Their First Noel

by Annie Jones

  “Making bad choices because you have some kooky idea that being irresponsible will keep you from sticking with bad choices is not fixable, Mom.” He never once took his eyes off Corrie’s face.

  Not even when the tears began to pool in her beautiful eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” she was barely able to rasp out. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “That’s my point, Corrie.” His breath eased from his constricted chest and he looked away at last. He did not raise his voice. He didn’t feel angry so much as he felt defeated. He had dreamed of restoring this inn for so long, had worked toward that goal, planned, saved, hoped and when he had come to the end of his rope, prayed. And what had Corrie done? “You’re not a kid. What you do should have purpose and intent. You direct your path. We all do. I don’t know if I could ever… I need people in my life who understand that.”

  The tears rolled down her cheeks. Her lower lip quivered but she didn’t say a word.

  Greer moved up to take her hand but his mom intervened and guided the child away. “This is between the two of them. I think you and I should make our way home, Greer.”

  “There’s nothing between me and Corrie, Mom. She’s just in town for a contest and…her own reasons. I’ve got my own stuff to worry about. It’s that simple.” He turned away at last and looked around for his keys, his coat. He looked down and realized he didn’t even have any shoes on. He headed toward the stairs to go get them. “I can pull Corrie’s car out of the ditch with my truck and she can follow you back to town.”

  “That will take care of things once and for all then,” Corrie said in a strained but controlled tone. “I’ll take the gingerbread inn with me now—”

  Andy stopped on the steps. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s finished and I don’t want it in your way,” she murmured.

  He did not look back. “You said the more you move it, the more chances it will crack or break or get messed up. I can bring it into town on the day you need it.”

  “Friday.”

  “Friday.”

  “At the community center. The entries have to be there by five but the doors open at one. The earlier you get it there the more time I have to see to any last-minute details.”

  “I’ll be there at one,” he said then went upstairs to get ready to extricate Corrie Bennington from his parking lot, his inn and his life.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hannah McFarland had led the way back to Hadleyville. Once they had turned from the rural lane that made its winding way to the Snowy Eaves Inn, the going got smoother. When they left the county road to the highway, the crews had scraped and salted or plowed and pickled or whatever it was they did up here to clear away the ice and snow.

  With each new phase, Corrie cried a little less. She had no business feeling so blue over Andy’s rejection. He’d never pretended there could be anything more between them, never told her he trusted her or asked her to stay after the contest was over. And everything he’d said about her was certainly nothing she hadn’t heard before from her mother. Maybe this time it would sink in.

  “Do you have any plans for the day, Corrie?” Hannah asked when she’d seen her charge safely to the Maple Leaf Manor parking lot.

  “Plans,” Corrie repeated barely above a whisper. Her heart heavy, she looked at the red door of her quaint but impersonal room.

  Despite everything, she did not want to be here. She wanted to be back at the inn, cleaning up, giving Andy support and encouragement and more than a few suggestions for ways to pull the place together enough to host that open house. “I think I’ll snuggle down in a chair and do a little Bible study. You don’t happen to know where I’d find that verse about pride going before a fall?”

  “Proverbs, though that’s not exactly the way it goes.” Hannah smiled and put her arm around Corrie’s shoulder in a sweet, motherly way. “But if you’re looking for insight into my son you might do better to consider the verses about the sins of the father being visited on the sons.”

  “Oh?” Corrie bent down to give Greer a wave through the window then looked Andy’s mom in the eye. “I don’t know whether to tell you that I don’t want to understand your son because after Friday I’ll never see him again, or ask what you mean by that and totally blow my cover because I really do wish I could understand him.”

  She laughed and drew Corrie into a sideways hug. “Just my not too subtle way of letting you know you shouldn’t be too hard on Andy. When my husband died unexpectedly, he left us in a financial bind after we had just cashed out all our savings to adopt Greer.”

  “So Andy grew up fast.”

