going anywhere.”

  “Oh, I would love that. Who knows what we might find?”

  “And are you going to tell me why you’ve suddenly got to see a picture of my Grandma Mavis?”

  She thought of her dream—of the two of them, naked and glowing, floating in a soft, warm void, making mad, wonderful, passionate love. No way was she getting into that with him. “Just wondering about her. I mean, this was her house….”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. Jilly couldn’t guess what he might be thinking. Then he said, “People said she was crazy, but she wasn’t. She was shy, really. Nervous around strangers. Liked to keep to herself. She lived up here, in this house, all alone, for most of her life. She raised my mother up here.”

  She couldn’t resist asking, “What about your grandfather? Where does he fit into the picture?”

  He lifted an eyebrow at her. “He doesn’t—not in my lifetime, anyway. And not in Ma’s either, as far as I know.”

  “Caitlin never knew her father?”

  “That’s right. And it’s likely that my grandmother didn’t know him for very long. McCormack was her maiden name. Whoever he was, he hung around long enough to get my grandmother pregnant with Caitlin and then vanished without ever bothering to come up with a wedding band—but you know that, don’t you?”

  She gave him a half shrug. Of course she knew. They both came from the same hometown, after all. And in New Venice, Mad Mavis and Caitlin and her three wild sons had always been the topic of gossip and conjecture. People loved to whisper about how Mad Mavis McCormack had Caitlin up in that old house of hers, all alone, without getting married first—without even any evidence of a man in her life.

  Will made a low noise in his throat. “Around the Highgrade they always joked about it, called it Mad Mavis’s immaculate conception. They said that Caitlin was a product of a virgin birth. The drunks got a good laugh over that one, considering the way Caitlin turned out.”

  Jilly took his meaning. Caitlin McCormack Bravo was about as far from a virgin as any woman could get. By the time she was twenty-one, she’d had two sons, Aaron and Will, by the notorious Blake Bravo—and she was pregnant with Cade. Blake had then disappeared, by faking his own death, as it turned out. He’d never been seen by anyone in New Venice again. And after that, for Caitlin, there had been an endless string of affairs. The men seemed to get younger as Caitlin matured. Her last boyfriend had been around the same age as her sons.

  Jilly said softly, “You were close to her, to Mavis, weren’t you?”

  Will was looking off toward the pineapple-adorned curtain, a musing expression on his face. “I remember her as gentle. And that she was good to me. Ma always said I was her favorite. I don’t know if that’s true. But in the summer sometimes, I used to stay up here with her, just the two of us. We didn’t talk much. We played checkers and Scrabble and I always felt…at peace with myself here.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Twenty years ago yesterday.”

  Jilly felt a coldness, like a drop of icy water slithering down her spine. She’d dreamed of Mad Mavis on the twenty-year anniversary of the woman’s death.

  Just a coincidence, she hastened to tell herself. And surely it was. But that didn’t make it any less unsettling.

  She asked, “So that’s the reason you hate Christmas? Because the grandmother you loved died on December twenty-third?”

  He slanted her a look. “Uh-uh. First, you tell me why you think you have to make a point of not talking about me to your friends.”

  “Oh, Will. Come on. You can figure it out.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Because I don’t want them thinking I’ve got a thing for you.” She said it, and then couldn’t quite believe that she had.

  She just knew he was going to ask, Have you got a thing for me? What she wasn’t sure about was how she would answer him. Now he was being so kind, making an effort, as he’d put it, to behave like a bona fide human being, she couldn’t help starting to find him attractive all over again.

  But he didn’t ask. He only said, with a sincerity that melted her heart, “I’m damn sorry about the rotten things you heard me say that night at Jane’s. I’m not going to make any excuses for myself. There are none. But it wasn’t really about you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I guess I do.”

  “You’re an attractive woman. You’re smart. You’re fun to be around. And you are charming—too damn charming, in fact, for my peace of mind.”

