Christmas In The Country

by Muriel Jensen

  “And you’ll wait until I get down to flip one?”

  Oh, God. “You bet.”

  Whittier reached out impulsively to hug her. “Thank you, Liza,” he said, his cheeks glowing, his eyes dancing merrily. She suspected it was from too much brandy, rather than the result of the spirit of the season. “Thank you for making these few days possible.”

  The moment his footsteps topped the stairs and sounded in the hallway overhead, Sherrie turned from the flapjack batter and wiped her hands on her apron. Her glance was deadly. “Yes, Liza,” she said. “Thank you for making these few days possible.”

  Liza guessed that was exhaustion talking. She went to put an arm around her. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve been worked to a nub, but when it’s over you can buy the inn. Just keep thinking about that.”

  “Really?” Sherrie shook her arm off and covered the bowl of batter with plastic wrap. “Bill thinks I’d make a terrible proprietor.”

  Liza frowned at Bill.

  “What I said was…” He eyed Sherrie in complete exasperation, an elbow braced on the back of his chair. “That if you’re going to explode at every little suggestion made by—”

  “He said it was embarrassing for everyone that I was flirting with Jeff!” Sherrie put the bowl in the refrigerator and gave the door a vicious swing closed. “I made mulled cider, gingerbread, pot roast and vegetables, pudding and Mandelbrot! When in the hell did I have time to flirt?”

  “You worked it in smoothly while Liza and I were watching television,” Bill replied, making no effort to defuse the situation.

  Liza turned the frown to a glare. “Bill,” she warned.

  “Don’t give me that look,” he said. “It only works when you’re really married.”

  “We were talking about what we wanted in mates,” Sherrie said with an air of wounded dignity. “That was all. I was fishing because Liza likes him.”

  Bill looked at Liza in surprise. “You do?”

  She nodded. “But thanks to the surprisingly smooth workings of my plan, he believes I’m married and so I can’t really…act interested.”

  The three of them stared gloomily at each other.

  Liza pushed Sherrie toward the stairs. “You go to bed and I’ll finish cleaning up. I’ll even set the table for breakfast.”

  Sherrie sighed. “All right.” She pulled the apron off and hung it on a hook in the utility closet. “Oh, incidentally,” she said, “if Jeff should mention it, I told him you lived here summers, then when Bill got the job at the hospital, he commuted between here and Hartford until after the boys started school.”

  “Why,” he implored, “did you say that?”

  She turned on him angrily. “Because it’s hard to keep it all straight, all right? Because he was talking about wanting a woman who’d be willing to move around the world with him on engineering projects but still want to have children, and I said that children needed routine, and I happened to mention that Travis and Davey had been shaken by the move here.” She drew a breath and glowered at Bill. “But you had already told him that you’d been with the hospital for eight years, so he couldn’t imagine how the boys could be traumatized when Travis would have been only two and not even in school, and Davey wasn’t even born yet. So I had to improvise. I know it wasn’t great, but I’m sorry. I never claimed to be Mata Hari.”

  Liza took hold of Sherrie’s shoulders and gave her a small shake. “Sherrie, I’m sorry to be putting you through this, really I am. But you’re doing great. It’ll all come together, I promise.”

  “Yeah,” she said, heading for the stairs. “But it seems to be causing other things to fall apart.”

  Liza sat at the table, leaving a chair between her and Bill. They heard the sound of Sherrie’s bedroom door closing upstairs.

  “Do you think she meant the two of you are falling apart?” Liza asked.

  Bill shrugged a shoulder moodily. “Possibly. But the point she isn’t getting is that if she won’t commit to us, there’s nothing there to fall apart in the first place.”

  “Come on, Bill,” she cajoled. “You’re not being very compassionate. She’s confused.”

  Bill met her gaze, and for the first time since Sherrie had introduced her to him more than a year ago, she saw the frustrated man under the usually mellow doctor.

  “So am I,” he replied. “And being compassionate has gotten me nowhere.”

  “Just last night,” she reminded him gently, “you were looking forward to using this as an opportunity to make her realize that she does love and need you. Forgive me, but your approach needs some refinement.”

  He groaned and ran a hand over his face. “I hadn’t counted on it being this difficult to have her around all the time and not be able to touch her. To know that she’s just down the hall and not be able to do anything about it. To have her look daggers at me because our little arrangement requires me to be attentive to you.”

  “Whittier leaves right after the show on Christmas Eve,” Liza said. “I am willing to bet you that you’ll get just what you want for Christmas—my sister.”

  He studied her with an even glance, then asked quietly, “Have you thought about how many of us you’ll have to answer to if this all goes bad on us before the show?”

  She sighed, suddenly more weary than she could bear. “It’s all I think about. But everyone has too much at stake. I won’t let it go bad. Trust me, Bill.”

  He stared at her another moment, then pushed away from the table and got to his feet. “I will, Liza,” he said. “I just hope to hell you know what you’re talking about. I’ll bring in another load of wood before I go upstairs. Anything I can do for you?”

  She looked around the almost spotless kitchen. “Thanks, but it’ll only take me a few minutes. Sherrie tidies up as she works. A good quality in a woman.”

