A Small Town Christmas Read online

  “Sorry we’re late,” said her mom, giving her a hug and a kiss.

  Grandma Nordby was right behind her. She seemed to get shorter and rounder every day. “Where is everyone?” she asked as Emma leaned over and kissed her.

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. “This is for a good cause, for crying out loud.” Which was exactly what she wanted to do. The decorated squares from all the shops in the greater Seattle area and its outlying districts would be turned into quilts and then auctioned online, with the proceeds going to breast cancer research. She’d said that in her ad. Surely someone cared.

  “Well, let’s get to work,” said Emma’s mom briskly. She walked to the table, took a seat, and grabbed a square. “If it’s going to be just the three of us, we have a lot to do.”

  Grandma Nordby shook her head. “I don’t understand where Doris is. She promised she’d come. Let me use your phone, dear,” she said to Emma. “I’ll just call her.”

  Now they were going to call and plead with people to come make her a success? “That’s okay, Grandma,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  But of course it did. She so wanted Emma’s Quilt Corner to be a thriving business, and she’d envisioned this night as a smashing success, with lots of women from the community working together, enjoying each other’s company.

  “Come to think of it, Doris was worried she might be coming down with something when I talked to her yesterday,” said Grandma.

  Maybe the whole town had come down with something. Emma fetched them all mugs of hot cider from one of the enormous Thermoses she’d filled and sat down at the table.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” her mother said in a tone of voice that heralded a motherly lecture.

  “No you don’t,” said Emma, reaching for a fabric square.

  “Yes I do, and you’re not.”

  “Not what?” asked Grandma.

  “A failure,” said Mom, looking sternly at Emma.

  “I wasn’t thinking that.” Well, okay. Maybe she was a little, but she was not telling her mom. She frowned at the fabric in her hand. “Where is our town spirit? Why aren’t there any people here?”

  “The people who count are here,” said Mom with a decisive nod.

  It was a valiant attempt to cheer her up, but . . . “You had to come. You’re related.” Emma sighed.

  “Well,” said her mother, “if it’s any consolation, I think the high school’s fall concert is tonight.”

  “And Dancing with the Stars is on,” added Grandma Nordby.

  “Great. I got beat out by a TV show,” muttered Emma.

  “And a school event,” added her mother.

  “This is an event, too,” said Emma, “and an important one.” Or at least she had thought it was.

  Two more women straggled in later, but it wasn’t enough to hide the grim reality. She was a failure.

  TWO

  Black Wednesday, that was how Sarah Goodwin would always remember this day. She gripped her cell phone like a lifeline. “I miss you,” she lamented to her daughter, Stephanie.

  “We’ve only been gone six hours,” Steph reminded her.

  Only six hours ago her daughter and son-in-law had stopped by Sweet Somethings Bakery to tell Sarah one last good-bye. Her granddaughters, seven-year-old Katie and five-year-old Adeline, had been in tears. Even Sarah’s husband, Sam, Mr. Tough Guy Fire Chief, who had run over from the station to help see them off, had been looking a little misty eyed. A box of oatmeal cookies from Nana’s bakery had cheered the girls considerably. And Sam went back to the fire station with an apple pie and a smile.

  But nothing was going to make Sarah feel better. There was nothing in the bakery, nothing in her life, that could fill the big, empty spot her daughter’s family had left behind. It had been a horrible day, bitter as vanilla. She knew this was a big deal for her son-in-law, but his gain had been her loss. Why did companies have to move people around so much, anyway? Children needed to be near their grandmother.

  She sighed. “It’s been the six longest hours of my life. Well, except for when I was in labor with you. Ten hours of labor—”

  “And this is the thanks I get,” her daughter finished Sarah’s favorite tease with her. “I know, but think of the fabulous daughter you got out of the deal.”

  That made Sarah tear up. Fabulous was on her way to upstate New York.

  “Remember, we’ll be back for Christmas,” Steph reminded her.