  “He became the man of the family. He went to work for a construction company and sacrificed his college money for the good of the family. He was barely nineteen.”

  “That’s how old my father would have been when I was born.”

  “Pretty young for so much responsibility. You might bear that in mind when you try to figure out what to do next.”

  “For Andy or my father?”

  “Either one.” She gave Corrie a pat on the back. “I’m just saying that sometimes it’s easier to understand people if you understand their story. A thought you might want to hang on to when you talk to your mom later.”

  “My mom?”

  “You are going to call her and tell her that you may have found your father.” She wasn’t asking. She was telling Corrie that she needed to do this, and she needed to do it with a forgiving, gentle heart.

  “What if she’s angry or hurt by that?”

  “Then you’ll handle it. Corrie, this is your life. You have to take charge of it. I know it sounds corny but often the truth really is so simple it’s easy to dismiss it. You can’t move forward with so much tying you to the past. You have to find your answers. You have to talk to your mother and find your father.”

  Hannah was right. She had spent the last few days dragging her feet over completing the task she’d come to Vermont to take care of because deep down she didn’t want to complete it. To follow through on those goals would mean moving on, moving away from the Snowy Eaves Inn and Andy. Her father no longer lived here. She had nothing to tie her to this place now.

  “Are you going to be okay?” the woman asked quietly.

  “Yes.” Corrie smiled for the first time since she’d left the inn and gave Andy’s mom a quick hug and a thanks. “I believe I am, because you’re right, it’s time for me to move on.”

  Corrie wasn’t exactly sure what “moving on” would look like, though. She threw her coat on a chair and pulled off her boots. She looked at the phone on the nightstand, read the rate info and decided to charge her cell phone and call from that.

  Stalling? Preparing, she told herself and made use of the time by looking up the verse she had angrily accused of being Andy’s flaw.

  She ran her finger under the words of Proverbs 16:18. “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”

  She shut her eyes. She didn’t know exactly how to define a haughty spirit but she was pretty sure that did not apply to the bighearted, humble man she had tried to pin it on. She exhaled slowly then started to read the passage again, only to find her gaze falling on Proverbs 16:9. “In his heart a man plans his course but the Lord determines his steps.”

  Corrie read the verse once, twice then another time and the tightness in her chest began to ease. Move ahead, prepare, let the Lord direct her steps.

  The message sank into her being and filled her thoughts. She finally raised her face and said a prayer not asking for any one thing, but offering herself to God’s plan and knowing it would be enough even if her mother was harsh, her father disinterested and she would never see Andy McFarland again.

  “Only, if it could work out better than that, Lord, I’d think that after the birth of Jesus, of course, that was the best Christmas present of all.”

  Finally, Corrie was in the right frame of mind to call her mother. She took her phone and went to t
he window, pulling back the avocado-green curtains so that she could watch the gentle snow flurries that had moved in midday.

  “Bennington’s Bakery, Barbara speaking.”

  “You used your last name so that if he ever wanted to find you all he had to do was find a phone book, didn’t you?” Corrie didn’t see any reason to bother with small talk.

  “I think by the time I opened the bakery he had given up looking, if he ever did. But yes, that’s exactly why I used that name for the bakery. I thought even if I married again, your father could still find us,” she replied. “Do you have something you want to tell me, sweetie?”

  Corrie had so much she wanted to say. She wanted to tell her mother about Andy and the inn. About having the wrong name and about the mayor, and the town that she had come to love. But she had to start somewhere, so she said, “I think I found him. He lives in Virginia now.”

  “I see.” Barbara Bennington sounded disappointed. “Is he…”

  “I don’t know everything, but according to Hannah McFarland, he’s widowed. Never had any children.”

  “Never had any other children,” her mom corrected with a flare of maternal protectiveness and a hint of melancholy. “So, you’ve talked to Buck then?”

  “Buck? His nickname is Buck?”