  He grinned at her over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “Save your breath. I’m already sold.”

  LIZA AWOKE TO FUSSY CRIES and wondered drowsily how a cat had gotten into her high-rise apartment. Then the sound grew louder and she came awake with sudden urgency, realizing that the sound came from Betsy.

  Bill, beyond the louvered doors, was fast asleep, and Sherrie was probably too exhausted for anything to penetrate her sleep.

  Liza put on the bedside light and went to the baby, prepared for her to continue screaming even after she’d been picked up.

  Betsy didn’t disappoint her. Liza turned to the bed to change her, and in her bare feet stepped on something small and fuzzy. The discordant, manufactured squeak assured her that it wasn’t a mouse, so she reached down to pick it up. It was Betsy’s small stuffed bear.

  Betsy grabbed it from her, cuddled it in her arm and leaned heavily against Liza’s shoulder. Liza stood still for a moment, stunned by that response. This was Betsy, who had hated her since birth.

  She laid her down on the bed, certain she would protest noisily, but she simply cuddled her bear and watched Liza’s face with sleepy interest until she’d finished diapering.

  When Liza lifted her into her arms again, she snuggled close and was asleep in minutes. She was restored to the crib without waking.

  Liza stood over her, recognizing the event for the momentous breakthrough that it was. Though it was only two in the morning, today was December 23—deep into the season of miracles.

  She felt a sense of invincibility. She would pass off Bill and her nephews as her family for the sake of everyone involved, but the moment the show was over, she would take Jeff aside, explain the situation, ask him to forgive the deception and invite him out on a date.

  Yes, it was simple and straightforward, but so was she—when she wasn’t trying to deceive an entire country.

  Feeling restless and energized by her decision, she pulled on the big blue robe Bill had left over the chair and went downstairs, intent on a cup of tea and possibly a piece of Mandelbrot the boys had missed.

  She was surprised and a little dismayed to find Jeff, dressed in a
pair of old gray woolen pants and a dark-blue-and-gray sweater with a blue turtleneck. He was staring out the kitchen window.

  He turned when he heard her approach. He held a mug of coffee in his hand, and she noticed that the deep blue of the sweater close to his face darkened the color of his eyes. He looked very wide awake, and despite the fact that he seemed relaxed, she thought she sensed an alertness come over him, as though he couldn’t be himself with her, as though her presence required caution.

  She regretted that and wished desperately that she could explain. But she couldn’t, and there was no point bemoaning the fact.

  “Hi,” she said, giving him only a friendly, casual glance as she went to the stove to get the kettle. “I’m sorry, did the baby wake you?”

  “No. I’ve been down here for a while.” He moved aside so that she could put the kettle under the faucet. “I heard her, though. Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, yes.” She carried the kettle to the stove, the tension she’d felt in his room last night snaking its way around her right now. “She just wakes up and. wants to know somebody’s there.” At least, that was how Sherrie had explained it to her.

  “I don’t think that’s something we ever outgrow.” He leaned back against the counter and turned his head to watch her as she reached into an overhead cupboard for a cup. “My parents were older and I remember how quiet our house always was. I loved them, but I used to hate the quiet. I wanted the noise and excitement of my friends’ houses, full of other kids and football games on TV and dogs barking.”

  Liza understood completely. That was the kind of fictional world she’d built in her columns, a busy country home where something was always going on.

  “Then I finished school and got busy,” he continued, waving his mug to indicate, she guessed, the forward progression of his life. “I loved my work and I loved the travel, and decided that maybe I didn’t need those things after all.”

  “But you had a fiancée,” Liza said over her shoulder as she pulled down a box of tea, unwrapped a bag and placed it in her cup.

  He nodded. “Sylvia Stanford. We were perfect for each other…” He gave her a grinning glance. “Or so I thought, because she was as devoted to her work as I was to mine.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She runs a test kitchen for Sunquick. You know, the foods conglomerate?”

  “No kidding!” The real Liza used their canned and microwavable products all the time. “I love that stuff.” When he looked surprised, she added quickly and, she thought, cleverly, “When the boys have games or I’m otherwise pressed for time, they’re a great fill-in for meals.”

  “Ah.” He seemed to accept that as logical. “Anyway, she put in long hours, often worked on recipes at home. I thought what we had was perfect because she didn’t resent it when I had to be away, and it didn’t bother me that she often worked late. I thought it was love because we didn’t distract each other.”

  Liza found the plate of Mandelbrot. Two lone pieces were covered in plastic wrap. She pulled the wrap off and offered him a cookie.

  “Is it all right for us to take the last two?” he asked.

  She smiled. “It’s all right for me. I’m going to blame you.”

  He took a cookie. “In that case, I may as well be guilty.”

  The kettle began to boil and Liza hurried to it before it could whistle in the quiet house. She poured water into her cup, then waved Jeff to follow her.

  She went to a window seat in a far corner of the kitchen. The cushions on it had been covered with a red-and-beige check to match the curtains at the window.

  She sat in one corner of the seat and held one side of the curtains back to look outside. She gasped in pleased surprise at the sight of large snowflakes drifting from the sky.