  And then a certain son-in-law was going to get a lump of coal in his stocking. It had been all Sarah could do not to give him a lump on the head when he made his big announcement at her birthday dinner two months earlier. Talk about a crummy birthday present. It had been hard enough letting her son go off to Hollywood, where he was bound to wind up running bare naked all over the big screen to embarrass her in front of her girlfriends, but parting with Steph was ten times worse. Jonathan’s departure had been no surprise. Boys grew up and moved away. Daughters, on the other hand, were supposed to stick around, making themselves available whenever their mother felt the need to interfere in their life.

  “Here,” Steph said. “The girls want to talk to you.”

  A moment later a little voice piped, “Hi, Nana.”

  “Katie, my little cupcake with the cherry on top,” Sarah said, forcing good cheer into her voice. “Are you having a fun trip?”

  “Yes, but I miss you so much.”

  “And I miss you, too,” said Sarah. She began to wipe down the counters in the bakery kitchen with bleach water. Keeping busy was always a good idea when you were feeling down. So was consuming vast amounts of baked goods, but she was too far down for even that to help.

  “We went over the mountains,” Katie announced, happily switching gears, “and we had a picnic.”

  “Well, that sounds fun,” said Sarah. It was no picnic here in Heart Lake.

  “And we got ice cream. Addie got sick in the car.”

  Poor Steph.

  In the background Sarah could hear another little voice, whining, “I want to talk to Nana.”

  “We’re going to stay in a motel tonight,” Katie went on. “And when we get to our new house we’re going to get a puppy. Mommy promised. And we’re going to go to Yellow Park and see bears.”

  Yellowstone Park. They’d taken the kids camping there years ago. Sarah could still remember the rotten-egg smell of the hot springs and how uncomfortable the bed in that old camper had been. The kids had nearly driven her insane that trip. If only she’d known then how fast they’d grow up. She’d have stayed a lot saner.

  The other little voice was getting louder. Sarah heard her daughter now, too, saying, “Give the phone to Addie.”

  “Hi, Nana!”

  “Addie, my little sugar dumpling, how are you doing? Is your tummy all better?”

  “Uh-huh. But Katie ate my cookie.”

  “Did not!” Katie cried in the background.

  “Nana will mail you some more. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Addie, her voice subdued. Poor little thing, she missed her nana. Or at least her nana’s cookies.

  There was a moment’s silence and then Steph was back on the phone. “That gives you the highlights so far. Ice cream and barf.”

  “Sign me up,” said Sarah.

  “I wish I could. We stopped at a gas station and scrubbed down the car, but it didn’t help much. We’ve had the windows down for the last hour. My buns are asleep and the girls are getting cranky. Are we having fun yet?”

  No. “It will get better once you stop for the night.”

  “If Darrell ever stops.” Steph’s tone of voice said the boy had better do so soon. “Addie, what’s wrong? Oh, Darrell pull off. I think Addie’s going to throw up again. Gotta go. Love you!”

  Sarah echoed the sentiment although there was no one left on the other end to hear it. With a sigh, she shut her cell phone. She looked around the bakery kitchen. It was so clean the health inspector could eat off the floor.

&
nbsp; Chrissy Carroll, who worked the counter, poked her head in. “The last ST has gone.”

  “Well, then, let’s close up and get out of here,” said Sarah.

  “Ten minutes early. Awesome!” said Chrissy, and disappeared to go home to her family. Lucky Chrissy. Her kids were little.

  Sarah looked at the clock on the wall. Ten till five. Well, it was five o’clock somewhere and she was going on a bender.

  She locked up the bakery, dropped the day’s profits off at the bank, and then squeezed her Cadillac-sized hips into her gas-economical tin can and steered herself toward the Chocolate Bar, Heart Lake’s chocolateria.

  Change. Sarah hated it, unless it was good and was happening to her. What she hated most was when people moved away. First her sister and brother-in-law had drifted off to California in search of sun—which was highly overrated, if you asked Sarah—and took her nieces. (At least one of them had had the good sense to come back.) Then Jonathan had left. And now Steph was moving.

  And speaking of moving, Sarah thought, checking out the strangers driving past her, was Heart Lake some new destination spot? It seemed like lately she was seeing as many new faces as old, familiar ones. Why couldn’t life stay the same?