  “I am?”

  “Absolutely. Maybe that’s why I’ve been so hard on you. To keep you at a distance.” Oh, my. She was certainly liking the sound of this. And then he added, “You’re something special, Jilly Diamond.”

  And she realized she was glad she’d come here, in spite of everything, in spite of how mean he’d been earlier, in spite of a big tree limb dropping on her head, in spite of having some kind of visitation from a dead old lady in the middle of the night, in spite of all of it—well, except for Missy’s disappearance. She really could have done without that.

  “It’s just that I’m…” He seemed to be seeking the right words.

  She thought maybe she had them. “Not in the market?”

  “Yeah. That’s it. I’m not in the market—though, when I look at you, I could almost wish I was.”

  Her throat had gone dry. From the Cheez Doodles, of course. She swallowed.

  “Want a root beer?” Will was already swinging his feet to the floor. “I think we really need a root beer.” He slid on his moccasins and stood, pausing to hand her the bag before he turned for the curtain.

  “Will.”

  He stopped and looked back at her.

  “I haven’t forgotten and you’re not getting off the hook.”

  He shook his head. “You really don’t want to hear it.”

  “Yes, I do. I want to hear all of it, the whole long, sad story.”

  He suggested ruefully, “We could just play checkers.”

  “Not on your life.”

  Chapter Eight

  “It started when I was little.” Will settled back against the pillow and popped the top on his root beer. “My earliest memories of Christmas are depressing ones. Looking back, I don’t know how Caitlin managed—three boys to raise, a business to run and my father long gone before Cade was even born. I think, given all she had on her plate, she did a damn fine job. But we had some seriously lean years there at first.”

  Outside, the wind was up again, making the pines cry. Jilly glanced over her shoulder as a particularly hard gust shook the windowpane behind them. She thought of Missy, all alone out there, and sadness squeezed her heart.

  Will was watching her. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Please. Go on.”

  “Jilly—”

  “No. I want you to. I do. You had some seriously lean years…”

  After a moment, he continued. “When you’re a kid, you don’t think of how your mom is killing herself to make a life for you and your brothers. You think, why aren’t we like all the other families in town? I didn’t get it, you know?”

  “You just said it. You were little.”

  He grunted. “I was little, and I was resentful. Somehow, even from the first, Caitlin always manage
d to hang a few strands of tinsel downstairs in the Highgrade. She’d stencil grinning snowmen and happy Santas in the windows. She and Bertha—you know Bertha?”

  “Of course.” Bertha Slider was a big, good-natured woman with freckles and carrot-red hair. She’d been Caitlin’s second-in-command at the Highgrade for as long as Jilly could remember.

  “Well, Ma and Bertha would put up a tree in the corner of the bar. But Caitlin just didn’t seem to have the time or energy left over to get us a tree for our apartment upstairs. Christmas Eve, she’d work the bar, serving up the good cheer to all the sad and lonely types who had nowhere else to go for the holidays. She was always good behind the bar, you know? It’s one of the secrets of her ultimate success.”

  Jilly did know. “She can be so exasperating. But what a heart.”

  “Yeah. A lot of running a bar is about being ready with a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on. And Christmas Eve, her shoulder would get a major workout. She wouldn’t drag herself up to bed until after three or four sometimes. Christmas morning, she’d sleep late. Not that it mattered. There was no tree in the first place and nothing much to put under it, if there had been.”

  “Pretty bleak,” Jilly said.

  “From the viewpoint of a seven-or eight-year-old kid, you bet it was. I look back now, I can see she was knocking herself out to make a life for us. But at the time, all I saw was that she wasn’t like other moms, that we had no dad. And the only Christmas around our place was down in the bar.”

  “So what about Cade and Aaron? Do they hate Christmas, too?”

  “Not that I know of. I wouldn’t say they’re exactly crazy about the holiday season, but they’ve always seemed pretty much okay with it, as far as I could see.”