  “If your first name was Wallace, wouldn’t you go by a nickname, too?” There was a soft laugh on the other end of the line then a hesitation. “Honey, are you trying to tell me you didn’t know your father’s nickname?”

  “I didn’t know his real name. I had it backward, James Wallace. And Buck? No clue about… Wait, you are the BJ loves BB that I saw carved in the beam of the attic,” she had muttered.

  “You found that? He wrote that there the day before I left to go back to South Carolina. We didn’t know about you yet, only how we felt and what we hoped for our future together.” Again, sadness tinged her mother’s voice.

  “But he did know about me, right, Mom?”

  “He knew I was pregnant,” she confirmed. “And he didn’t keep his word to come for me by Christmas. My mother convinced me that he didn’t deserve to know if you were a boy or girl, that unless he came to find us, he didn’t care.”

  Corrie looked out at the snow-covered landscape and thought of that Christmas more than twenty years ago when her mother waited to hear from Wallace “Buck” James. She couldn’t help comparing her feelings now for Andy and her mother’s for Buck. Deep down, Corrie believed that if Andy had said he loved her, she’d have never stopped hoping that it was true. “It’s because of the things Grandma said and did, not because of Buck, that you taught me that people can’t trust anyone, that we only have ourselves to rely on?”

  “Not trust anyone? Only count on yourself? Oh, honey, if that’s what you learned from me…” Her voice trailed off in pain. “I’m so sorry. I thought by teaching you self-reliance you’d have the courage to do anything you wanted to in life, including finding Buck. I didn’t want you to be like me. If I had had the courage you have shown already, by going off and looking for the things you think will give you peace of mind, make you happy, well…”

  “You would have come here looking for Buck instead of waiting your whole life for him to come back to you.” Corrie finished the thought. “You’d have done what made you happy, even if it meant a terrific change of plans.”

  When Corrie hung up she had a new understanding of her mom, and herself. The power of all the things she had learned today churned inside her head. She couldn’t sit still. She looked out the window. The snow had become a fine mist only really visible in the halo of light around the Maple Leaf Manor sign.

  “Snow,” she whispered. “And answers. A plan and the promise that I’m not alone, that God directs my path.”

  She felt such peace. Andy’s mother had been right. She had begun to deal with her own past and it made her feel like she could finally move ahead. Or just move around.

  She bundled up in her coat, scarf and her beloved boots, headed out the door and hit the sidewalks of Hadleyville. All around her people were making their way around. Leaving work for the day, Christmas shopping, maybe even doing things to prepare for the contest event this weekend. Those who recognized her said hello, those she’d never met wished her Merry Christmas or warned her to keep warm.

  She stayed on the main street, the same one she had traveled Friday when she had encouraged Andy to help string Christmas lights in the park. Andy’s office was dark. She shivered and wrapped her scarf around her mouth and walked, her eyes fixed on the lights twinkling on the gazebo in the deepening dusk.

  The wind whipped up and blew a dusting of icy snowflakes into her face. She hunched her shoulders up and looked around to see if there was a place to duck in and get warm. She realized she was on the steps of the church that Andy attended and all around her people were making their way up the steps to the big doors adorned with fresh wreaths. “The Christmas Pageant.”

  Her stomach lurched. She couldn’t go in. She had to go in. Andy would be there. But then, so would Greer. Wearing the costume that Corrie had made for her.

  She looked up at the door and took a deep breath.

  “Hey, Corrie, come on in and sit with us, why don’t you?” The mayor and her husband came up the stairs and before Corrie could protest, Great Aunt Ellie had her by the arm.

  “Okay, but…if we could find a quiet spot before the pageant begins? I have something to tell you.” Corrie grasped the older woman’s wrist and moments later, huddled in the cramped privacy of the cloak room, Corrie shared her story and they shared a hug.

  Ellie fidgeted with her glasses, obviously unsure which set she’d need to see the small numbers on the highly sophisticated phone she extracted from her coat pocket. “We have to call Buck this very minute.”