  By the time she came through the door of the chocolateria even the sensual aroma that danced around her nose couldn’t tease her into a happy mood.

  She took in the array of truffles behind the glass counter with a scowl and marched to where her niece, Jamie Moore, stood, smiling and holding out a steaming cup of Sarah’s usual weekly treat, a coconut mocha. (Hold the whipped cream—a woman had to draw the line somewhere.)

  “I hope that’s a double,” said Sarah. “I need it.”

  “A double with decaf so you won’t be awake all night,” said Jamie. She arched a delicately penciled blond eyebrow. “Is this a two-truffle day?”

  “More like a ten, but I’ll stop at one. How could you tell?”

  “Other than the fact that I knew Steph was leaving today? Just a lucky guess.”

  Sarah took the mocha with a sigh and moved over to the glass case. A summer of weekly truffle treats at her niece’s new shop had already added three pounds to her hips. Even when Sarah was young she’d had a bit of a bubble butt. After she’d opened the bakery it had grown from a bubble to a balloon, and now that she was fifty-six, it was nearing the size of a hot-air balloon. Every once in a while she suggested to herself that changing this weekly coffee klatch to the back room of Emma’s quilt shop wouldn’t be a bad idea. A girl couldn’t get fat on fabric.

  Her friend Kizzy, who owned a kitchen shop in town, kept urging her to join her teeny-bikini diet club, but Sarah wasn’t ready for that. So Kizzy settled for getting Sarah out for Sunday afternoon walks around the lake. Sarah wasn’t sure it did much good. At the rate she was going, to see any improvement she’d probably have to walk all the way to Florida. And back.

  Okay, one truffle. She bent over to examine the rows and rows of treats calling to her from behind glass. Flavors ranged from dark chocolate with Grand Marnier filling to white chocolate with lavender. Then there was the fudge: traditional chocolate, rocky road, penuche, and the new caliente flavor with its south-of-the-border bite. And now, with summer giving way to fall, white- and milk-chocolate-dipped apples had replaced double-chocolate ice-cream bars.

  “Decisions, decisions,” teased Jamie. How she managed to stay a size eight was a mystery. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the girl didn’t eat.

  “Don’t laugh. It’s hard when you’re only choosing one,” said Sarah. “You could do my hips a good deed and come up with a no-fat, no-calorie truffle.”

  “I could,” Jamie agreed, “if I made it out of cardboard.”

  “How about the white-chocolate-raspberry?”

  “Good choice,” Jamie approved, and pulled one out for her.

  The shop door opened and in stepped a woman in her early thirties with a round, freckled face, a curvy figure, and strawberry-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had a coat thrown on over jeans and a pink flower-print flowing top. Emma Swanson, proud owner of Emma’s Quilt Corner. One Wednesday in September, she’d wandered into the shop just as Jamie and Sarah were getting ready to end their day with a dose of chocolate. The impromptu get-together had quickly become a weekly tradition, and casual friendship had made a fast evolution into sisterhood.

  Emma flipped the sign hanging on the door to closed and locked it, announcing, “It’s officially five.”

  “Good,” Jamie said with a sigh. “I’m ready to sit down. I’m pooped.”

  “Too much business,” said Emma. “I wish I had that problem,” she added with a sigh.

  “Be patient,” Sarah told her. “You haven’t even been open a year yet. Quilting is catching on.”

  “I hope so,” said Emma. “So far my best customers are still my grandma and my mom. And Mom doesn’t quilt. Oh, and you, of course,” she added, smiling at Sarah.

  Sarah had spent a small fortune on fabric a week earlier so she could make quilts for both the girls for Christmas. She’d been so busy with the bakery that she hadn’t quilted in years. But she was sure it would all come back to her, like riding a bicycle. She hadn’t ridden a bicycle in years, either. She’d rather quilt.

  They settled at one of the white bistro tables on the other side of the shop, Emma and Sarah armed with their mochas and truffles and Jamie only with a cup of chocolate mint tea.

  “No wonder you’re so skinny,” Emma said, pointing to it. “I don’t know how you keep from eating all your inventory.”