  “So what makes you different?”

  “Maybe it’s partly that my birthday is December twenty-sixth.”

  “Eeeuu. Tough.”

  “I wouldn’t call it the end of the world. It only seemed like it at the time. If somehow Caitlin managed to provide some kind of Christmas, no way she had the energy to make a big deal over me the next day.”

  “You never had a cake? Or presents?”

  “Sometimes. And sometimes everyone would just forget about it—well, except for Grandma Mavis. She would always have something for me for my birthday. She didn’t come down into town a lot. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her till weeks later. But when I did see her, she’d have something all wrapped for me and it would make me feel good. But a lot of times, on my birthday itself, I’d get nothing—and by nothing, I don’t mean so much the cake and the presents. I mean the attention. The right kind of attention, the kind that tells a kid people are glad he’s around, happy he was born. On my birthday, as a rule, I either felt forgotten, or I felt like just one more burden, one more job on Caitlin’s endless to-do list.”

  Jilly was nodding. “Bleaker than bleak.”

  “But on the plus side, it did get better.”

  “As the years went by?”

  “Yeah. When I was nine, I got a cake and a puppy. God, I was happy. I’d been asking for a dog for about three years by then. And I finally got one. He was a lab-and-shepherd mix and he was the sweetest damn dog that ever was. I was crazy about him.”

  “Why do I think there’s a grim punch line coming?”

  “Probably because he was run over and killed two days before my twelfth birthday—on Christmas Eve. Run over and killed by a drunk driver in the parking lot behind the Highgrade.”

  Jilly let out a sympathetic moan. “Oh, Will. I’m so sorry.”

  “Pitiful, isn’t it? And then, two years later, Ma finally coaxed Grandma Mavis into visiting us for Christmas. By then, well, you know how we were, my brothers and I. Wild, to put it mildly. Cade and Aaron were off God knows where. But I stuck close to home that year, to be with Grandma. I tried to be cool about it, but I was so damn excited that she was there. I knew she’d make Christmas special, and I knew that she’d fuss over me on my birthday, too. She had this old rattletrap Ford pickup and she and I went out together two days before Christmas to cut down a tree.”

  “Oh, I don’t like the sound of this. Two days before Christmas would be the twenty-third. And the twenty-third of December was the day that she—”

  “Who’s telling this story?”

  “Oops. Sorry.”

  “I remember how happy I was, this kind of glowing feeling I had, to be with her. We got the tree and we drove back to town. She parked in one of the spaces right by the back door of the Highgrade and she turned to me…” His voice trailed off. He sipped from his root beer before he went on. “That was when I realized something was wrong. She looked so old, I remember thinking. The wrinkles in her face looked deeper than ever before. And the skin around her mouth was dead white. I asked her what was wrong. She forced a smile and said she was a little tired. She thought maybe she’d go on upstairs and lie down….”

  Outside, the wind, for a moment, had died. The final Christmas tune had played a few minutes before and the boom box was silent. The room seemed, at that moment, supernaturally quiet.

  Jilly heard herself whisper, “Oh, no…”

  Will said, “What I wanted, more than anything right then, was to believe her. I wanted it to be like she said. That she was just tired and a little rest would make everything better. I helped her up the stairs. She stretched out on the sofa in the living room. She said, ‘Yes. Now that is much better.’ I said, ‘Grandma, maybe I oughtta go and get Ma, don’t you think?’ She waved her hand at me. She said again that she was fine. She said she wanted me to put up the tree, there by the window, so she could see it. She did seem better, I told myself. A little rest, and she would be fine. I got out the tree stand and put it by the window and went down and got the tree myself and hauled it up the stairs. I was so damn proud to have managed it all on my own. I got it on the stand and I stood back to look at it. I remember what I said. ‘So Grandma. Looks good, don’t you think?’ She didn’t answer.”

  “She was gone?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, I need a Kleenex and I hate this story.”