  “If you’d just give me his number, I can do that later. The pageant is—”

  “Not going to start for almost half an hour.” She settled on a pair of glasses then began moving the phone forward and back as she frowned at the screen. “I don’t think I could keep this secret that long, do you, Larry?”

  “Not if her life depended on it.” He chuckled.

  “Besides, as soon as Buck hears he won’t want to waste time chatting on the phone, not when you’re only going to be in town a few more days. I just know he’ll want to jump in his car and come up here to talk to you in person.” Ellie pressed a few numbers then extended the phone to Corrie. “Here you go.”

  Here she went, indeed. With each gentle purring ring in her ear Corrie imagined the sensation of a roller coaster slowly ascending the first steep climb. Crank by crank, uphill, defying gravity. Then, when it reached the peak…

  “Hello, Aunt Ellie, if you’re calling about Christmas, I’ll be there the usual time. I won’t forget. I never do,” said a clear masculine voice tinged with patient good humor.

  “I… This isn’t your aunt. She’s letting me use her phone.” Corrie gulped in a quick breath and gave herself over to the roller coaster of an emotional ride. “I, uh, I don’t know if you remember her but I’m Barbara Bennington’s daughter.”

  “Of course I remember Barbie, she…I…is she all right?” Genuine concern infused his question.

  That put Corrie at ease, a little. She exhaled then pushed her shoulders back. “She’s… Mom is fine. Actually, I’m calling about my father.”

  Ellie put her arm around Corrie’s shoulders for support.

  “Your…father. Would I know him?”

  “You are him,” she said softly.

  “I thought maybe you’d say that and I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited to get this call.” His voice broke.

  “I know a thing or two about waiting for someone to make contact.” Corrie’s stomach clenched and her jaw tightened as she added, “So does my mom.”

  The mayor and her husband tried not to look like they were listening. She seemed suddenly fascinated by the coats hanging around them and he began examining the Christmas pageant prog
ram, but their expressions made it clear they had heard that.

  “I deserve your anger and mistrust for not coming as I promised that Christmas,” Buck James said in a way that shouldered the blame without excuses. “I am so sorry.”

  “I think that’s an apology you own my mom more than me.” She tried not to sound harsh but her emotions were so close to the surface. “Me, I’d just want to know why. Why didn’t you come that Christmas?”

  The Walkers no longer kept up the pretense of giving her privacy. Ellie folded her arms and cocked her head to show she clearly wanted to know the answer to that herself.

  Corrie didn’t mind, either. After all, they were family now. “Why weren’t you there for my mom when I was born and for me, growing up?”

  “Your grandmother didn’t tell you?” He could not have faked the hurt and disbelief in the words he blurted out. Silence followed, then a deep breath. “Corrie, I don’t want to turn you against your grandmother, but you should know the truth. After your mom went back to South Carolina, she contacted me and told me not to come.”

  Corrie felt as if she had the wind knocked out of her. “What? Why?”

  “She thought I had obviously misled your mother. That none of this could have happened if I wasn’t a liar and a scoundrel. She laid all the blame on me and told me that your mother and you would be better off without me.” Again, his voice grew emotional and tight. “She said she’d have me arrested if I showed up at her door.”

  “I’m sure my mom never knew that,” Corrie said softly, as much for herself as for him. Then she turned to the Walkers to say, “He tried to come. My grandmother said she’d have him arrested.”

  “Oh!” Ellie raised her eyebrows. “I knew it had to be something. He’s a good man, Corrie.”

  Corrie was glad to hear that and even more glad that she truly felt it was true.

  Buck cleared his throat and went on, “I was terrified, Corrie. I told myself I’d wait until things cooled down, then come. A few weeks after I thought you would have been born, I called and your grandmother told me your mother wanted no part of me and that she had made sure your mother hadn’t listed me on the birth certificate so I had no legal claim on you.”