  “I have Clarice for that. Anyway, I sampled so many truffles when I was first learning how to make these things that I don’t care if I ever taste another one again as long as I live. Well, unless it’s a new recipe,” she amended.

  “I sampled a lot of my recipes when I started the bakery, too,” said Sarah. “All it did was turn me into an ST.”

  “Yeah, that was what did it, all right,” mocked Jamie.

  “What’s an ST?” asked Emma.

  “Sweet Tooth,” Jamie answered for Sarah. “And you were an ST before you even opened the bakery. I was around, remember?”

  Sarah shook her head. “This is the problem with having an older sister who makes you an aunt before your time. You end up with lippy nieces who know too much.”

  “You imported me,” Jamie reminded her with a smile.

  “And I’m glad I did. Someone in your family needed to come back home. You make a great addition to Heart Lake.” She took a sip of her mocha, then sighed.

  “They’ll be back by Christmas,” Jamie reminded her, accurately interpreting the sigh.

  “Seeing them go had to be pretty hard,” said Emma. “I know how much you love your granddaughters.”

  “My mom wore sunglasses when I went to say good-bye,” said Jamie.

  “Doesn’t everybody in L.A. wear sunglasses?” asked Emma.

  “In the house?”

  “Um, that’s weird.”

  “She didn’t want me to see she’d been crying.”

  “I was brave and didn’t cry,” bragged Sarah. “Not until they left, anyway.”

  “Well, we sure could use a few more Stephs here,” said Jamie. “You’re not going to believe this, but two little twits ran the four-way stop on Lake Way and Alder yesterday.”

  Emma looked at her questioningly. “Somebody ran a stop sign and you’re surprised?”

  “Somebody ran a stop sign in Heart Lake and I’m surprised,” Jamie corrected her. “There were two old ladies at the crosswalk. If I hadn’t let them go they’d still be standing there.”

  “You know, people used to just about kill each other with kindness at that four-way stop,” Sarah reminisced.

  “Well, they’ve kept the ‘kill each other’ part,” said Jamie.

  Emma sighed. “I wish Heart Lake could stay just like it was when I was in school.”

  “Nice places like this can’t help but grow,” Sarah said. “Eve
ryone wants to be the last person in Paradise. Of course, as more people move into Paradise it gets harder to stay connected. Then people stop caring and it’s not paradise anymore.” She frowned and took another sip of her mocha.

  “That’s already happening,” Emma said with a frown. “You know, only four people came to my event last night. And two of them were related.”

  Guilt washed over Sarah. “Oh, no. I completely forgot.”

  “Me, too,” said Jamie. “I’m really sorry, Em.”

  Emma shrugged. “Oh, well. I tried.”

  “People are selfish,” Jamie said in disgust. “But what are you going to do?”

  Emma put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. “I wish I could do something. It makes me sad to think of Heart Lake changing. It used to be a sweet, friendly town.”

  “It’s still friendly,” Jamie assured her. “You were like a one-woman welcoming committee when I first moved here.” She beamed at Sarah. “And you were awesome.”

  “I had to be. We’re related,” Sarah teased. “Seriously,” she added, “Heart Lake is a perfect fit for you.”

  Jamie had come a long way from the beaten-down woman Sarah had taken under her wing a year ago. Now she was happy, with her own place and a thriving business. No man in her life, though, but Sarah could hardly blame Jamie for putting a NO VACANCY sign over her heart, not after what she’d left behind.

  “Maybe that’s what we need, some kind of welcoming committee,” Emma mused. “That way people would feel connected.”

  “There was such a thing once,” said Sarah. “It was called Welcome Wagon.”

  “Welcome Wagon? What happened to it?” asked Emma.

  Sarah shrugged. “It just . . . died. No volunteers to keep it going, everyone working and no one home to welcome. I guess people are too busy to be nice.”

  “It only takes a minute to let two old ladies cross the street,” Jamie said in disgust.

  “Well, there’s your random act of kindness for the day,” Sarah told her. “You know,” she added thoughtfully, “if everybody just did one nice thing a day . . .”

  “We’d be living in Mayberry,” Jamie finished.