  The box was on the night table. He passed it to her. Jilly yanked out a tissue. “Here. Hold this.” She pushed her root beer at him. He set the box on the bed between them, next to the bag of Cheez Doodles, and took the can from her. She blew her nose and then demanded, “You blame yourself, don’t you?”

  He gave the root beer back to her. “I tell myself that she insisted she was all right—that I was a kid and I desperately wanted to believe what she said. That she had a massive heart attack and there was probably nothing anyone could have done for her, anyway.”

  “But you still blame yourself.”

  He leaned close, a sad smile on that wonderful mouth and a teasing look in those blue, blue eyes. “Tell you what.”

  She dabbed at her eyes. “What?”

  “Just say the word. I’ll get the checkers.”

  She waved her wadded-up Kleenex at him. “Uh-uh. No way. Tell the rest.”

  “Jilly—”

  “I mean it. I want to hear the rest.”

  He settled back on his pillow. “Well, let’s see…” He shot her a look. “Remember, you asked for this.”

  “Come on, what next?”

  “Next, there was Mitzi Overposter. I think of Mitzi as just more of the same.”

  “Wait a minute. I know Mitzi. She still lives in New Venice.”

  He saluted her with his root-beer can. “That’s right. Married to Monty Lipcott, with four kids last I heard—Monty junior and three little girls. Monty senior sells insurance now. But back then, he was New Venice High’s star quarterback.”

  “Are you saying Mitzi dumped you for Monty?”

  “You got it. I realize now she was not the love of my life, but it certainly felt like she was at the time. I caught her with Monty at Devon Millay’s Christmas party. They were making out in the walk-in closet in Devon’s mother’s bedroom—well, more than making out
. It’s just possible I witnessed Monty junior’s conception. I remember that when I pulled open that closet door, ‘Jingle Bells’ was playing on the stereo in the living room.” Will drained the last of his root beer. “Where’s the wastebasket?”

  “Over here, on my side.” She held out her hand and he passed her the empty can. She got rid of it, along with her own can and her used tissue. “So after Mitzi, you—”

  Right then, everything went black.

  “Oh, no,” Jilly groaned.

  Will’s voice came at her, disembodied, through the darkness. “It was bound to happen sooner or later, with the storm this bad. I was surprised it stayed on all last night.” The bedsprings complained as he shifted his weight. “A few years ago, I put in a generator for situations like this.”

  “I saw it, on the back side of the house, knee-deep in snow.”

  “Which is why I don’t want to deal with it tonight.”

  “Smart thinking.”

  “I’ll just get some candles.” He was standing by then. She could see nothing, but she’d felt him leave the bed and his voice came from above.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No need.” He was already moving away. She heard his soft tread as he crossed to the dresser. He opened a drawer. A second or two later, a flashlight’s beam cut the darkness. “I’ll be right back.”

  When he returned he had a box of votives and a stack of saucers. She helped him put the candles around, several on the dresser, a couple on the night table. They lit them.

  “Okay, now,” she said when they had stretched out on the bed again. “Tell me the rest.”

  He laughed. “I think I’ve told you enough—way more than enough.”

  “Uh-uh. You haven’t. Not near enough.”

  “Hell, Jilly.”

  “Please?”

  “I’ll say this. After Mitzi, I decided I was too young to get serious over a girl. So I didn’t. For more than decade.”

  “But then?” She waited, half expecting him to back out of telling the rest.

  But he didn’t. “Five and a half years ago, I met Nora Talbot. And I knew, the first second I saw her, that I would love her. The miracle was, she felt the same way. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. We’d met in February, so we settled on Valentine’s Day, which was a few days short of one year from when we met, for the wedding. But the wedding never happened. She was murdered when she stopped at an ATM to pick up some cash. Shot through the head by a two-bit thug who is waiting his turn on death row as we speak, I am pleased to say. It was Christmas Day.”