  “It’s snowing!” she exclaimed in a loud whisper as Jeff settled in the other corner of the seat.

  He smiled at her excitement. “I thought you knew. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It seems a miracle of nature that something can so change the look of the world without making a sound.”

  “I love snow out here,” she said, her guard slipping a little in their comfortable midnight conversation. “It looks so different in New York.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she panicked. Then she realized that to him, it had probably been a perfectly reasonable thing to say. He didn’t know she was thinking of how it looked from her high-rise window.

  “Do you have to spend much time there?” he asked.

  “Not much.” She took a deep sip of tea, then brought him back to their interrupted discussion about Sylvia. “I take it your relationship with Sylvia turned out…not to be love after all?”

  “No, it wasn’t. I thought we had a good thing going because we didn’t distract each other. Then it turned out that she’d been spending some of those late nights with a Dallas rancher doing banking business in Boston, and she left to marry him.” He dunked his cookie in the tea, then rested it on his cup as he apparently thought over the past. “Then it occurred to me that it couldn’t have been love, because love has to distract you. It should slow you down, reel you in, make you look at your world and what’s in it and face it honestly. Like Christmas does.” He bit into the cookie.

  Liza looked out at the snow and wondered what he would think if he slowed down and looked around and learned that she wasn’t married at all. Her confidence of a few moments ago in the ultimate result of this Christmas “play” deflated a little at his analysis of how love should behave. Was it possible to face a dishonest situation in an honest way?

  “Does your marriage do that for you?” he asked, startling her out of her thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Does your marriage ground you? Your celebrity must be unsettling sometimes. Bill seems very…solid.”

  Liza couldn’t quite define her suspicion, but she thought there was a kind of test in the question. He’d asked it casually, but she sensed a certain tension in him as he waited for her answer. He might very well have concluded that she was attracted to him and put that down to an unhappy marriage.

  But even though she wasn’t married to Bill, the man had turned his life upside down to help her and he was the soul of kindness and consideration. She couldn’t let Jeff believe ill of him.

  “Bill’s a wonderful man,” she said sincerely. “He’s as fine and caring in his relationships as he is with his patients.”

  “So you’re still very much in love after…what? Twelve years of marriage?”

  “Twelve years of marriage,” she agreed, deliberately sidestepping the very-much-in-love part.

  He studied her, as though gauging the truthfulness of her reply. She did her best to return his gaze with innocence in hers.

  “Your sister tells me she’s divorced,” he said.

  She frowned. All she needed to complicate the situation was to have him develop an interest in Sherrie!

  “Yes,” she answered. “Why?”

  He shook his head. “No reason.” He grinned. “She said she was waiting for Tom Selleck to get bored with his wife and come looking for a good pot roast.”

  Liza laughed, then sipped her tea. “She’s always been a nut. I don’t think she’d like Hollywood, though. She’s too attached to Connecticut.”

  Jeff held his side of the curtains back and watched the snow drift down onto the already blanketed countryside. “I could grow attached to it, too. They don’t need bridges or freeways here, though. Too bad.”

  “That isn’t all engineers do, is it?”

  “No. But it’s what I like to do.”

  “Oh.”

  Liza let it rest, knowing any more protestation on her part wouldn’t fit the role she’d assumed. She made a mental note to consult a psychiatrist the moment this was over.

  “How long has Sherrie worked with you?” Jeff asked.

  That answer required care. And why did he insist on talking about Sherrie? “We were raised by a single mother who worke
d a lot, so we were always helping each other with things. She helped me do the cable show last Christmas, and I consult her once in a while when I’m developing a recipe.”

  “She enjoys being with your family.”

  “Well…she thinks of my kids as hers. And Bill does a lot of her handyman stuff.”

  Jeff was quiet. Liza studied him, sensing something restrained in the silence.

  Then she understood what it was. She was being restrained. What she wanted to do was grab him by the shoulders and ask him if she was correct in feeling that he was interested in her, if she was simply misinterpreting his looks in her direction, his curious questions, or if he was trying to find out if she cared about him.

  Because if he was, she wasn’t married.

  But that was too dangerous. Right now, restraint had to be her byword.

  She stood abruptly. “I’d better get back to bed. Are you going to be all right down here? Would you like me to build a fire?” She prayed he would refuse her. She hadn’t built a fire since Girl Scouts, and then she’d ignited the troop leader’s skirt.

  “Thanks, but I’m going up, too.” He stood also and took her cup. “Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “All right. Good night.”

  Liza hadn’t realized he meant that quite so literally until she’d climbed several steps, her mind on the mysterious engineer instead of the long robe she wore, and tripped over it.

  She fell forward and sideways with a little cry of alarm. She hit her knee on a stair and gritted her teeth against a sideways crash with the railing and probably a sideways bump from stair to stair all the way down to the carpet. But it didn’t happen.

  She collided, all right, but with the front of Jeff’s sweater, not the railing. He’d stretched out his body from the step below hers and placed himself between her and the balusters.

  Her chin smacked into his shoulder and for a moment the world reeled. When it was steady again, she realized that he had an arm under her head and that his free hand was inside the waist of her robe, unfastened in the fall.